Clark's Big Book of Bargains (29 page)

If you like ultra-premium sheets, blankets, and towels, or want to give them a try, a great option is Tuesday Morning, which sells extremely high quality brand names at very good prices, but more money than I would pay. Tuesday Morning says it sells closeout merchandise at 50 percent to 80 percent off the prices you’d see in a department store or upscale catalog. They’re not open all the time, but more than they used to be. When I checked, Tuesday Morning said its stores were open from Feb. 5 to March 30, April 16 to June 30, Aug. 6 to Sept. 30, and Oct. 1 to Dec. 31. Check www.tuesday morning.com for details.

A couple of good sites to check are www.smartbargains.com, which lets you buy online, and www.overstock.com, an online liquidator.

Sometimes you’ll find a deal just because the color is being discontinued. We saw some huge, oversize bath towels at Costco for $6.99, but there was one color, a shade of blue, that was on sale for $2.77 (closeouts at Costco always end in 77 cents. At Sam’s Club, they end in 91 cents). The new blue color was right next to it, and it was $6.99.

• Tips on Sheets and Towels •

• Buy irregulars for huge savings.
  

• Check Value City and Tuesday Morning for excellent deals, especially on premium goods.
  

• Internet •

• www.smartbargains.com
  

• www.overstock.com
  

• www.tuesdaymorning.com
  

• www.valuecity.com
  

* HIGH-EFFICIENCY LIGHTBULBS *

My wife and I had been in a constant war over the lighting in our home, but we finally reached a compromise. I was changing all the lightbulbs, removing regular incandescent lightbulbs and replacing them with energy-efficient compact fluorescent bulbs. Then Lane would replace the compact fluorescents with regular bulbs. She didn’t like the light from the low-energy bulbs, which is whiter rather than yellowish—more like the light in an office building.

Our compromise was that I get to put in whatever bulb I want overhead, and Lane gets to control the lamps. So now, as a traditional bulb burns out in the overhead fixtures, I replace it with a high-efficiency bulb, and the cost of lighting our home goes down and down. The compact fluorescents use about one-fourth the electricity of traditional bulbs.

If you tried using compact fluorescents a few years ago, try again, because the light they provide is much better than it used to be, more like that of incandescent bulbs. The price, while still higher than regular bulbs, has come down dramatically. Compact fluorescents used to cost $15 to $20 each. Today they’re $3.50 to $4 each, and they last for years. Still, it’s hard to convince people, when they can buy lightbulbs on sale for 25 cents each, to pay $4. But the cost of the bulb is insignificant compared to the cost of the electricity it uses, and traditional incandescent bulbs are terribly inefficient in how they use electricity. For every $1 you spend on electricity with an incandescent, you get about 10 cents worth of light and 90 cents worth of heat, according to Southface Energy Institute (www.southface.org). Over the life of a compact fluorescent bulb, you’ll save $30 to $40 in energy costs. You won’t see the savings on your electric bill, because lights are a relatively small energy user compared to your refrigerator and air conditioner. But over time, making these changes will have an effect.

Our kitchen, for example, has ten can-style spotlights, and nine of them have compact fluorescent bulbs. I’m waiting for the tenth to burn out.

Outdoor floodlights are an even better deal, because the price difference between regular bulbs and compact fluorescents is minimal, perhaps $5 versus $4 for a regular bulb, and compact fluorescents use less energy and last longer.

Compact fluorescents now come in all shapes and styles. I buy them at Costco, but they’re available everywhere. Southface recommends looking for bulbs with a Color Rendering Index (CRI) of 80 or higher, for the best light quality.

If you’re looking for other ways to cut your monthly electricity usage, there are two ways to make a big difference. First, check the insulation in your attic. If it looks light, see if your electric or gas company will do a home energy audit, or get an estimate from companies that will blow in additional insulation or add sheets of insulation, called batting. Increasing insulation can pay for itself in as little as two seasons. Second, if your house is usually empty while you’re at work, have a programmable thermostat installed. They enable you to raise the temperature in the summer when you’re at work, but cool the house down before you get home, and vice versa in the winter.

