I’m trying to avoid the news at the moment. Not because of an osterich type of mind, hide your head and nothing bad is happening – “ta deda tee dah” – but more because I don’t want to make things worse.

What do I mean? Well, at the moment, I am pretty lucky. Everyone in the household is earning and we are all salaried above minimum wage. We have a small amount of debt in the house (a mortgage), which we fixed at 1.22% until next year. We have some savings so if one of us loses our job, we don’t even need to sacrifice our standard of living. The energy rises have not really hurt us.

The trouble is, I have the same feeling of dread at the moment as I would if things were very different. I have been in the position where my rent has suddenly sky-rocketed, bills hurt and heavily dependent on the next pay check.

My mum is having a big clear out and it’s all I can do not to say don’t get rid of that mum, I’ll have it. I quite literally don’t need anything. I’m even fixing up old appliances rather than buy new ones and I have a lovely car – maintaining that is so much cheaper than buying even a second hand one.

In the back of my mind is my dad’s old adage about not having investments while you have debt. Settle the debt then play – if you invest the money for the mortgage and the investment goes sour, you can well find yourself homeless. Pay the debt first.

So, that’s what I’m doing. Our interest rate is low, so I am putting spare money there. It’s great on many levels as it means we’re saving interest on that big debt and we therefore save tax. When we come off the fixed rate, we should (fingers crossed) only have 2 or 3 years of debt left, even if the interest rates go above 15%.

Hopefully, they won’t. But I do remember seeing mortgages advertised for 19% as an apprentice in 1993!

But things don’t actually look at all that bad?

If I’m feeling this way and not being frivolous, who else is? What is the impact of that?

Inflation is not actually a bad thing per se, it depends on the causes. The items that are costing significantly more aren’t things that take up much of my take home paycheck. I had reduced my energy usage over the past 10 years, so we’re cushioned from that. I don’t drive far with the cars, so that’s not a huge cost. Because of lockdown, we are out of the habit of going out – we have a nice house, so it is far from a necessity.

Due to the hot summer, some foods are scarce and/or expensive, but again, not a huge impact for us.

We’ve got all the essential work done on the house and the vehicles. We have a deal not to waste money on gifts on the upcoming season, though Christmas dinner is a bit of a splurge, all round. If it’s a sunny day, well…

It’s tempting to hide away and not spend until it’s all got better. Of course, if everyone does that, we have no growth. Retail and manufacturing all suffer, leading to job losses.

Let’s look at our household budget again… And avoid the news…

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 I have discussed swapping most of them out with first Heatmiser wifi programmable ones and those with Tado wired thermostats.

My husband’s office was the last hold-out. He’d opted for a programmable Heatmiser one, though not wifi programmable as “keeping the room cool is the biggest issue”!

Recovering some photos of doing the previous swaps meant that the job was completed in fairly short order. Pairing the room highlighted the fact we now have 13 of these devices or smart radiator valves in situ in the house. Lucky for us…

Which led to a conversation with my mum. She is currently living off-grid using an oil fired boiler for her central heating. I was going through the humidity sensor and the proximity features of the Tado system but found one of the radiators had detected an open window, so had shut the heating off in that room temporarily until the window was closed.

“How does it know that?” she asked. No idea, but it’s pretty reliable at getting it right and I love the feature. I think she may be considering the upgrade in her place.

Many words for little action

Cheeky, it’s only Saturday.

The last bit of DIY today, apart from this blog, was replacing a 30-year-old cable on my food processor. I was a little nervous about doing this but the internet really is a wonderful thing.

I find videos hard to follow, way too noisy. Thankfully, some-one had written down the steps: locating the right cable from our local electrical store (a simple 2 core 5 amp or “lamp” cable), I removed the old cable and put in a fresh new one. A 20 minute job and my mixer is back in reliable working order.

Time to make some tasty dishes with it 🙂

Bon appetit.

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 in 2013. Our first electricity bill was over £100 for just under 31 days of usage. It was the largest electricity bill I’d had for a May (the date was the 6th June, the bill ran from 2nd May 2013 to the 1st June) and I couldn’t understand what we were doing wrong. I sat down and looked up at the ceiling and rushed to switch off the lights – I was looking at 8 brightly shining 50W bulbs lit above my head or 400W of power being spent every second. Hey, I thought (or words to that effect), that’s no longer happening.

