construct or live in an eco-friendly house

I think that we are as close to this goal as we will be for a while. My main aims are as follows:

To keep all waste to a minimum
To cut energy consumption
To buy goods which do not harm the environment

We’ve ordered one for the garden and it should be arriving in the next 2 weeks. As the majority of our food waste is vegetable matter, this will cut down on our rubbish considerably. I am also going to create a space in the kitchen for our weekly re-cycle of glass, paper and tin.

This is now installed. It will be interested to see how our first bill comes in. We can then try to beat it next time!

An extra bonus today. I found out that our kitchen cabinets are FSC accredited. I was hoping that it might be the case.

We now have a new kitchen with most of the appliances rating A energy efficiency. We’ve always inherited other people’s kitchens before so it’s a real treat to have something that only we have used.

Happily, we have found someone who wants to take our old cooker on Freecycle and are hoping that they may consider the fridge as well. I’m not sure what we can do with the old kitchen cabinets as we had to smash up a bit to get them out (they dated from 1968!). Hopefully, the council can find something decent to do with the wood.

This is now installed. Eco-wise, it’s a tricky one because manufacturing UPVC ang glass is not green at all. However, the energy savings and relative longevity make sense, especially when you live in the middle of moorland! We haven’t been able to switch the heating off as it has been cold here, but we are planning to reduce the time that the radiators are on next week.

Hopefully, we should have all the drafts blocked up by the beginning of April which will help too.

Our new boiler is extremely energy efficient so that’s the first piece of green-ish equipment in place. Eventually I would like to consider installing a ground source heat pump, but it depends how long we intend to stay at this property. We tend not to use central heating very often anyway.

We’re going to make the renovation of our new house as green as possible. Some of the features that we will be looking at are:

Triple-glazing
Thick roof insulation
Cavity wall insulation
Composting
Recycling
Energy Efficient Appliances & Boilers
Recycled or FSC furniture
Water Meter
Local food
Low reliance on transport (I will be walking to work)

In some ways, our rental flat is much greener than our old house. We have hardly used the heating because of the improved insulation and expanses of glass, and we have less rooms to heat.

The downside is the lack of recycling and composting, but we hope to offset this by shopping down at the market and avoiding heavy packaging. Ideally, I’d like to be walking to work in spring/summer rather than using the scooter.

Still not going to sign this off yet though. I want to make the eventual house I own as self-sufficient as possible. That means high insulation to avoid central heating, solar panels for hot water, a composter bin or two, vegetable patch and fruit trees, recycling and low reliance on cars.

Global warming is now accelerating and we need to cut emissions by 70% by 2030. I don’t know if it’s possible to halt the process, but we must try. We are dinosaurs in the making at the moment.

We’re looking into solar technology, wind turbines – possibly to install within the next 12 months.