Death of a thousand cuts...

Waves for Water keeps on fighting the good fight, a must read if you don't want to start paying $35 (or worse) every time you need to mail a letter, and why does this ad for a car make me think about the core difference between sail and power boaters?

The other day I was reflecting on something Jay Fitzgerald said about the whole sustainable thing and as always, he seems to make a lot of sense...

Use less.

A lot of us on boats get hooked on a vicious cycle of thinking we need more and as a result you find folks on small boats with energy demands and production that would keep a medium-sized village going, and every last one of them seems to want MORE...

On "So It Goes" the biggest draw on power is our three Apple computers which surprises people as most assume it is the electric propulsion. You might want to reflect on that for a moment.

Electrical budgets are a lot like monetary budgets... We tend to budget for the big stuff and at the end of the month wind up getting poleaxed by the little stuff we did not quite think through or keep track of. For instance, if you decide to buy something that costs a couple of hundred dollars you give it some thought and work it into your budget. While on the other hand, you don't quite factor in the $3.50 cups of coffee at Starbucks and at the end of the month a couple of cups of coffee a day add up to $210... How'd that happen?

With power systems on boats it is always the little things that get you because they add up. That little muffin fan in my composting toilet that has been running 24/7 for over two years while only drawing milliamps does add up and combined with the fridge at 2.5 amps per hour plus the ipods and... and... and... and all of a sudden twin wind generators, four 100 watt solar panels and a 6KW genset start seeming like a really good idea.

Or then again, maybe you could simply use a little less...

Listening to Southside Johnny

So it goes...