I knew LED bulbs were coming so wondered up the road to our local store and bought 8 LED GU10s rated at 6W each instead of 50W – a saving of 88% though it cost (at the time) more than £130 – the plan was for each lighting ring in the kitchen to be done each month and by September, 8 bulbs were only £95 – we had enough 50W bulbs to use 1.5kW an hour and we reduced that to 150W. And then looked at every bulb in the house. The lowest rated ones were in the kitchen.

In that first weekend, I had reduced our consumption by 5kW and spent less than £100 doing that (excluding the kitchen). By the end of September, we had saved over 13kW just from lighting. The outside lights were up to 600W each, fluroscents in the garage, another 400W!

I looked at everything, the heating controls, the insulation, the curtaining. I didn’t do the work in one go – a big and expensive task, but broke it into small, timely jobs for weekends. Venetian blinds were swapped for curtains and thermal blackout blinds, starting in the bedrooms where they’d give the most benefit. Manual thermostats were swapped for wifi controlled timed ones. Holiday mode was used when we were away, summer programmes were subtly different to winter ones.

I use the microwave when I can – I am a big fan of microwave roast dinners for a fraction of the cost of a traditionally cooked roast chicken. Teamed with peak generation from our solar cells means we can cook for free and donate electricity to the grid for others to use <3.

The hob was eventually swapped for an induction one. The convection cooker for a significantly more efficient one.

One big step was the adoption of the smart meter in 2015. Like the electric vehicle, I don’t really understand why these haven’t been taken up more widely. During the summer, I time the cooking to coincide with the sun generating the most electricity and now that’s teamed that with the vehicle to grid, and our electricity bills are not only zero but paying for most of our gas use.

According to https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-63483668, people with smart meters can take part in a new scheme to help ensure we reduce the reliance on burning gas and coal – critical as gas supplies have been made prohibatively expensive by Vladimir Putin and his campaign on the Ukranian people.

This builds on the https://carbonintensity.org.uk/ which highlights when there is a glut of renewable energy on the grid against times of greatest use. We’ve been collating (and sharing) this data in the UK for a while now and canny people can use it to help reduce our carbon footprints. This allows them to capitalise on that saving through cold, hard cash.

Now, even during the summer, between 4pm and 7pm, there is a big draw on electricity in the UK. During the winter, that’s exacerbated by needing to turn on lights for the journey home and moving about darkened houses. By using microwaves and induction hobs instead of gas and electric convection ovens, we can reduce power usage dramatically. Don’t have a hot drink on turning up home in your car – instead use a flask for water boiled at lunchtime and wait a bit for that hot drink.

I hear many people talk about having batteries but there are some simpler ways of making the most of solar energy during the winter. Traditional storage heaters worked by warming “bricks” during the night time to give heat out during the day – flip that technology to solar heating and solar voltaics, and your house can be giving out heat as you walk through the door from work or school from energy stored at lunch time when there’s a glut of power from solar sources. For a much lower cost than installing a heat pump or solar thermal heaters…

As is my wont on a Sunday, I’m drinking a hot cup of Earl Grey (black), watching the leaves drop from the trees (it is October in the UK), putting off my set of chores. I’ve been doing this for the past 24 hours, like most weekends, and the grey sky outside is not inspiring me to do anything else at the moment.

Excitingly, we’re moving my husband’s office upstairs which means the last thermostat in the house can be swapped out to a Tado one. It’s quite the reno (to borrow the Property Brothers’ parlance) with a Study bed becoming my husband’s new desk and collapsing a wardrobe in the old spare room up to the attic ready for my son to move out.

We’re big believers in reusing furniture. There’s a 4-6 seater dining table and chairs, a futon sofa bed, a double bed, 2 wardrobes, some flat pack chests of drawers all waiting to go.

What we’ll have left is my husband’s old desk which will move out to the landing to make a hoby desk for me. My sewing machine and all the tools and gadgets will nest in bedside tables ready to spring into action when we need something. The landing cupboard holds the ironing board and a handy socket will allow me to press fabric quickly and easily rather than squeeze in to the lounge and set up temporarily there and need to immediately clear away.

The old office will house the futon as an extra spare room and the gym equipment we bought for lock down. A spare monitor will have the Wii fit plugged in ready to go and that will all mean we have a slouchy, gymy area downstairs that can flex if we need it to.

