Finding the chase and cutting to it

Entrances and internal walls. We’ve looked at roof insulation being a warm winter hat for your home. Insulating your floors has given you a pair of cozy slippers to isolate your feet from cold floors. We can think of doing the same for your walls as giving you a heavy-duty winter coat. Before I dive […]

While roof insulation can easily be considered a hat for your house, treating the ceilings and floors is a harder concept to articulate… Just get on with it! Indeed! Insulating the roof does so much to prevent you losing heat outside is obviously a good idea. The floor and ceilings are a harder concept to […]

A drought has been declared here in the UK. At least officially. What does that mean, when do such declarations get made and is there an end in sight? There is no definition of what a drought is. A sustained period of no rain, seems vague. Yes, we have had several ‘heat dome’ situations in […]

Yesterday was the first day this July we were using electricity supplied from the national grid. In fact, since the middle of May this year, we have, where humanly possible run ‘off-grid’. Where humanly possible? Some things are scuppering this philosophy. This sounds so ungrateful, but our electricity supply company gives us free hours of electricity and […]

Well, “Driving off the grid” is. Excited to announce that our journey towards sustainability has been transformed into a Spotify podcast! “Driving off the grid” explores the steps we took to decarbonise our lives and the insights we’ve gained along the way. You can listen to the podcast here: “Driving off the grid” on Spotify, […]

Unusually, I got thermodynamics in physics. Heat is all about vibration of molecules rubbing together or hitting each other. Small amounts of friction taking and giving off energy. Which brings me to today’s subject. It is inspired by a throw away comment my husband made this morning. Would the recent heat waves would change the […]

Surely, you are taking stock… No, absolutely not. I am taking the carcass from our roast chicken and making a pint of stock. All in 28 minutes. Got to love microwaves. In fact, from an eco point of view, it’s not been a bad few days. After four brilliant solar generation days, we have had […]

As the UK is coping with high humidity and high outside temperatures, it may seem an odd time to be thinking about insulating your pad. Summer is a perfect time to strip out older insulation and replace it with newer, “up to code”, materials and thicknesses. There are 21 million homes in the UK and […]

I wanted to follow up on Walking in the shadows, which looked at the using passive cooling methods for coping with the Heat Dome, which affected Africa and Europe in the last week of May 2026. After all, we hear the same advice every year, but life gets in the way. We get home from […]

Last week, we looked at the difference using our solar panels has made to our carbon footprint. Of course, that isn’t in isolation. At 27kWh, we have a large amount of battery capacity. But what got us here, why is that working so well for us? What is the easiest? Energy. I don’t use a […]