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Win an energy monitor!

We’d like lots more people to save energy, so we’re giving away ten eco-eye mini energy monitors – the handy little gadgets we’ve been using on the Low Carbon Households project, which let you see just how much electricity your home is using, in real time.

Fitting them is easy (they clip on to your power supply cable near the fusebox) and the results are guaranteed to raise eyebrows from everyone in your household.

To be in with a chance of winning, simply take a look around the energy section of the site and leave a comment on any post in that category before 12 midday on 28 October (making sure you’ve given us a valid email address – which will not be published on the site).We will then enter you into our free prize draw.

Then we’ll select the winners at random – and if you’re one of them we’ll send you your very own eco-eye mini.

That’s it. No catch [see our full terms and conditions]. Although if you’d care to let us know how you get on with your new gadget, we’d love to hear from you.

Lightning image by

Flickr user idarknight

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Originally posted 2009-10-20 23:14:00. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

Guest blogger Paul Pritchard is UK head of corporate responsibility for MORE TH>N’s parent company, RSA. He agreed to give up something he loves as part of our energy-saving project, and share the highs and lows with us on Living. You can read the first instalment here – below is the second splash.

Over two weeks now and I am pretty confident I am going to make it.

I have had a couple of wavering moments – both at the weekend and prompted by Charlotte and Olivia taking baths themselves (I understand why food dieters are so keen to remove chocolate and other temptations from the house).

It did prompt a debate (more of a whine really) that it was probably OK to go into a bath that had already been used by someone else. After all, the aim of this is to save energy and the bath has already been run… however it was unarguably still a bath and I had promised I wouldn’t.

I have also started timing Olivia in the shower and wondering (with just a tiny hint of malice) how long in the (electric) shower corresponds to a (shallow, gas heated) bath – carbon wise. If I left the warm water in the bath it would surely mean I used less heating in the house (in winter anyway).

Does anybody know of a time plug for baths which lets the water out only when all the heat has gone into the room (say when the water cools to 20 degrees). Sounds like the sort of idea someone should have had while sitting in a bath.

A literary plug

I have also been trying to enlist support in the form of quotes from the great and the good. Not sure I have found anything quite suitable but I liked the following from William S Burroughs

‘I had not taken a bath in a year nor changed my clothes or removed them except to stick a needle every hour in the fibrous grey wooden flesh of heroin addiction. I did absolutely nothing.’

Haven’t quite got to that state yet at least but it fits my mental picture of the author.

Then I found something by Sylvia Plath – I cant say I know much about her but it’s probably summed up well by the source of the quote – thinkexist.com ‘(her) works are preoccupied with alienation, death and self-destruction.’

So what did she have to say on baths?

“There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them.”

Mmmm bit of a mismatch there, it’s just a bit mundane… but maybe it shows the power of the bath? Although there could have been fewer inspired words from the suicidal poet if she had bathed more frequently she might have just been a little bit happier?

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Originally posted 2009-10-23 13:13:00. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

As part of our series of energy challenges, guest blogger Lee Colgate agreed to give up central heating at a time when most of us are turning it on.

In his last post, Lee told us all about the hardships endured while avoiding frostbite on holiday in Spain. In this, his final post, he updates us on central-heating-free life in November, back in Blighty.

Well, it’s finally over. Just in time and thank god. We take so many things for granted these days, but still I underestimated what it would be like to actually live without central heating at the back end of the year in the UK.

As you may have read, we ran away to Spain for a couple of weeks, a little way into the challenge. Some very clever editing by the talented Living team (I ranted about orange women wearing yellow on cut price airlines; I don’t know why; wait, yes I do – read on) on that particular report managed to conceal the fact that I was slightly the worse for alcoholic wear at the time of writing. It won’t have hidden in any way whatsoever that I was feeling deeply smug and having a thoroughly lovely time.

Post-smugness reality

To fulfil the challenge and make the whole thing worthwhile, we committed to leaving the heating off into November on our return. To be honest, the weather at the beginning of the challenge really wasn’t that severe, but it had all taken a turn for the worse by the time we got back. And, you know, it was actually not all that nice with the heating off. Who’d have thought?

<!– The two of us didn’t actually suffer all that much. I bought Colin a pair of the rather fetching socks I was sporting in the photo that accompanied my first post. In a different colour, obviously. It’s not like we have matching anoraks or anything like that. We wore rather more than is customary when indoors (or indeed outdoors in, ooooh, let’s say Finland) and added more if it got colder.