• Tips on High-Efficiency Lightbulbs •

• Compact fluorescents provide better light, more like that of traditional lightbulbs, and are much cheaper than they were a few years ago.
  

• Compact fluorescents now come in virtually all shapes and sizes.
  

• A compact fluorescent bulb can last ten times as long as a regular incandescent bulb, and a single bulb can save you $30 to $40 in energy costs over its lifetime.
  

• Internet •

• www.southface.org
  

* SMOKE DETECTORS *

If you have a burglar alarm in your house, make sure you have a smoke alarm that’s integrated into the burglar alarm system. That will give you whole-house protection, and you’ll never have to worry about it.

If you don’t have a burglar alarm, and you don’t want to go to that expense, you can buy a relatively new style of smoke alarm that provides great protection at a great price. The new smoke alarms use a lithium battery that lasts for ten years. That’s a much better choice than the old-style smoke detectors whose batteries must be replaced once or twice a year. Firefighters say that people die in fires when there are no smoke detectors or when the smoke detectors aren’t working, either because someone has disabled them or because the batteries are dead.

The ten-year smoke detectors are so cheap now—routinely less than $10—that you can put them throughout your house. It’s a very inexpensive form of life insurance. Write the date you installed them on or near the smoke detector, so you’ll know when to replace the battery.

People have the most trouble with a smoke detector in the kitchen. That’s the one people tend to disable, because it’s accidentally triggered by a dinner gone awry. I recommend placing one near the kitchen, in the laundry room, and in each bedroom.

The laundry room is something people don’t think about much, but it’s a prime location for a fire to start. The clothes dryer is the source of some of the most dreadful fires to ever hit a home. People often forget to clean the lint screen in their dryer, or the exhaust pipe that carries the hot air outside their house. Lint clogs trap heat, and the lint is like kindling for a fire. Within a couple of minutes, a fire can reach more than 1,000 degrees. Many people also store things around a dryer that can catch fire. When I learned about this I went and looked at our dryer, and we had boxes and papers next to it. We were setting ourselves up for a tremendous possibility of a fire. Now we’ve cleaned all of that out.

If you have the old kind of smoke detectors, throw them out and buy the ten-year kind. There are times when it pays to be cheap and there are times when it doesn’t pay to be cheap. It doesn’t pay to be cheap with smoke detectors.

Another great way to protect your house from fire is to buy fire extinguishers. There are different extinguishers for different types of fires. For example, Class A fire extinguishers are for ordinary combustibles such as wood and paper, and Class B fire extinguishers are for flammable liquids, mainly grease and gasoline. Class C fire extinguishers are for electrical fires and Class D fire extinguishers are for combustible metals. So you probably should keep a Class B fire extinguisher in your kitchen, where a grease fire is more likely. Some extinguishers have multiple ratings. I just bought a First Alert fire extinguisher at Costco that is rated for Class A, B, and C fires for $18. If you can find one that is rated for several different kinds of fires, that’s great. Costco also had Kidde brand extinguishers for a similar price. Either would be fine.

Keep one fire extinguisher in the laundry room and one in the kitchen, at least.

Mark Meltzer had to put out a fire with a fire extinguisher shortly after he moved into his house. An old condensate pump on his air conditioner seized and caught fire. Mark noticed that the air conditioning had stopped, went to the basement to check, and found flames coming from the tiny pump, just a few feet from a gas line leading to his water heater. He grabbed a fire extinguisher, which he had in the basement, and put out the fire. Then he called the fire department, which cut out the pump, eliminating any danger that it would smolder and reignite. If Mark had had no fire extinguisher handy, the fire could have been disastrous.

You can be overcome with smoke very quickly. If you have a fire in your house and it’s getting big, get out. Don’t try to save anything but yourself and your family.