I’m curious, what’s an item, tool, or purchase you own that you feel has completely justified its cost over time? Could be anything from a gadget to a piece of furniture or even software. What made it worth it for you?
- Epson Ecotank Printer
Has ink tanks so money isn’t wasted on cartridges and the printer is actually initially expensive unlike those printers that make money back on ink catriges
- Hammer Drill with the proper bits
Makes it easier to mount shit to bricks, goes in brick like butter if you’re using the right drill and bits
I recomend Ryobi Hammer Drill & Bits
- Air Fryer
I’ve stopped using my oven and only use it rarely for things that I don’t want blown apart thst I can weigh down with a fork or spoon like Pizza for example
- Refillable Japanese brand pens and mechanical pencil
I recently got these to aid in Japanese study and refillable pens are more economical in the long run
And Japanese brands go hard on the quality of stationary and I got introduced into the cult of stationary obsession with this
I’ll edit my comment if I can think of anything else
Make sure you use that printer once a month. I let mine sit and the ink dried on its nozzels or somewhere and now it won’t work. I’ve attempted to fix it with no luck. Was a great printer until that happened.
A bicycle. No gas to pay, no parking fees, no insurance, and I can do most of the maintenance.
Camping hammock, it’s what I sleep in most nights. My body complains when I have to use a mattress
I’m going to say my $50 charcoal grill. I’ve had more propane grills fail on me in 5 years, and charcoal grill keeps going. I know its terrible for the environment.
A private jet is way worse for the environment. I think you’re okay.
Your little grill is hardly terrible for the environment. Maybe for your lungs, but that’s why you don’t inhale the charcoal.
My Casio A 168 - I like watches and typically I would opt for more expensive ones but I still marvel at the amount of watch you get for this kind of money. The design is great, very comfortable to wear, very precise and has a very good battery lifetime and background light.
Someone else already mentioned a safety Razor.
My iron pan - much healthier, more ecological and will last longer than I will ever live.
Obviously my bike. Saved so much money on it. Although I still need to figure out what I should do with my very rusty chain. Should I replace it?
Yes replace it! It feels good to help your bike after all you’ve been through. Spent more than my bike is worth on repairs lol
I bought a big pack of eneloop rechargeable batteries a decade ago and they are just within the last year or so starting to fail.
First thing that comes to m8nd is my Pitbull head shaver. I s(h)aved several hundred euros on simple head shaves, 2 minutes a time.
How short does it cut? I use a razor, which I assume is closer? But I wonder how close they are.
razor will be definetely shorter, but the pitbull also gives a pretty clean shave (to the point of undistinguishable difference - to me at least) and it literally takes like 60-90 seconds. lemmy show you: (cat for scale ;))
Wow, thanks for that. I’d say the pic looks like what mine does after a shave with the razor. Looks like I know what I’ll be buying at some point. Thanks again for the help.
Used Wacom Cintiq 21UX I got off FB marketplace for like $300 (MSRP went for $1500+) about 5 years ago. No new drivers are being updated or released for it because it’s so old, but it still works great. I’ve likely made back what I paid for it in art commissions since then.
- A pinecil. It was like $30, and has paid for itself within the first two things I did with it (repaired a good computer mouse which just had a USB connector lift from the board, and fashioned a DIY solar connector). I have repaired/made countless other small things in the few years I’ve owned it.
- Our bicycles, I guess? Financially speaking, they were dirt cheap (~$80 for both), we’ve sold our Prius since we bought them ($5000), we’re not paying for gas for trips within the city (~$30/mo), we’re not paying insurance or parking or maintenance or any of that crap (~$20-30/mo or so). So they have paid off within the first couple of weeks. And there’s so much more: both of us lost some weight, city errands are sometimes faster, and usually more pleasant now (no being stuck in traffic ever), and we’re not wasting space on a useless hunk of metal or polluting the air we breathe.
I had never heard of the pinecil before, thank you! I’ll keep that saved for when I want to upgrade my dinky little iron
When you are replacing a water heater, always get the biggest one possible. Nothing is worse than being the second person showering, and you run out of hot water halfway through. It used to happen to me every day.
Then we had to replace it, and a bigger one wasn’t that much more. I asked myself if it was worth $100 to never have a cold shower again, and then got an even bigger one than that.
Haven’t had a cold shower since.
Gas here.
Its instant, no storage.
I mean, it depends, I wouldn’t say always go for the biggest one you can, because the bigger the volume, the more it will cost to heat up and keep hot. E.g. we have a 50 liter water heater that’s enough for three people, and in the worst case scenario, it only takes like 20 minutes for it to go from cold to hot.
Everyone has to decide if the additional expense of buying and maintaining a larger hot water heater is worth it, but I know that I’ve never regretted it. I know that if my shower went cold every day, I would regret not spending the money, EVERY DAY.
Fair
Battery charger.
Two pairs of black Carhartt cotton duck overalls I bought in 2010 and 2011. One knee is blown out but they are the softest most comfortable clothes I own. I still wear them once or twice a week, wash on hot, dry on hot. These, a Dickies pocket T shirt, and 15 year old 14 eye steel toe Docs are the ‘uniform of the day’. Other than a few nice suits and some shorts, I’m pretty much not interested in clothing. The suits were bought for corporate recognition and I work from home otherwise.
My radar detector (Valentine V1 Gen2) literally paid for itself the first time it alerted me of a speed trap ahead. I am guessing it has since saved me 10’s of thousands of dollars.