Sundays, time to dream, drink tea, put off chores, and cower from the drizzle. Have fun with yours :).

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 has been a good solar generating year (as per fig 1 below) compared to last year and on top of that, our SEG or smart export guarantee means we get 11p over the cost of buying a unit for every unit we export.

This is important because a big change happened once solar panels became relatively cheap: one of the benefits we got from doing the install early was a means to recoup some of the investment by feeding in our excess energy into the grid.

However, that and our export rate were initially fixed which meant with the high rates of inflation due to gas prices rising we were potentially left out in the cold.  In April, our energy provider gave us the floating SEG – which allows us to largely fund our heating and electricity through the use our V2G and solar exports.

Of course, it also reduces our pull on the grid.  Our consumption is lower (though V2G does skew the figures) because of our investment in lowering our carbon footprint.

Of course, there are other benefits as seen in the UK’s Carbon Intensity monitor last night…  We can see that wind and imports (like our car donating its stored energy) far outweighed our need for electricity generated by gas. 

These figures show why its important to retain the SEG and enable more people to invest in solar and get a fast return on investment.  For the next 20 years, it would enable the UK to become one of the lowest users of fossil fuels for heating and energy.

Hang on a minute, doesn’t this just mean poor people are buying rich people’s electricity?

I am saying, we shouldn’t be using this mechanism to regain inequalities in our system.

I’m a higher rate tax payer and have been for the past 12 years.  I strongly believe that tax for me should be higher and for those earning less it should be lower.  Why not?  I can afford this to make the UK better.

By keeping the “green levies”, we can make this technology available to more people, especially in the middle earning tier, those paying higher rate tax but who have no wiggle room to make such investments.

The high rate tax bracket should be raised and then the rate put to 45% and the highest tier should be back at 50%.  I also think a spouse who isn’t working should be able to gift their tax allowence to their partner but that really does stray off topic…

If more people use solar generation during the day and V2G over night, we can reduce our need to burn fossil fuels to those who cannot do either, reducing the cost – where there is no demand for something it either becomes very cheap or very expensive.

We need to change people’s view on the technology.  Tesla’s power roof hasn’t really come to fruition and is very expensive where you can get it.  Round where we live, solar cells are almost seen as a badge of honour.  All the cool houses have them but that isn’t the case everywhere in the UK.  Which is odd.

If we team the technology with smart meters of course, you start to be able to tune their usage.  My parents were early adopters and now my mum is widowed is running her car, cooking, green house, and house for less than £30 a month at today’s prices (her heating is a little different as she’s an oil fired house off the grid).  During the summer that pretty much drops to zero even though she’s heating the hot water from the solar panels too.  She will be well below the price cap of £2,500.

Will you?

It’s a good question.  Our EV is now doing a 25 mile round trip during the day which means we’re not quite doing as well as we did – it’s knocked £10 a month off our earnings from V2G bringing our total in at £160 per month compared to £170.  We get around £600 a year from our FIT.  So (12*160 + 600=) £2,520 from the panels and V2G is nearly the price cap.  Our electricity use is typically 7287.70kWh and our gas is 19176.29kWh.

At 33.38p per kWh for electricity and a standing charge of 37.08p per day, that makes the electricity bill = £135 (standing charge) + £2432.63 = £2567.97 for electricity.

Gas is charged at 9.81p per kWh and a standing charge of 27.12p per day.  So that’s £1,882 near enough.  So our bills have gone from £300 per annum last year to £1,930 although that’s a poor estimate as it has done this as a big bang and actually the prices only went up in October.  That’s £8 per m² in our home.

Our usage has dropped considerably thanks to our Tado valves and thermostats and using our smart meters to make better choices.  We’ve also knock 1 tonne off our carbon footprint, which is reducing our costs as well – typically we’ve reduced our usage by 100kWh for electricity and 450kWh for the gas it month.   It has, after all been a much hotter year and we did go from using gas all year to turning it off over the summer.  We made use of natural mechanisms to reduce our need for cooling over the summer.

Interestingly, we started up the boiler for heating and hot water this month.  Compared to last year when we were both working from home and didn’t have the Tado thermostats in place (though I had installed the radiator valves) our gas usage in October was 1112.95kWh where-as this year, halfway through, our gas usage is only 259.94kWh – a drop of 24% – and there have been some really cold days.  My son and I both travel into the office each day meaning my husband is only properly heating one room when he is in the house.  Turning the heating down automatically when we’re all out makes such a difference!

