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What Costs Nothing but Could Save You a Fortune? — The Zero-Pound Green Home Challenge

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  What Costs Nothing but Could Save You a Fortune? — The Zero-Pound Green Home Challenge Before spending £10,000 making your home greener, how much could you save by spending absolutely nothing? When people talk about making a home greener, the conversation can become expensive remarkably quickly. Solar panels. Batteries. Heat pumps. New windows. External insulation. Smart heating controls. A new electric car. All of these may have a place. Some can make an enormous difference. But there is a much less glamorous question worth asking first: Are we already using the energy we pay for as intelligently as we can? That leads to my Zero-Pound Green Home Challenge . The rules are simple. You are allowed to change settings, habits, timings and the way you use things already in your home. You are not allowed to buy anything. Not even a £5 gadget. The challenge is to see how much energy — and money — you can save without spending a penny. Start With the Biggest Energy User: Heating In most ...
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Could Your Garden Feed Birds All Winter Without Buying Bird Food?

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  Could Your Garden Feed Birds All Winter Without Buying Bird Food? The best bird feeder in your garden might be a plant you didn't cut down in September. As autumn arrives, many of us perform almost the same gardening ritual. We cut down the dead flowers. We remove old stems. We rake up leaves. We prune shrubs. We tidy borders and perhaps take several bags of garden waste away. Then, only a few weeks later, winter arrives and we go out and buy bags of bird seed, sunflower hearts, peanuts and fat balls. There is something slightly strange about that sequence. We remove much of the natural food from the garden — and then pay money to put food back into it. I am certainly not suggesting that people should never feed garden birds. Supplementary feeding can be extremely useful, particularly during prolonged cold weather. But perhaps we should start thinking about the garden itself as a bird feeder. A sunflower head can hold hundreds of seeds. A hawthorn hedge can carry berries. Ivy pro...
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Don’t Kill the Spider: The Wildlife Sharing Your Home Is More Useful Than You Think

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  Don’t Kill the Spider: The Wildlife Sharing Your Home Is More Useful Than You Think “That enormous spider in the bath isn’t plotting against you — and it may be doing more pest control than you realise.” There is something rather revealing about our attitude to wildlife. We are happy to put up bird feeders. We build insect hotels. We plant flowers for bees, leave autumn leaves for hedgehogs and talk enthusiastically about biodiversity. Then a large spider runs across the sitting-room carpet at 10 o’clock at night. Suddenly, our commitment to wildlife conservation can become rather less enthusiastic. Yet perhaps going green should not stop at the back door . Our homes are not sealed biological bubbles. They sit within an ecosystem, and throughout the year — particularly during autumn — various small creatures find their way inside. Some are permanent residents, some have wandered in accidentally and some are simply looking for somewhere sheltered to survive the winter. Bef...
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Is It Cheaper to Heat the Person Rather Than the Whole House?

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  Is It Cheaper to Heat the Person Rather Than the Whole House? If one person is sitting in one chair, do we really need to heat twelve thousand litres of air around them? For many households, this is no longer an academic question. As autumn turns into winter, people begin looking at the thermostat and wondering what the next energy bill will bring. Some respond by heating the whole house less. Others retreat into one or two rooms, close doors, turn down radiators elsewhere and put on another jumper. I see this very close to home. My mother is 95. She worries about the cost of heating an entire house when she spends most of her time in only a few rooms. She turns off radiators in rooms she does not use, closes the doors and keeps the rooms she does occupy at around 18°C. In fact, that basic idea is very close to current Age UK advice: keep the rooms you use most at a steady, comfortable temperature—around 18°C is suggested—while unused rooms can have their radiators turned o...
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