Finding the chase and cutting to it

Being diabetic, I have a bigger footprint than the average person on the planet.

As a household, we’re making an effort.

The Electric Car

According to the New Scientist this week, in the UK, a fully electric car has a much lower carbon emission footprint than a hybrid petrol/electric car this year and on-going years.  This is as the UK moves towards more nuclear and renewable energy generation compared to gas and petrol.  This is aside from microgeneration.

The Leaf is one of our big consumers for electricity.  Each mile costs us less than 4p at the moment (especially during the winter) if we charge from the mains rather than our solar cells.

Household usage of electricity

The majority of the halogen lights in the household (and most compact fluorescents) have been replaced by LEDs.  We’re also using remote controlled lights to keep the footprint down as much as possible.

Cooking and refrigeration are the two areas we’re still struggling with: we have a plan over 2019 and 2020 to swap out our older units with more efficient ones.  We did the microwave last year and using that in place of the main cooker is keeping our generation usage down considerably.

Thought goes in to how everything is cooked.  When saving food for reheating, we cool the food completely before putting it into the fridge and the same for reheating.

Heating and hot water production

The room thermostats downstairs make a big difference to our heating usage.  If we don’t use a room, we cool it by a couple of degrees – I don’t turn it off completely, but drop the consumption.

I’m looking at swapping our upstairs thermostatic radiator valves to programmable and remote controlled ones.  That would give us the same capability upstairs as downstairs for a fraction of the cost of putting in a system like we have downstairs.

Honeywell do an interesting system for this called EvoHome.

I’d expect a 30% savings as we got from swapping out the downstairs thermostats as a minimum and a much more comfortable living environment too.

Recycling

We do what we can.  Obviously, some things cannot be recycled, but all paper, cardboard and glass is recycled.

We do the vast majority of our plastic through our kerbside collection.  That doesn’t cover plastic bags, but well before the 5p charge, we reused all plastic bags at least 40 times before using them as bin liners.

All of our garden waste is recycled by preference or completely dried out and burnt as kindling for our log burner.  Irritatingly, our log burner will not burn multifuel.  We use the log burner over the weekend, only when the temperature outside is below 15°C and only fuel and kindling that has been matured for 12 months.

Consumables

Aside from CFCs there are various toxins and chemicals used everyday in a western lifestyle.  The toilet is bleached at least once a week.

But that’s the only thing.  We use a steamer to clean the floors and bathrooms.  That uses water.

I do use isopropanol alcohol as a pre-injection cleaner for my blood glucose sensors as they are in my skin for 14 days.  For my other sites and blood tests, I tend to just keep clean.

We paint at least one room in the house a year.  This year, my husband has painted the windows sills round the house.  All the paints we use are water based and we use water to clean out the brushes where possible.

We use aerosols for our deodorants and I use a spray three or four times a month for my hair.  I use a solid stick for sports on top of that.

Garden

We’ve planted 52 tress over the past three years to form a hedge.  We’ve also planted a peach tree.  We use an electric lawnmower.  We collect water to keep the plants hydrated.

The drought this year saw some of these new trees hit hard but we’re waiting to see what recovers over the winter.

Not bad…

No doubt, we could do more.  We’ve insulated without stopping rooms being ventilated and upgraded extraction fans which keep things dry without burning up more electricity than necessary.  I’d like to fit curtains in more of the rooms as that really helps keep the heat in.

We’re trying to keep things simple and not break the bank: we are not early adopters as a result.

Once the kitchen appliances and the TRVs upstairs are sorted, the obvious next things for us to do are upgrade the solar cells (put more in) and potentially get a battery system.

We could also look to lose our diesel car.  If we did that, the obvious thing to do would be to swap the Leaf and the XFS for something like the F-Pace.  We’d really need to clear the mortgage before doing that though!