Our Earth Hour

I hope everyone who marked Earth Hour this evening enjoyed their hour without electric light. We turned off our lights and appliances between 8 and 9 pm and enjoyed a game of candlelight scrabble.

Keeping heating costs down

Since starting to reduce our fuel use for heating and hot water, this little Galileo thermometer has stood on our mantelpiece giving us a visual indication of the room temperature.

We have gas central heating and up until a few years ago I used to set the timer clock at the start of the winter and leave it on the same setting until spring. The heating would switch on for a couple of hours in the morning as we were getting up and then switch on again mid afternoon until bedtime. I think back then the thermostat was set for around 18-20C (64 -68F). Not any more!

When I started thinking about how much heating we actually need, I realised that the temperature of the house varies from day to day depending on the amount of sunlight, the number of people at home, the amount of cooking etc. The temperature we require also varies depending on what we are doing, the temperature needs to be higher if we are sitting reading or watching television than if we are cleaning, cooking or moving around.

So now we have reduced the thermostat setting to 15 C (59 F) and the heating comes on automatically for 45 minutes in the morning just before we get up and for three hours in the evening from 6-9pm. If the house cools too much outside of these times we push the "extra hour" button for some additional heating.

We use the Galileo thermometer as a quick guide to the temperature of the living room. Ours has four glass bulbs, calibrated at 16, 20, 24 and 28 C. If all the bulbs are at the top of the tube then the temperature is below 16 C (61 F) and if we are cold we add an hours heating. If the red bulb has dropped to the bottom of the tube (as in the first photo) then the room temperature is above 16 C and the rule is that if you are cold at this temperature then you should be wearing more clothes!

After several years of keeping to these temperatures we now all have a good supply of warm clothes (lots of layers) and find we are quite comfortable running the heating a lot less than we used to.

I have recently completed one of those carbon footprint calculators. I put in the figures for our 2007 gas usage and was pleased to find that per person we came out at well under a third of the average UK carbon dioxide emissions for heating and for electricity. Using this little thermometer to gauge whether the house really is cold or whether we should wear an extra sweater must have saved us a considerable amount of money and fuel - its certainly paid for itself.

Its too hot!

Today was my first day back at work after the break and after spending lots of time snuggled up at home in thick jumpers and cardigans the thing that struck me most was how hot the building was. Its always hot and I wear fewer layers of thinner clothing to compensate but after a couple of weeks living at much lower temperatures today I felt almost uncomfortably warm. I also noticed that my skin felt drier and more taut by the end of the day.


I don't know when workplaces started to be heated to high temperatures but I know of several buildings which are kept at such a high temperature that windows have to be opened to let the heat out! I don't know which came first, that buildings are hot so everyone wears short sleeved clothes in the winter or that fashion has dictated that light weight clothes are worn and so heating has to be raised accordingly.


There must be a whole generation growing up who wear similar clothes summer and winter and alter the temperature of their environment rather than change their clothing to suit the season. Of course its not just work places that are being heated to higher temperatures, the internal temperature of many homes has risen over the last few decades. An interesting statistic I found in the book "How We Can Save the Planet" by Mayer Hillman is that in the 1970s the average internal temperature of homes ( in the UK ) was 13C compared to an average of 19C today. That is a huge increase in just 30 years.


Perhaps now that energy prices are rising there will be a return to more comfortably heated buildings.

Quiet

The morning started very quietly today, there was very little wind and everything seemed still.

This is the first full week of the autumn term and so we are all settling back into our school-time routines. The quietness of the morning seemed to emphasise the return to a more structured time-table.

I took a detour on the way home from dropping off at school to pick a few blackberries. Just half a mile outside the village there was little sound, apart from the cawing of some birds pecking for grain amongst the stubble of the harvested fields and in the distance, across the fields, the sound of the children at the primary school that my children used to go to, playing outside before the start of school.

It was misty and slightly damp, it seemed as if I could almost feel the countryside beginning to slow down in preparation for winter.

I like quiet. When I am driving or when I am in the house by myself, I rarely listen to music or to the radio preferring to lose myself in my thoughts in silence.

As we have become more aware of our energy use and have not replaced appliances as they have worn out, I find that there are more moments when there is complete quiet in the house. No longer any whirring of a dishwasher or breadmaker, often the only thing switched on in the house is the fridge.

Until recently this must have been the level of noise in most homes. A couple of generations ago there may not have been a fridge.

Electricity came to our village in 1936. According to a local history booklet,

"The Wessex Electricity Company installed three lights and one 15 amp 3 pin plug free for each new customer."

-not much scope for a lot of electrical appliances then.

I wonder if the continual background noise we are subjected to, aircraft, traffic, etc, apart from the noise we generate ourselves, contributes to the general level of busy-ness and stress that many complain of today.

Perhaps in the future as we are forced to cut back on our energy use, amongst the many disadvantages will be the benefit of a quieter,calmer environment.

The photographs were taken during my blackberry picking walk this morning.

Energy use.

Just over a year ago I watched a television program about reducing energy usage at home. The program challenged a family with a house full of electrical appliances to live within the UK average for electricity and gas consumption and also to drive the average mileage for a week. I can't now remember the figure for the gas or the mileage but the electricity figure stuck in my brain - we should aim for less than 10kWh/day.

As I sat watching the program I remember thinking that we must be under the average, all our light bulbs were low energy ones and all our clothes were line dried, I was sure we were doing OK. We use gas for heating and hot water so our electricity is just for lighting ,cooking and electrical appliances.

I noted our readings for the month of January 2006 ....I was very wrong we used way more than average at 444kWh instead of 310kWh. Of course I made excuses for myself, we cook by electricity while a lot of people would be using gas, it was one of the darkest months of the year, there were four of us so we used several rooms at once etc etc. but I was determined to bring the figure down. Each month last year I noted the gas and electricity readings at the end of the month.

I have just compared the figures for the month of January with last years

January 2006 Electricity 444kWh
January 2007 Electricity 291 kWh

I am very pleased with the improvement. Changes we made in 2006 included
- we had to replace our fridge freezer during the year and although it we replaced with a very similar model I expect that it might be more efficient.
- we now turn everything off at the wall, previously the oven and video were left on so that the clock was still showing, not using much power but not necessary.
- we turned off our printer which we kept on as it was also our fax machine, we get faxes so rarely now that it hasn't been a problem.
- as much as possible I try to use the oven for a couple of things at the same time - timing bread baking or biscuit making to coincide with cooking the meal
- doing the majority of our washing at 40C and using the short wash option even when washing a full load. I was a bit dubious about this at first but the washing still seems to be clean. I have noticed that the combination of low temperature washing and no bleach soap powder does tend to lead to a stale smell in the machine but washing a load at 60C every one to two weeks seems to keep this at bay.

I was surprised that these changes made such a large difference but I suppose all the little things add up.

At the end of 2006 I had brought our daily electricity use for the complete year down to an average of 9.72kWh per day so I did just beat the UK average but I hope the figure will be even lower this coming year - I like a challenge.

Our gas usage ( heating and hot water) is also down this year from 230 units in January 2006 to 160 units in January 2007. I don't think I can take full credit for this though, we have increased our loft insulation and now tke showers more than baths but I think it must be mainly down to the very mild weather.