But our poor cat had a slightly harder time of it. Our flooring, apart from the bedroom and living room, is basically a linoleum bonanza, the sofa is leather and the…no, I can’t think of another word right now…poofs are (deep breath) ‘leather-look’. Not at all cosy for the poor little mite, who consequently followed us round like a puppy and launched himself into the nearest lap as soon as we sat down. Bless ‘im.

After a few days of our being back, present in the house, not dead (I’m fairly certain corpses don’t do much to raise the ambient temperature, at least not for long) and doing the usual things like cooking, ironing, showering, etc. the temperature indoors actually settled down to a fairly constant 19 degrees.

What never went away, though, and this was the most uncomfortable thing, was the damp. Without any strong localised heat sources getting much hotter than the ambient temperature it was almost, and allow me to exaggerate here for a minute to get my point across, like living in a cave. It’s not that there was damp running down the walls, it was just very uncomfortable and you could almost imagine things were going mouldy all around you. Given that we don’t have a tumble dryer, there was the added complication with laundry that almost led to things going mouldy all over you. But we don’t need to dwell on that. Why on Earth the TV has to go on about pessaries while I’m eating every evening I’ll never understand, so I’ll spare you.

Turning up the heat

We have turned the heating back on now, with the kind permission of our Living masters, and hallelujah! I’m just getting over a rather nasty cold I picked up while doing a half marathon in the weather-warning weather a couple of weekends back and I’m sure the lack of heating in the house didn’t help much in the early part of my recovery. It’s only set to 20, as opposed to our usual 21. I guess that’s partly because we got along OK(ish) for a while at 19 and partly because we’ve got so used to wearing outdoor clothes indoors that we just don’t need it any higher. Walking on the carpets no longer feels like walking on a bed of moss. Our clothes are dry again. And the cat’s happy.

Paperless quarterly billing means we won’t really have an idea of any savings we might have made until some time in December, but if it’s at all interesting when we see the results, I’ll be certain to come back and comment here to let you know.

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Originally posted 2009-11-18 09:19:00. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

There are plenty of car manufacturers boasting about the eco-credentials of their latest models these days. But I came across one this weekend which genuinely impressed me.

The Fiat 500 is a funky little town car – it echoes the cute style queues of earlier Fiats with the same number back in the 1960s and early 70s.

All well and good. It’s certainly a nice looking creation.

But what I think is a genuinely smart innovation is the eco:Drive system that comes with latest models.

eco:Drive helps you understand the impact of your driving style on fuel consumption and CO2 emissions. You just plug a USB stick into the port on the car’s dashboard and eco:Drive records detailed information about the vehicle and how it is driven onto the USB stick.

Then download the free eco:Drive software from Fiat’s website and install on your computer. Plug the USB stick into your computer and the eco:Drive software analyses the data on it and converts it into useful facts and figures. It gives you your ‘eco:Drive index’ – a mark out of 100 showing how efficiently you’ve been driving based on your acceleration, deceleration, gear changes and speed. It then makes recommendations about how you can improve the efficiency of your driving.

It even provides information on how much money this could save you. And for the seriously obsessive it lets you set yourself targets and see if you can meet them.

Fiat suggests you could reduce your fuel bills by up to 15%. That’s a big saving!

The software will evolve and improve with feedback from users – automatically updating as time goes on too.

A genuinely brilliant idea. My one criticism is that it feels very blokey indeed – even a tad nerdy. At the risk of sounding sexist, I wonder if girl-drivers – who tend to be the more eco-friendly of the sexes when it comes to driving and are probably more likely to buy a small funky car like the Fiat 500 – would ever bother to use it?

IMAGES: by Flickr user

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Originally posted 2008-12-02 04:50:00. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

So, a quick flick through my past posts reveals that, according to me, roofs are rubbish, rain is rubbish, festivals are rubbish, digital cameras are rubbish, mobile phones are rubbish, broadband is rubbish, cars are rubbish and even rubbish is rubbish.

In short, modern life is rubbish, except when it comes to fridges. Fridges are ace.

I won’t bore you again with the trials of living without one for a month, but my energy-saving challenge was made easier by the fact that the old fridge broke at the start. I’d had half a mind to replace it, though, ever since I hooked it up to one of our power meters and discovered that it was using an incredible 15 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity each week: enough to run my kettle for more than seven hours.

