Finding the chase and cutting to it

I love a sunny Sunday. It’s our chores day, generally, a day when we get the house sort for the week. Do a main dish for dinner and generally try, and obviously I’m failing, to get away from the computer screen. It’s the first truly sunny day of the year so far. I had a […]

It’s difficult to think of it in that terms – if you’re an office worker (and I do count those students and teachers as being in that boat), it just feels like a stolen hour of sleep. This was not the original purpose. In 1784, Benjamin Franklin propose aligning “working time” with “available day light” […]

I’m writing this while suffering from jet lag, so my body thinks it’s 6pm in the evening rather than 11pm… And that’s despite not having much sleep last night… Oh, this is going to be SO worthwhile! Shhh, bear with me. With this extra time I managed to screw up my contribution to the tado […]

… to get some of the things I cannot buy in my main shop. Like many, I do the majority of my shopping from a supermarket. But they don’t do everything and besides, I did forget a couple of things. Why the wait, well I live in a football town, so waiting until kick-off has […]

Rebound effect cancels out home insulations impact on gas use study was not a headline I welcomed on Sunday, as a keen advocate of insulation. I read the article with interest, not least because I feared I’d led everyone reading this blog down a blind alley by encouraging increasing insulation. But wait, for us, a […]

Today is officially the start of winter as in the northern hemisphere, it is the solstice – the shortest day of the year. Of course, in the southern hemisphere, it is the longest day. All thanks to the earth being on the list, by about 23 to the sun. It’s one of the reasons so […]

It’s easy to say that Saturday is our going and and getting things done day but today, I am doing something a little different. Having recharged my batteries last night and looking out at a beautiful, and sunny, Saturday morning, my stomach is begining to wake up and ask: what’s going on? I made pasta […]

We’re doing a little renovation (replacing the stair and landing carpet) and remodelling (moving my husband’s office upstairs) which has allowed me access to that room’s thermostat. The self-builders we bought from put underfloor heating downstairs with individual room thermostats – really old, mechanical, set the temperature but no other functionality, type room thermostats and […]

As I sit here, in my comfy home, lit by LED bulbs, lightly heated by timed, thermostatic controls, I’m thanking my efforts over the past 10 years to make my house as energy efficient as possible. I was lucky in that we wanted to change energy supplier relatively shortly after moving into our current home […]

Oh, yeah? Another article on insulation. No! Electricity and gas prices went up this month – we were away when this happened, which made it a little more surprising than it perhaps should have been. But, like many who made the move to solar power and EVs early, it’s really not that bad. This year […]