Our current direct debit is £150 a month (which is £1,800 and we have a credit to cover the rest with our supplier) , which is reasonably cheap living these days, especially as there are now three of us contributing, £50 each a month…

Actually, if you’d ever heard me sing, this statement would induce horror, but the sentiment is there. Everything is ticking along nicely.

10 years ago, next year, we moved house and increased our mortgage. We reached a milestone this month on our mortgage this month which is definitely cause for celebration. When we had our first shared mortgage, we got a bottle of champers to celebrate each £10k reduction in our mortgage, so increasing it was not at all desirable. We’ve been lucky, we’ve been able to do that given what’s been happening the past 18 months.

My son has just had his first pay check from his first accountacy role, which is very exciting. He’s happy and planning for the future which brought back memories from when I started with my firm 25 years ago.

Back then, I could buy a house for £55,000. Honestly. It was a big reach on my salary at the time – I was buying the 3 bed-semi on my own. I had a small student loan I was also paying off, so I knew life should get easier after that initial shock – the first month in my house was the first I’d dipped into savings, it was only the £500 cashback on the mortgage that kept me afloat that first month and I put half of that back as savings for my heating and water bills for the winter. It was an EPC rating E house of 78m² and produces 4.5 tonnes of CO₂ a year! The money covered a third of the running costs in those days. For very little money, it could be got to a B and mostly through insulation.

My son is not in the same position. The financial crash in 2008 lead to the use of low interest rates to ensure 10000s of people weren’t left homeless through repossession. Which meant anyone in secure position could borrow money cheaply. This had the natural effect of driving up house prices: what should have made life cheaper for all had almost the opposite effect. If you could get in early enough and be ready to move quickly, houses could be bought with small impact.

Inflation is going to be changing that, hopefully. House stock may also become available due to the requirement that rental properties have an EPC certificate C. Given much of the stock is Victorian or Georgian, they have few opportunities to get that high without considerable investment so may come on the market at short notice. Hopefully.

Of course, my son in his trainee role is competing with people on a much higher salary than him. “If someone tells you life is easy [], they are trying to sell you something”.

Of course, I’m writing this after the first budget from Liz Truss’ government. Trickle down doesn’t work. How do I know this? We’re people who are supposed to trickle down and we don’t.

My house is a finite size: I don’t want to fill it with so much stuff I can’t move. I can’t eat so much that I put on weight because that would shorten my life. I work full time, I don’t have the time (or energy) to spend on leisure other than the basics of keeping fit and holidays. You’re supposed to invest 1%-4% into your home – replacing carpets, investing in renovatings, decorating, new appliances – each year. For us, that’s two – eight months’ taken home wages. For bigger projects, we save up, the kitchen is probably going to be 4 years’ worth of that budgeting and planning. We’ve replaced most of the appliances over the past two years to be more energy efficient.

On our list is the kitchen, the double glazing units, flooring, and of course, a replacement heating system. That’s the thing with houses – the running costs, outside of the gas, electric, and water, need to be considered on top of food and the mortgage.

If you do some of the maintenance your self, you can save a great deal. We spend a Saturday morning twice a year cleaning out the gutters. It’s easier to do with a couple or three people. We have one ladder and a platform so two people sit either end of the gutter and lift out the hedgehog and a third person hoses that brush down. We’re lucky in that we have a low roof line – a Georgian or Victorian house might need scafolding put up to do the same task – a “town house” definitely does. Safety first – no point in hurting yourself so you can’t work to save paying a professional.

Some jobs are budgeted on lifetimes. I spoke of replacing our UPVc windows, they are coming to the end of their life and being a cheap version, that’s been a little shorter than we’d be looking to achieve next time. Windows, carpets, vinyl flooring, bathroom fixtures, etc, all need to be replaced over time. Even the big appliances only have a 20 year life on them in general. Servicing of boilers, heating and cooling systems help extend lifetimes but lifeless objects do not self repair.

The trick is planning. Service things once a year, plan the big jobs for one a year on a rota. It lowers the cost and allows you to save for them rather than borrow. Fix the items you are not planning on replacing if required.

With carpets and flooring, we’ve started to do them on a room by room basis as our house approaches 20. When we decorate a room, we do the carpet. That means next time around the costs can be balanced over a longer time frame. We’re just gearing up to do the landing and stairs for example.

