Saving $120 a month from a $45 rice cooker sounds great but the math seems off unless you're eating rice for every single meal. Rice is cheap, sure, but most people's grocery bill goes to meat, veggies, and dairy, not just the carbs. A rice cooker doesn't magically make those cheaper, it just makes rice easy to batch cook. Don't get me wrong, cooking at home saves money compared to takeout, but crediting the whole $120 to the cooker feels like a stretch. You probably just started cooking more in general, and the cooker was one small part of that.

Shavings do dry faster but the dust is what got me. Switched to pine a couple winters back and my hens started sneezing within a week, so now I do a thin shaving base with a flake of straw on top for the nest boxes only. The roosts and floor get straight shavings though, and yeah the mites cleared up way faster than when it was all straw. One thing nobody mentions is that straw from the feed store can already carry mite eggs when you bring it home, so you might be reinfecting yourself every time you rebed. Shavings in a sealed bale seem less likely to bring hitchhikers in with them.