Freecycle - Keep Reusables from Landfill
What is Freecycle?
To quote Freecycle themselves .. “The Freecycle Network™ is made up of 4,486 groups with 5,229,000 members across the globe. It’s a grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement of people who are giving (& getting) stuff for free in their own towns. It’s all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills. Each local group is moderated by a local volunteer (them’s good people). Membership is free.”
In my Freecycle time I’ve got rid of books, clothes, plants, cardboard tubes (!!), wood, kitchen stuff, rubble, gravel and more. I’ve been given a USB Network card, games for my children, a towel rail and many other things.
When doing up our front garden, we had people coming and helping themselves to our gravel from the garden (advertised on Freecycle ) and therefore saving us not only trips to the tip, or the cost of hiring a skip - but also lots of back breaking work too!!
So how does Freecycle work? Basically, sign up to your LOCAL group and in doing will receive emails (you can select how often this is as an option) detailing things that other people are giving away - “Offered” ads. As a Freecycle member you can then email them back saying that yes you would be happy to take it off their hands. The person giving it away then chooses from all responses that they have had, who will receive the item.
How does the person choose who should receive the item? Many factors - sometimes first response, sometimes most polite response, or soonest collection time, . or just simply pulling out of a hat! Different Freecyclers have different ways of selecting their ‘winner’. I personally like a polite response with a quick collection time.
Once an item has been allocated to a member, then a ‘Taken’ post is submitted to the group to let them know that the item is no longer available.
On Freecycle you can also post ‘wanted’ posts - state what you are looking for and hope that someone out there is looking to give one away for free… obviously asking for things like Wii, high spec laptops etc does not go down too well with other group members!!!!
As part of my wish to MAKE money this year from online ‘things’ I am trying to be more diligent in the 
Anyhow, now that it is winter, our Gas bills have soared… and so I’m going to experiment with the central heating and how long it is running each day. We have been having it on pretty much constantly from 6am - 9:30pm because with 2 young children at home all day we need to be warm. We do not have a room thermostat to help regulate it. What I am going to experiment doing is to have the heating on throughout the same period of the day, but… only on for half an hour in every hour - so it will cut in and out every half hour throughout the 6am-9:30pm time slot - the only exception being that it will be on for a full hour first thing in the morning to warm the house up. I’m hoping that the half hour ‘on’ period will heat the radiators enough to give us some heat throughout the next half hour before it kicks in again.
