Zero waste week

I'm way behind with posts; there is so much I wanted to share on this blog, but things are hectic at the moment, so it's just a quicky. I'll get chance to catch up soon.

Our challenge for this month is to take part in Gloucestershire's zero waste week. This is the one area where we feel confident. Our weekly waste is around 100 grams per week and we managed to go 6 months without putting our bin out, so we're ok with this one.
Rubbish is our thing LOL!

As for the rest of the challenges throughout the year, well, we'll see. They could prove to be a bit of a, erm, challenge :D

Results of our Home Energy Report

I mentioned in another post that I had taken the EST's Home Energy check. It's a free online tool for checking the energy efficiency of your home.

The results of our report showed that we could cut our annual fuel bills by around £270 a year (around 34% of our annual expenditure), and we could reduce our carbon footprint by a further 0.4 tonnes. I wasn't so convinced. Our home was rated as an 'F' for energy efficiency and the report showed that the potential of bettering this would only put us at an 'E'. Is it time to move house?!?!

According to this report, our estimated running costs are £1483 and carbon dioxide emissions are 2.3 tonnes per year. To be honest, I don't know how this compares to the 'average' household in the UK at all, so I'm not sure how useful these figures are.
We should, therefore be able to reduce these running costs to £1213 and our CO2 emissions to 1.9 by following the advice set out in the report.

There were two suggested improvements; one which we are considering anyway and the other which seems irrelevant.

The first is to do with our radiators and boiler. The report reads "To ensure that you have a good standard of heating control and improve the efficiency of your system ensure that your heating system has a programmer, room and hot water cylinder thermostats and that thermostatic radiator valves are fitted to radiators. Heating and hot water use accounts for 84% of household energy use."

Well, we run a 12kw wood burner which heats 7 radiators. We obviously can't put a programmer on it - it's either in or out, but we keep it controlled as much as we can and it's damped down at night. The hot water cylinder already has a thermostat, kept at below 60 and we don't have thermostatic radiator valves fitted to the radiators - I'll have to ask DH about this; can we run them with a woodburner? I have to say, that is rare for our radiators to get hot to the touch; they are usually just warm.

So I'm not sure how helpful that advice was.

The second suggestion was double glazing, which, as I've mentioned previously, we are considering. We'd both put it in tomorrow is the fairy of good fortune waved her magic wand upon our bank account, but for now we're saving hard and are going to get a couple more quotes before considering a DIY job.

After the more major suggestions, the report talked about CFLs. We have those in some lights, not in all - we have dimmer switches in the lounge and a few spotlights throughout the house. I don't really like CFLs to be honest, I've never yet found one with a decent colour spectrum. DH, however, is in the process of building his own LEDs. Buying them proves prohibitive due to cost. At the moment we have a prototype set in the kitchen running off a car battery.

What is interesting is that the LEDs are too blue and the CFLs are too yellow, but we are running both of them in the kitchen and it's a really good colour - go figure!

The other advise was not to run the immersion during peak hours (we're not on economy seven, so that's irrelevant), to buy energy saving appliances (I don't need to upgrade anything) and to ensure the immersion thermostat is at 60 (ours is).

So, there wasn't anything amazing in there, and I'm not impressed that even with putting their suggestions in place, the potential energy efficiency for our home is only an 'E'!

There are two other energy efficient steps we are looking at:

1- Install tankless water heaters for the bath and kitchen sink (which means we will no longer need to use an immersion heater)
2- Install an EcoDan air source heat pump; which works a bit like a fridge in reverse.

We're going to look into grants for doing some work - more on that as I find things out and we're also applying for the Warmfront grant to see if we can get a more efficient wood burner. We currently burn over 6 tonnes of wood per annum, which seems such a lot. Our last load of oak cost £65 and lasted us three weeks. Eek!

Wrap up warm for winter

Once a month we receive a postcard from Carbon Watchers about an area to focus on for that month.

In the middle of December we received a card telling us to 'wrap up warm for winter'. It included tips about cavity wall insulation, loft insulation etc.

Last year we had cavity wall insulation put in. Our loft has been converted into our bedroom, so now we have a tiny loft space. We do have SOME insulation in there, but you won't catch me going up there - places full of spiders and cobwebs are not my favourite places to hang out. I'll ask DH how much is up there when he puts the Christmas decorations away.

During December, we did a couple of measures of our own. Firstly we draught proofed the porch door and I can't begin to tell you what a massive difference this has made to the warmth of our house! We'd been playing with the idea of hanging a thick curtain behind it for months, but thought it would get in the way of the stairs and be inconvenient. When the cavity wall insulation was done, the people gave us enough draft proofing to do one door, so we actually used it and I wish we did it months ago!

In addition, we had some polystyrene sheets in the garage. DH crawled up the side of our bedroom from the loft and filled it with these sheets. For the past week, the temperature has been below freezing every night and we have not needed to put the electric convector heater on in the room before going to bed. This is a HUGE difference, as we were having to put the heater on for 15 minutes before we could bear to go up to bed!

Another goal for us will be to draught proof the back door and we've also had a couple of quote for double glazing, which we may consider putting in next Summer if we can save up enough money.

We have blankets lining the curtains in our conservatory, which we close at dusk. Unfortunately, the curtains are rotting due to UV damage, so we might need to do a repair job later in the year.

I did the Home and Energy check on the EST site and I'll write more about that in another post. I was not very impressed with our results I have to admit!

First Electricity meter reading

On the first day of the month, the carbon watchers are supposed to take a meter reading and send it in to Severn Wyre Agency. I meant to do it first thing this morning, but I've only just remembered!

Never mind; at least I have the right day. Our reading is 96661. Throughout the year we're going to be logging this to see if we can reduce the amount of electricity we use.

The village we live in does not have mains gas, so that reading is not applicable for us. In addition, we run a woodburner, so our winter electricity usage shouldn't be too much more than our summer usage, although we do have a couple of electric convector heaters as a back up heat source and I do tend to cook more meals in the winter.