That had never seemed right to me, and I wanted to see whether a new replacement would really be that much better, or whether makers’ energy-saving claims are all just hot air.

Before I could find out, the old item had to be carried down the three flights of stairs from my flat, and a newer, unintentionally bigger version manhandled back up. This required the street-level removal of all of the replacement’s packaging, the signing of a damage disclaimer, and an almost superhuman effort not to upbraid the delivery man for his insistence that it wasn’t going to fit until it already had.

If the first thing I learned from my new fridge-freezer was that it is chief among the things you don’t want to carry into a third-floor flat, the second was that modern examples are very, very good. After a quick wipe down, I hooked it up to the energy meter and set about loading it up with all the things I’d missed so much in my fridgeless month. Chiefly beer.

Fridge over troubled water

After the first day – much of which would have been spent working hard to get everything down to temperature – it had used 1.45kWh, which seemed a promising start. And despite extra demands from freezing bucket-loads of ice cubes, and left-over chilli and pasta sauces, at the end of the first week the meter was showing just 6.34kWh – less than half the electricity my old fridge would have used in the same time.

In the second week it only got through 5.05kWh, while in week three consumption was down to just 4.89kWh – less than a third that of my old fridge.

I’m impressed, frankly. New Fridge is bigger, colder and better than the old one, and yet it uses just a third of the power: It’s likely to save me more than ?

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• In from the cold

Originally posted 2009-11-05 05:22:00. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

Some snippets of conversation from our house late yesterday evening:

“Look what happens when I switch on the kettle!”

“Right, I’m going to try turning off the lights in the kitchen!”

“Oh my god, did you see what just happened when the washing machine came on?”

I know – it’s sad but true. With less time and energy than is contained in one kilowatt-hour, we had transformed into electricity measurement geeks.

I’d just got back from the launch of the Low Carbon Households project, which is being run by Lewes District Council. Fellow Living contibutor Jeremy and I will be monitoring our home electricity use for a year, as will more than 30 other households in the district.

An eco-eye out

We’ve all been equipped with an eco-eye mini, a neat little device that reveals what’s going on behind the scenes.

The idea of monitoring energy use may not push everyone’s button, but when you get one of these bad boys clamped onto your supply you can’t help but get involved with it.

It’s very simple. You plug the sensor into the mains or insert a couple of batteries (they came supplied with proper ones, Duracell AAs – when does that ever happen?). Then you lock it on to one of the wires going into your fusebox – no cutting or rewiring required.

Next you put batteries in the separate monitor screen, and set the time and the cost per unit of electricity (according to your last bill). And that’s it. You’re recording real-time use of power in kilowatt-hours, and can see how much your current use would cost over a week, month or year – as well as the likely CO2 emissions.

Within seconds, you’re wondering why the level is so low, or so high, and why it’s changing all the time. It’s a bit of a jolt.

We’d been told at the meeting by Climate South East’s Matthew Bird that the kettle would be a shocker, and he was right. Making a cup of tea sent our low, mid-evening reading shooting up five-fold. You quickly realise why the National Grid struggles to cope with the surge in demand during half-time in cup finals.

And…?

So, this is all very well. But will it actually change the way we behave?

Well, the early signs are: yes. Our kettle doesn’t have a water gauge, so it’s easy to overfill. I did exactly that this morning, and felt so unable to waste the hot water that I made a full cafetiere (which could be reheated later, for rather less power, in the microwave) and a Thermos flask of tea for my train journey later in the day.

I’ve eased off the monitor-watching a bit this evening, but it’s sat there, watching, waiting, and ready to reveal the true energy impact the next time we hoover, or dry the kids’ hair or leave the TV on standby.

And as they say, knowledge is power.

Anyone else out there got an eco-eye mini or similar smart meter plugged in to their home? Let us know your experiences of whether it’s helping you to save energy.

IMAGES by me

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Originally posted 2009-03-04 11:08:00. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

So, Simon’s been living without his fridge, Tamsin H has given up her washing machine and Lee, poor soul, is going without central heating until mid-November. Brrrr. Not wanting to miss out, I’ve been wracking my brain to see what energy saving challenge I could come up with. Ideally it should be one that seems impressive, without imposing any actual hardship.

Inspiration came while checking out the 10:10 climate change campaign website which challenges all UK households to cut 10% of their energy emissions in 2010. They’ve produced a printable list of ten simple things everyone can do to cut their emissions, and number six was making sure you never buy anything new. They reason that less stuff made equals less emissions and therefore less climate damage.

