I’ve finally figured out how to create calculators on this blog – so here is my first calculator, hopefully first of many! Just a simple way to roughly calculate the amount of money you save in fuel by transiting to work on an ebike.
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Author: Richard Christie
Richard Christie runs a small motel on the Kapiti Coast and also writes the Balance Transfers blog. He is interested in how businesses can play a role in improving environmental outcomes, and the challenges associated with doing so. Although this is a blog nominally about the topic of inflation, one of the key recurring questions this blog covers is 'what will be the financial cost and financial impact of climate change?' The blog covers micro economic and business-specific topics relating to the business landscape in New Zealand.
What’s the ROI for an ebike?
I got in the habit of riding my bike to work every day while visiting my mum up in the Coromandel and I’m finding it a rather hard habit to shake. The problem is, now my work is 25 km away instead of 5 km away. Could an ebike help with this situation?
Excuse me, but why does anybody need solar power batteries?
Today I intend to lay out a system that works well in harnessing the power of the sun, without the need for any costly solar power batteries.
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Cafe Overload In Coastal Tourist Locations
It has been a busy summer and Whangamata has just recently opened its 26th eatery, according to TripAdvisor. Despite the flowering of new businesses, there seems almost relentless demand to be serviced. Hour long waits are very common and customers readily (if not happily) accept them during peak times over summer.
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Energy Transfers In The Commercial Kitchen
For the past few months, while I’ve supported my mother through a sickness, I’ve been working as a prep chef in a busy commercial cafe in a coastal town. My main observation has been of how energy transfers within a commercial kitchen. It is one of those things that I’m sure no one else would find remotely interesting, but that fascinates me intensely. In a busy commercial kitchen, not a single joule is wasted. Everything is on just for long enough to deliver the desired result, and then it is shut off. A busy commercial kitchen seems to operate on a fine line between careful resource management and deft resources as the chef arranges a wide array of components in the last few seconds before the plating.
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Why I’m Raging About Broccoli Sprouts
Much more than anything else, this blog is just a repository for things that I learn, enabling me to cement the learning process by listing and recounting the steps involved in a new process. So I make no apology for the fact that the blog hops from topic to topic and appears to have no external consistency whatsoever.
The Alexander Technique and the Commercial Kitchen
At the commercial kitchen where I’ve recently started working, we served 137 meals yesterday in less than 8 hours of opening. Each of these meals includes a number of sequences or steps to complete to turn out the meal in a matter of minutes.
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The Summer Economy
Life changes rapidly; one minute I am down running a business in Kapiti and the next minute a short stopover to visit my unwell mother leaves me with a totally new job on the Coromandel Peninsula.
Geographical features that make Otaki Motel a good location for solar panels
Our solar power installation is now set up and in recent articles I’ve addressed how our solar installation is currently generating more than 50% more power than was initially forecasted based on NIWA data. The savings we’ve achieved have also been on the high side, cutting our bill down by around $93 during our first month and by around $150 during our second month. In fact, our monthly daytime consumption for last month, at 170 kWh, was the lowest number we have ever consumed during any month in recent memory.
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Solar Panels on an Overcast Day vs Solar Panels on a Sunny Day
It’s a miserable, shitty, overcast day here in Otaki, and what better way to use it than to generate some fodder for my blog. And I had hoped to put my washing out today – oh well. At least one silver lining in this is I get to get some forward intel to help me plan ahead for the winter months, to see how our energy use will be affected.
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