Taking our time has been rewarding. We know the rooms we do allowing us to make the right decisions and be delighted with the results.

Microwaves are often scorned in cook books and recipes but I’m a huge fan – I got my first one when I was 19 as a grown up, but I’d grown up with one in the house. My dad was keen, cooking meat, fish, and egg dishes (seperately, not combined) and his favourite dish was hollandaise sauce – it took seconds but made fish dishes complete.

I bought a fish kettle for the microwave when I was 25, which gave such good results that when it died (a tragic accident involving a short height and a very hard floor), I bought another. A trout steamed for 2 minutes and 30 seconds with boiled jersey potatoes, horse raddish sauce, peas and sweetcorn is a brilliant and low effort meal that tastes out of this world. A tiny glass of wine and it’s a meal worth setting the table for.

You’ve heard me wax lyrical about using the zapper for Sunday roasts and using the bones to make stock. I did this today and have enough stock for the next week or two of meals. Indeed the main oven isn’t in use today: a cooking apple and some flour, sugar, and butter will be made into a crumble for this evening’s meal in 12 minutes of cooking time. Served with ice-cream, it will be lovely, nutritious meal, for very little cost or effort.

It was great to see microwave ovens featured in this week’s Waitrose Food magazine. Wish they’d had more recipes though.

Sorry for the delay since my last post but it has been an exciting few weeks. Our son dropped out of university but made a good go at things in Newcastle but as his flat mates have moved away, he had no home so has returned.

We were not unhappy empty nesters but having an adult return and having found a job he starts tomorrow, be a sharer in the load is quite nice. If I’m missing anything, it’s having some quiet time, but I will adjust.

Is that interesting?

Cheeky! Probably not, but like I say things have been busy. We’ve just had our last Sunday lunch cooked on the halogen hob – from Wednesday, we’ll be induction.

It’s quite nerve racking – we’ve had some experience with a single plug in hob, but I do like a halogen for things like soups – the constant radiant heat does have it’s uses but while you can get a mixed fuel hob in terms of induction and gas, induction and halogen hobs are not an option.

It will make pasta cooking amazing. For our first meal I’m thinking of Pasta alla Genovese. Should be a dream on the new machine. Which means getting my arse in gear for making the pasta.

In my cooking adventures the past 2 years, the learning of making fresh pasta is an real eye opener. It is true that start off costs are much higher than buying a packet of dried pasta but of course, your costs go down each set you make. Pasta flour is roughly equivalent to a kilogram of dried pasta. Of course that’s ignoring the time, washing up, pasta maker, eggs, etc.

But of course, the idea is to try to reduce consumption. Electrical consumption. Hobs can never be 100% efficient because pots and pans radiate heat as they get hot. It’s why an efficient oven cooking many things at once or cooking cakes and puddings afterwards is a better way to cook in terms of making the most of your bought electricity or gas.

We’ve turned off our boiler this summer for a variety of reasons but mostly because our supply is being re-piped. New gas mains being replaced across the town and following the success last year of just running the hot water tank off the emersion heater, that’s what we’ve been doing instead.

As well as reducing our carbon footprint and reducing the load on the grid, it’s a lot cheaper. Reducing our water usage by using showers thanks to the drought has meant we’ve saved a great deal on our energy consumption.

Of course, it’s been an amazing year for solar generation – so that’s allowed us to reduce our billed electricity use while having plenty of hot water. While prices for gas have driven up the price of electricity, that cost has been off-set by having enough generated energy to cope.

Which beggars the question why this year has seen energy prices soar? The arguement is demand has gone up – air conditioners, fans, etc. But ever since COP 21, hasn’t the drive been to reduce demand? Do what you can?

During lockdown, I started to make fresh pasta.  Which is great from a taste and cooking point of view, but not great from a food waste point of view unless you make use of this handy tip.

Oh yeah, one word from the wise, eh?

Hey, enough of that.  Collect knowledge.

Several sites spoke of “freezing the pasta” instead of popping in the fridge during the “resting phase”.  This is great but when thawed, the pasta can go a little grey – which isn’t confidence inspiring and a similar thing happens in the fridge, even within the recommended three to four days.

Vacuum packing is the answer, or rather getting as much air out of the bag of pasta as humanly possible.

