SIMPLE FUEL ECONOMIES

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXVII, Issue 19804, 21 May 1934, Page 12

SIMPLE FUEL ECONOMIES

A woman who keeps house for a family of four on a remarkably small sum has taught me many good ways of saving on fuel, says a writer in an exchange. She keeps all potato peelings, dries them in the oven, and puts them into a box in the coal-cellar. To the peelings she adds day by day as they accumulate, dry shavings, nut-shells, old matchboxes, and dried orange peel. This mixture will start any fire, and the housewife who uses it has got so into the habit of adding to her “firelighter box” that she never wastes even a match!

Another of her economies is to sift all cinders, take a shovelful each night, sprinkle them with a very little paraffin, and leave them ready to start the fire in the stove next morning.

Again, she saves empty cotton-reels, soaks them in paraffin, and stores them in a tin. One of these will serve to start a fire. So will old newspapers, twisted and formed into rings. Use four rings, one on top of another, and add coal, but no wood. If the fire gets very low my economical friend pushes a couple of old moth-balls between the ccal, and—to use her own words —“off goes the fire again like a furnace.” Finally, a very good hint I recevied from her was to save some old tins, and when the fire is really hot, put one or two on and let them get red hot. The burning of tins, she declares, keeps the chimney clean and saves the cost of sweeping. I have tried the scheme and found this to be true.