It struck a seriously big chord. My home is crammed to the rafters with miscellaneous stuff, from boxes of make-up I’ve never used to mountains of clothes I’ve never worn. And sadly, with the ease of Amazon’s pesky one-click ordering, more of this stuff just seems to appear each week. I knew things were getting out of hand when I started to know the delivery drivers by name.

It had to be new

Children’s toys and books are the worst. Not wanting my 17-month-old to miss out, I feel like I’m depriving him if I don’t buy something brand new and made of lurid plastic at least once a month. And in my bid to build up a nice library of books for the little fellow I’ve realised that not once has it crossed my mind that I may be able to buy them second hand.

Now obviously, with so much stuff hanging around, the sensible thing would be to just stop buying things until I’ve used up everything I own. But with a toddler around there’s always things you need – they grow out of clothes and shoes so quickly (every ten weeks, according to the Clark’s saleswoman).

So I’ve decided that my energy saving challenge will be to buy absolutely nothing new in the next two months (apart from food and groceries, I’m not up for scavenging through bins quite yet). Instead, I’ll be finding new outfits out of the clothes I already own, using up make-up and toiletries and if I do need to buy something, it’ll have to be second hand.

Weight: lifting

Weirdly, now I’ve made the decision, I feel so much lighter, as if the weight of consumerism has been lifted off my shoulders. Imagine! No longer do I have to fret about having the latest fashions, or have to trawl the high street. I hate shopping anyway, so having my options narrowed to just a few musty second hand shops or eBay is a bonus. And thanks to Jo-ann’s excellent posts on second hand clothes shopping and ethical fashion, I needn’t miss out.

Anyway, I’ve been doing my challenge for a couple of weeks, and it’s proving slightly more tricky than I first thought. The hardest part has been trying to find a birthday present for my sister-in-law. She’s a cash-strapped mum like me, and asked for some perfume which she really needs.

Even though a request on Twitter brought back some wonderfully creative solutions (like buying vintage perfume bottles which she could fill with whatever scent she likes) at the end of the day, she really just wanted some perfume. So sadly, that’s what she got (although technically I got my husband to buy it for her, so wasn’t strictly a fail).

Anyway, find out how I get on in my next post. I need to buy my son a few ‘new’ jumpers. Any suggestions?

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Originally posted 2009-10-26 20:51:00. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

Guest blogger Paul Pritchard is UK head of corporate responsibility for MORE TH>N’s parent company, RSA. He agreed to give up his beloved baths as part of our energy-saving project, and share the highs and lows with us on Living.

Having steeped himself in literature for the comfort denied him by the shower, his month of abstinence is now at an end. But has it changed his habits for good?

It’s over. I managed to complete my month.

OK, so it doesn’t really compare to a month without a fridge but I reckon it has taught me something and I will definitely change my behaviour going forward. It ended with a bit of a whimper as I had pretty much got used to the occasional shower routine, but still really nice to know I can now enjoy the odd indulgence again. I don’t think I will be doing the five-minute midweek baths though – a quick shower serves equally well (I never thought I woud say that. Also I do actually wonder if maybe we wash and shower too much – as a kid I used to wash my hands and face before I went to bed and that seemed fine.)

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Originally posted 2009-11-10 08:15:00. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

British engineer Richard Jenkins has become the fastest driver ever to use only the power of the wind – smashing the previous record in the process.

And the all-British Greenbird carbon fibre land yacht needed winds of only 30mph to reach its top speed of 126.1mph, besting previous record holder, American Bob Schumacher by almost 10mph.

The record-breaking run took place at the dried-out bed of Lake Ivanpah on the border between Nevada and California.

Originally the Windjet project, the craft can operate on both dry land and on frozen water – and is designed to break the record on both surfaces.

It was renamed to capture the spirit of the Bluebird – the legendary series of craft headed by Donald Campbell in the 1950s and 60s before his death at more than 300mph on Coniston Water.

The Ecotricity–sponsored Greenbird is billed as being “part aeroplane, part sailboat, part Formula One car” and it used some clever, but relatively simple principles to speed itself to glory.

Power is produced in a similar way to how an aeroplane generates ‘lift’ to climb in the air; using wind moving over the ’sail’, which is essentially a vertical wing.

?

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Originally posted 2009-04-01 17:32:00. Republished by Blog Post Promoter