Finding the chase and cutting to it

I had an apprenticeship as a young adult, that allowed me to live 250 miles from home. I had to buy a fridge for my insulin, and as an 18 year old, I did that on a credit card and paid off the total of the fridge with my first three pay checks after rent, […]

We’ve been looking at insulation, and during the winter, one of the biggest influences on how much energy you need to heat your house is how many mammals are living in it. A human being raises the temperature in a room by around 1°C, so having two people… It’s why we run many living spaces […]

Last week, A Coat for the House, Part 1 looked at what was going on internally in your property. This week, we’re heading outdoors. External doors, windows, and walls. Entrances and exits. Entering with the front door, we can then go to the other entrances/exits, the windows and end up with the walls. Poor quality […]

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 […]

Learning how to make good use of our microwave to reduce our power consumption while cooking has highlighted just what we were missing out on in terms of the unit being an extra pair of hands in the kitchen, almost a sous chef. It should be noted we bought the microwave in 2017, as our […]

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 […]

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 […]

We have a rule in our house since 2020: if you buy another kitchen gadget, something has to be given to a charity shop or sold. So much to unpack here, don’t you mean stakes in the ground? No, I don’t, we’re talking about food. Let me continue. OK, but wait, you have a ginormous […]

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 […]