Carbon reduction begins at my home
When I watched that Al Gore film, I came away full of good intentions about changing my ways and my lightbulbs - then promptly did neither.
But recently Croydon Council sent round an enthusiastic man with terrible B.O. to do a home energy review, and kitted me out with a load of cool energy saving stuff I never knew existed.
So, for my contribution to Blog Action Day 09, I’m going to take you on a tour of my house. This is stuff you can stick in your house too, stuff which is cheap, easy to install and saves you money while doing a teensy little bit more than you’re already doing to save the world.
1. Water saving shower head
Here’s mine. They cost around a tenner, come in all shapes and sizes, have a powerful flow just as luxurious as your normal shower but save about 4 litres of water every minute. Haahoo optional.
2. Chimney balloons
If you have fireplaces, you have draughts. Chimney balloons are like double-glazing for disused fires, and – as a bonus – also stop dead things falling onto your carpet. You can buy them here or here for £20.
3. Wireless energy monitor
You’ve heard of these. They show how much energy you’re using and the cost per minute. The wirelessness means you can carry them around the house and see what happens when you switch things on or off. Here’s me, switching on the kettle (a YouTube sensation in the making):
Mine’s an OWL, which appears to have won plaudits from pundits, though others are available. From £25.
4. Radiator panels
These are bits of moulded, shiny plastic which you stick behind your radiators on any external walls to reflect the heat back in, and come in packs of 5 or more for about £20. They save 80kg of CO2 a year and cut heating costs by about £10, according to this. And they make your house look a bit more like a spaceship, which is what we’re all striving for after all.
5. Low energy halogen bulbs
My house is full of tacky Argos spotlights, and for the two years I’ve lived here (and not got around to swapping them) I’ve been buying evil 50w bulbs thinking there was no alternative. But wait…
Croydon Council to the rescue! (A phrase not often heard). You can get these energy efficient GU10s which suck up less than a sixth of the power and last ten times as long. Hard to find in shops but very easy to find online for around a fiver.
And that concludes our little tour.
If there is a serious point to make here, it’s this. Tackling climate change needs everyone to switch to a low carbon lifestyle, and that’s a gargantuan ask. Innovative products like these are therefore absolutely vital to stimulate consumer demand by making it easy, affordable and desirable to make the change. They’re a key part of the transition to a low carbon world which – to quote from the government strategy:
will transform our whole economy. It will change our industrial landscape, our supply chain, and the way in which we all work and consume. For as well as being an environmental and economic imperative, the shift to a low carbon economy is also an economic opportunity. Businesses and consumers can benefit from significant savings through energy and resource efficiency measures. And supplying the demands of the low carbon economy offers a significant potential contribution to economic growth and job creation in Britain, not only as part of the short term economic recovery, but also through sustainable growth over the decades to come.
You can follow and have your say about what the government’s doing to stimulate all this here, or for a load more stuff you personally can do about climate change, have a look at the Blog Action Day site and Directgov’s Act on CO2 pages.
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Comments
Thanks for this Neil – I enjoyed the tour. Having posted my own blog about how the grander actions, wind turbine, composting toilet etc are tricky in a tiny victorian terrace, your solutions are definately do-able.
I love the tour, and that you bothered to do it. The thought crossed my mind… but I decided to conserve my energy – maybe I’ll share my worktops and funny triple tap with the world now. Will look out those energy saving spotlights you mentioned…
[...] Leave a Comment Stooging around the web this afternoon looking for nothing in particular I found this, which links to this site, which is a really useful idea and something I should do soon. And so [...]
Steph > Your funny triple tap sounds intriguing.
Dan > Gee, thanks. Free with Night Garden mag. Gotta catch them all.
Lifestyle changes are good, but they can only slow emissions growth slightly, they will not reduce emissions. Personal lifestyle changes can only have an impact of a few percent at most. We cannot ignore the other 95 percent of the problem. Some have suggested that we can forget about caps and just focus on behavioural changes, which is insane.
http://selfdestructivebastards.blogspot.com/2009/10/voluntary-lifestyle-changes.html
Great Post!
Reducing your carbon footprint starts at home and can include many things inc; cavity wall insullation, solar panels, wind turbines, economy appliances, low energy bulbs, double glazing etc. Although green products may initially come with a price tag, there’s other simple ways to reduce your emissions, these inc; turning lights off in vacant rooms, switching off electrical appliances instead of them being on standby, turning down the temperature a few degrees on the washing machine, showing instead of bathing. These tips are to name a few!
Hello, I'm Neil Williams. I'm a government web geek, a dad, a husband, a grower of veg, a keeper of hens and a lapsed comedy writer, roughly in that order. 
Love the Ha-hoo