Inner City Farmer

I’ll say this for those in charge of the City of Austin: they put their money where their mouth is when it comes to selling the idea of conservation. A smart homeowner can get all sorts of things for free and/or save a ton of money by taking advantage of all the rebates that are offered. I bought a high efficiency washing machine just after moving into this place, and, if I remember correctly, I received not one but two rebate checks soon afterward, one from Austin Energy, the other from the City. I also drove down to some generic office building downtown and picked up a low-flow shower head, which was about ten times nicer than my old one. And a couple months ago I got a rebate for buying an Energy Star refrigerator. The list of what they offer rebates for goes on and on: solar panels, rainwater harvesting, air conditioning, weatherization.

Just when I thought I’d hit them up for everything possible I discovered that the City was giving away high-efficiency toilets. I would be just as happy to install a “dry” toilet in my house—that’s right, humanure!—but composting your own feces remains an illegal activity within the city limits. So today I drove up to Metric and Rutland and picked myself up a fancy new Niagara Ecologic toilet. Warning to those who might be thinking of doing the same: it appears the program is wildly popular. When I got there I was initially informed that they were all out of toilets, but one miraculously appeared after a little poking around. Be sure to give them a call first.

Tags: humanure, Niagara Ecologic toilet, rainwater harvetsing, rebates, solar panels

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 27th, 2008 at 2:37 pm and is filed under Energy, Water. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.