I’d bet that selfhosting jellyfin and running sunshine/moonlight has saved me close to $800 on comparable services since I learned to do it last year. So I’d have to say my GPU, which is used mostly for those purposes.
Only problem there for me was that it went off the rails for me, i got some 100TB of storage and I’ve been collecting old movies and shows that can’t be found anywhere on Netflix type services. II spent thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours by now
I have two 10,000 liter water tanks in my basement that I use to harvest rainwater, and another 2,000 liter tank on my roof. From October to around May I close the city water and use only rainwater. I’ve been doing that for a bit more than 10 years now, and it paid for the installation cost in about 4 or 5 years. I also have solar water heaters, but it’s hard to tell how long they took to pay for themselves because I also have on-grid photovoltaic panels for energy generation. My energy bill is about 1/6 of my neighbors’, and the photovoltaic panels paid for themselves in about 5 years as well.
How did you get the tanks in your basement?
sloped lot. I put them there before the walls.
Wow. Thats very cool. I’m planning on getting a solar system installed this winter too (costs less in the winter). Here power supply is not reliable but solar is fairly cheap thanks to China. Infact I’m pretty sure we have a very impressive solar system for a country of our status. (Pakistan)
It’s been more than a decade since I installed mine, so there are probably more options today, but when I did, you were either on-grid or off-grid. On-grid means you “sell” your energy production to the energy company, but if the city power goes out, so does yours. Off-grid means you don’t use city energy at all, but it was much more expensive because it required batteries for storing energy… however, I remember recently reading about people using their electric car batteries to power their houses when the electricity was out, and I’m sure batteries are much more affordable nowadays because of how much electric car technology has developed.
Bit different here. You can be on grid or off grid too. But the government has limits. They don’t want to buy all the power lol. Despite the fact that they don’t produce enough themselves.
You are put on a waitlist first. Now we do have one side of the house under solar already for a year. But thats my uncles side, and they are on grid by now plus have have batteries. And yep batteries are the expensive part here too. But you can manage a combination too.
I’ve got a 5kw battery/solar system for my little off the grid trailer home. Batteries were at $1000 a piece, at 2.5 kw a piece, last year. They are currently $800 each so prices are dropping year over year
Batteries are quite expensive. Lead-acid batteries are readily available, but don’t really work well for powering a house on a regular basis, because they don’t have a very long life cycle. LiON batteries work very well, but they’re fire hazards. Even worse, if you live in an area where you get freezing temperatures, they must be kept inside, because they can’t be allowed to freeze if you’re cycling them. LiFePO4 is the current best option. If you don’t charge them above 80, 85%, and never discharge below 20%, you should have a nearly infinite lifespan. But that means that for every 30kWh of power you use, you want 50kWh of battery. And currently LiFePO4 battery banks run approx. $1000/kWh (+/- depending on band). If you heat your home with electricity, and you live in e.g. North Dakota, you’re going to want more like 200kWh of batteries, because even high efficiency heat pumps can suck a lot of power when it’s -20F.
I’m currently working on getting a 17.7kW system approved by the local utility. It looks like I’ll need to step down what I’m feeding into the grid, because the line capacity out where I live is only 10kW, and they will only approve 75% of the line capacity for grid-tied systems.
You drink the rainwater?
Not directly, but I probably could. I have nets in my gutters so insects and leaves don’t fall on it and I have another filter before the tanks in my basement. I regularly do tests to check levels of pH, chlorine and other stuff. The chlorine tablets I use says it’s used to make water drinkable, and I use the rainwater to cook and make coffee (so I only consume rainwater that was treated and boiled).
My city is in the middle of mountains and it rains a lot and it also has tons of public water fountains, so every weekend I just go to a natural water spring at the bottom of a mountain and fill some bottles to drink through the week - the city’s water company do weekly tests on the fountains and every fountain has a QR code for you to check that fountain status.I think that’s a cool option for preparedness, but seems like a bit of a hassle compared to just using municipal water. But I’m guessing the municipal water is also fairly expensive where you live
There were a couple of years with extended drought season and the city’s water reserves got dangerously low and there was rationing. Since then, I got another five 260L barrels and tons of 5L bottles filled with rainwater under my stairs just for use on my lawn, garden, and houseplants. I don’t believe the climate is going to get any better in the future, nor that the population will get smaller or industry will use less water. Every year is hotter than the previous one. What I expect are longer and longer drought seasons, and I don’t think I’m prepared enough :P
Im my experience, the expensive park of the water bill is actually the sewer expenses. Are you on septic or do you use municipal sewer? Do you have a water/sewer bill at all in the months youre not using their water?
Here the sewer is 80% (so for every $10 you consume of water they charge another $8 for sewer). In those months I don’t use their water I still pay for the sewer minimal fee (up to 10m³ water consumption, my average in the months I use their water is 18m³)
Filters, hommie.
I mean, I know, but wouldn’t those also increase the cost?
I pay $200 a month for water in the seattle suburbs, plus $180 for city drainage, and a one time $25k fee for hook up to the water system. So yeah filters might be a cost.
When you say "I close city water’, sounds like you are also drinking that water? Sounds like a cool idea that I too have been thinking about. That water needs disinfection though
I’m not a native speaker. I just mean I use the city water supply when it’s not raining season, and when it starts raining (about half of the year here) I stop using (and paying for) it and use only rainwater. As I wrote in another comment here, my city has a lot of natural springs and I get water for drinking there.
