Jeremy Herndon Blog

As you may have noticed in the recent thread of posts, I’m trying to find ways to stretch our budget. It would be a good idea to try to find ways to increase our income, too! My brother-in-law tells me that he has been making extra money web hosting. I asked him how he managed to do that, and he told me to read the article on the web hosting webpage published by the webhostinggeeks.com.

So I’ve been reading their website, and found that they have a lot of interesting articles about web hosting, and that they rate and review a lot of web hosting providers.  I was surprised and impressed that they have even created a web page that rates and reviews “green” web hosting providers!  I was comparing their rates with the other web hosting providers and saw that their prices were very competitive!  I’ll have to give some thought as to whether or not this type of business would be a good fit for our family.

On my campaign to make our house more energy-efficient (for the environment AND our shrinking electric budget) I have decided that it is also a good idea to get pipe insulation for our hot water pipes.  I’m going to  go to Home Depot or Lowe’s and buy some pipe insulation and install it in the basement.

I’ve seen some little insulated boxes that fit over top of the outside water spigots to help protect them from freezing. I think that is a good idea, too. It would be awful to have one freeze and burst – especially during the day while we are not home to deal with an emergency like that.

I do try to conserve water and have always turned out the lights when I leave a room and other prudent habits. But I’m always on the lookout for more ideas on how to save money and also help the environment.

In addition to trying to make our house as energy efficient as possible, we are looking for ways to cut our expenses everywhere we can.  So we’re also looking to trim our insurance budget.  I found some good government-sponsored websites I think can help us with that.  I went to Google and did some searching and I found quite a lot of information out there!

What seems most promising at the moment is the page “12 Ways to lower your homeowners insurance costs” and the New York State governments page titled “Homeowners Insurance Information For Consumers”. I found both of these sites through the US governments web page usa.gov/Citizen/Topics/Family/Homeowners.shtml.

I think with these resources, I should be able to find some ways to trim our budget!

I’ve been taking a look at how to save some money lately.  In these shaky times, I think it is important to save every penny we can!

We recently received the electric bill, and that was motivation for me to start looking at ways to reduce our electricity usage, even now without the added extra expense of running a central air conditioner.

First thing I’m going to do is install a thermal insulated blanket for the water heater.  I bought one at the hardware store for about $20.00  Our family takes a lot of showers, and we run the dishwasher every day (yes, it is full when we run it, and we have it set on air drying!) and we do a LOT of laundry,  so I think insulating the water heater better will help reduce our electricity usage.  I’ve read that doing this will save 4-9% in water heating costs!  And that will be good for the environment, too!

I find it interesting how many times radar guns are used for purposes other than catching speeding cars! They are used to help people who are involved in sports, too! That’s how “they” determine how fast a pitcher can throw a ball, how fast a golf ball is flying, how fast a soccer ball is going, etc.

I was surprised when a friend of mine who is in a small local amateur team was bragging to me how fast he could pitch a baseball. I asked him how he knew, and he said that the coach of his team had bought a radar gun to use in their team’s training. I didn’t realize that his little team was so heavily invested in the game that they would go out and buy a radar gun! He said that they didn’t get just a radar gun, they got a pitching cage with a radar gun in it!

I asked him where did his team go to buy the gun, and he told me that they got it from the radargunsales.com website.  I went to their website and saw that they have a large variety of sports, safety, and traffic radar guns.  They also sell other miscellaneous equipment such as portable ice rinks, soccer goals, and pitching mounds.