Life without baths: two weeks into Paul’s energy saving challenge

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 – thinkex​ist​.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

Tags: Flickr, Image Galleries, Outdoors, Photo sharing, Recreation, Sylvia Plath, Urban Exploration, William Burroughs
Posted in Energy, Home | View Comments

Discovering how to balance energy efficiency and style in a Victorian house

In part two of his invest­ig­a­tions into how to make his Vic­torian ter­raced house more energy-​​efficient without com­prom­ising its fea­tures and char­ac­ter, our guest blog­ger, Simon Mustoe, finds a few sur­prises cour­tesy of the Energy Saving Trust (EST).

Last week, I went public with a homeowner dilemma: I whole­heartedly sub­scribe to energy-​​saving prin­ciples but am not really pre­pared to do any­thing that com­prom­ises the char­ac­ter of my Victorian-​​era house. I lit­er­ally couldn’t bear to watch someone rip­ping out the ori­ginal wooden sash win­dows in favour of double-​​glazing, or cov­er­ing up a beau­ti­ful ori­ginal wooden floor with carpet. In fact, I think I had uncon­sciously decided that there really wasn’t much I could do to con­serve energy in a house that was built over 100 years too early to bene­fit from environmentally-​​conscious build­ing prin­ciples. Appar­ently, the first step in beat­ing a prob­lem is to admit that one exists, so I’m facing up to my pre­vi­ous assump­tion and put­ting it to the test.

Given that the Energy Saving Trust is host­ing Energy Saving Week I made it my first port of call. A little dig­ging around its web­site led me to a list of ways to insu­late the walls and floors of a house. I was pleas­antly sur­prised by what I found. For instance, I hadn’t real­ised that I could actu­ally insu­late solid walls, a fea­ture typ­ical of Victorian-​​era houses. Appar­ently I can – both inside and out, although doing both would count as excess­ive. What’s more, each option would save in the region of two tonnes of carbon diox­ide (CO2) emis­sions each year, which equates to around ?

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Ori­gin­ally posted 2009-​​10-​​22 01:51:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

Tags: Energy, Energy conservation, Energy Saving Trust, Environment, Insulated glazing, Sash window, Terraced house, Victorian architecture
Posted in Home | View Comments