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Don’t Pour Drinking Water on Your Garden: Use It Twice

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  Don’t Pour Drinking Water on Your Garden: Use It Twice Before water disappears down the plughole, ask whether you’ve really finished with it. We have become rather accustomed to using perfectly good drinking-quality water once. We turn on the shower and let several litres run away while waiting for it to become warm. We rinse vegetables under the tap and send the water straight down the drain. Half-finished glasses of water are tipped into the sink. An aquarium is cleaned and a bucketful of nutrient-containing water disappears down a waste pipe. Then, a few hours later, we go outside, turn on another tap and use fresh drinking water to water the garden. There is something slightly absurd about that. I am already a great believer in collecting rainwater. I have a 250-litre water butt, yet during prolonged hot weather even that apparently large quantity can disappear remarkably quickly. Rainwater harvesting is certainly part of the answer, but perhaps there is another reservo...
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Your Fridge and Freezer Are Working Harder This Summer — Help Them

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  Your Fridge and Freezer Are Working Harder This Summer — Help Them One appliance in your kitchen is running 24 hours a day — and hot weather makes its job even harder. When people think about reducing household energy use, they usually look at the obvious things: heating, hot water, washing machines, tumble dryers and perhaps air conditioning. The refrigerator is rather different. You never switch it off. It sits quietly in the corner of the kitchen, hour after hour, day after day, attempting to maintain a little artificial winter while the rest of the house gets hotter. And during a hot summer, that becomes increasingly difficult. If the kitchen reaches 28°C or 30°C, the refrigerator is still trying to keep milk, cheese and vegetables at perhaps 4°C, while the freezer next door may be trying to maintain -18°C. That means moving heat across a temperature difference of nearly 50°C. So perhaps, before worrying about buying another energy-saving gadget, it is worth spending...
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Could You Make One Room in Your House 5°C Cooler Without Air Conditioning?

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  Could You Make One Room in Your House 5°C Cooler Without Air Conditioning? Before buying an air conditioner, try treating your house like a science experiment. During a hot spell, it is very easy to assume that an uncomfortably warm room simply needs mechanical cooling. Buy an air conditioner. Plug it in. Problem solved. Except that air conditioning uses electricity, costs money to buy, adds another appliance to maintain and, in some houses, may simply be compensating for a much more basic problem: we are allowing too much heat into the room in the first place. What if, instead, we chose one room in the house and experimented with it? Could we make it 1°C cooler? Could we manage 3°C? And could a particularly badly overheating room actually be kept 5°C cooler at its hottest point simply by changing how we manage sunlight, windows, ventilation and internal sources of heat? The answer will vary enormously between houses. A north-facing downstairs room is very different fr...
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