Now, this kind of device was in short supply during lockdown (great minds and the like), and we’re doing small scale.  How to get the effect without the cost, another gadget in the kitchen and having to buy tough plastic sheets to use in the device?

Pressure is the answer.  Atmospheric pressure, actually.  Have you ever noticed when you put an empty plastic bottle in the bath, it can actually crumple a little bit more, before the water starts to rush it?

We’re going to make use of this.  Put your item to be “packed” in a normal plastic *zip-lock bag and “roll the bottom up to the top” to push out as much air before putting in the water.  It doesn’t have to be perfect, it’s just make the process a little quicker.  Seal up most of the zip-lock hold tight.

* I have tried this with non-zip-lock plastic bags and it does work, it’s just a little bit fiddlier and harder to get an air tight seal.

Now, place into a bowl, jug or box of water and push the bag in as far as you can without covering the hole in the top of the zip-lock.  Ease any remaining gas out and close the zip-lock completely.  Dry off the excess water clinging to the bag and place in the freezer.  When you get your pasta out up to a month later, it will be as golden as the day you made it.

This process works well for any type of food for home freezing, especially in “frost free freezers”.

Vacuum packed storage without running any motors or buying special bags.

Today is likely to be one of the hottest days in the UK and at 11:28 the temperature in my lounge is around 24.8°C, and that’s with the south facing windows protected by closed curtains.  I know as while the boiler is off, if it’s not burning gas it’s not getting hot, the room thermostats are cheerfully reporting back the temperature and humity.  It’s warm and only going to get hotter this summer.

Our modern houses in the UK are foraciously protected from losing heat, but that can be used to your advantage at the moment.

Fight the urge to open windows during the day.

This may seem insane, but if it’s hotter outside than in, all you will be doing is letting in that hot air.

As you keep your curtains closed (that’s official advice from HM Gov), keep those south facing windows shut too.

Of course, that can feel like you’re sitting in the dark, but if you can, take the opportunity to cover up and take a book under a tree or beside a north facing wall?

Of course, the night is coming later this time of year, but as the temperature drops outside, throw open the shades and let in cooler air.

Keep hydrated.

Water is your friend, though make sure you keep your salt levels up too.  Sweating is how humans keep cool and during the summer, our water requirements can dramatically rise.

Try to siesta or at least not to do anything that can raise your body temperature.  In the summer, in the UK, peak heat is between 1pm and 4pm, this time of year.  If you cannot nap, try sitting down.  Raising your legs and feet can help reduce swelling.

Do not use electric fans if the temperature gets above 37°C in a dry room.  There are a few theories about this but the easiest comparison is the idea of a fan oven, the hot dry air passing over your body can make the situation worse!  If you are in a dry area, wetting your body (having a shower for example) before switching on the fan may help you work around this issue.

Why not just buy an air con unit and keep your cool?

Great idea, but as with the fan, they only work well if properly installed and I’m guessing that isn’t your situation right this minute.

If you do get a unit, ensure the vent is facing north – they work significantly better if you can do that.  If not, consider about when you want to use them.  In a bedroom, venting east when you are using to chill the room before sleep can get similar performance to venting north.

Turn off anything you are not using and I mean at the wall.  Anything with a fan or AC-DC converter will be dumping heat out into your room: now is not the time to watch a movie.

We’re not there yet, but some ideas.

If it’s yellow let it mellow was advice given during Cape Town’s draught a couple of years ago, preventing the waste of water by flushing away urine only toilet visits!

The government in South Africa also advised collectinig water during showers for flushing away solids.  Baths were banned but if you really must, one bath can be enjoyed more than once and the waste water used via buckets for toilet…

Don’t wash loads in the washing machine unless a full load.  Same with the dishwasher.  Can it wait for another few items?

Don’t water your lawn or ornamental beds – if it’s not food, it really should recover when the rains do come.  The car doesn’t need to be ultra shiny, just the external mirrors and the windows for visibility.

All great advice (not), I’m still hot!

Now is not the time to work from home.  Go into your office (many have aircon already in place) or if it’s the weekend, many shops have air con.  Sainsbury’s for example, is your friend.  As is cineworld.  Watching a movie in a windowless, air conditioned room is heaven – hence the summer blockbuster.  It makes your cinema subscription worth its weight in gold.

If you walk to those venues, remember your camelpak or bottle of water to keep cool and you’re hitting two goals at once – exercise and keeping your cool.  Enjoy the dry weather while it lasts.