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The Autumn Garden Jobs That Help Wildlife Rather Than Destroy Its Winter Home

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  The Autumn Garden Jobs That Help Wildlife Rather Than Destroy Its Winter Home The urge to make the garden beautifully tidy this autumn may be exactly what its wildlife doesn't need. There is something enormously satisfying about an autumn tidy-up. The flowers have gone over. Leaves are falling. Stems are turning brown. The lawn looks untidy around the edges. So out come the secateurs, rake and garden-waste bags. Cut everything down. Rake everything up. Remove every fallen branch. Sweep the patio. Clear the borders. By the end of the weekend the garden looks immaculate. Unfortunately, to a surprising amount of wildlife, we may just have demolished the neighbourhood. What looks to us like a dead flower stem may be somewhere an insect spends the winter. What looks like a pile of unwanted leaves may be shelter. What looks like an old log may actually be a miniature ecosystem. And those brown seed heads we are so tempted to cut off may become a winter food supply for birds. Perhaps on...
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Should You Finally Buy a Heat Pump? What Has Changed?

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  Should You Finally Buy a Heat Pump? What Has Changed? The question is no longer simply “Do heat pumps work?” — it is “Will one work well in my house?” For several years, discussion about heat pumps has tended to become polarised remarkably quickly. One side says they are the obvious future of domestic heating. The other says they are expensive, noisy, incapable of heating older houses and certain to produce enormous electricity bills. Neither position is particularly helpful if you are standing in your own kitchen wondering whether to replace a perfectly conventional gas boiler. By 2026, we really ought to have moved beyond asking whether heat pumps work. They clearly do. The more useful questions are: How much heat does your particular house actually lose? Can your radiators deliver enough heat at a lower water temperature? What electricity tariff will you use? What heating system are you replacing? How good is the proposed design? What will the installation cost after grants? A...
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Is Bottled Water Really Safer Than Tap Water in Britain?

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  Is Bottled Water Really Safer Than Tap Water in Britain? We happily pay hundreds of times more for water in a plastic bottle — but are we actually buying something safer? Walk into almost any supermarket, railway station or petrol station and there will be shelves or refrigerators filled with bottled water. Some comes from mountains. Some comes from springs. Some carries images of pristine countryside. Some is sold as mineral water. Some simply describes itself as drinking water. The underlying message is remarkably powerful: This is pure water. And, perhaps subconsciously: This must therefore be safer than the water coming from the kitchen tap. But is it? In Britain, for most people supplied by the public mains system, the answer is rather different from the impression created by rows of beautifully marketed bottles. Tap water is not an untested commodity pumped from a reservoir and sent directly into our homes. It is treated, continuously monitored and subject to strict legal s...
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