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What Would I Build Into My Dream Eco Home?

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  What Would I Build Into My Dream Eco Home? When people hear the words “dream eco home”, they may imagine a futuristic glass building covered in experimental technology, with automated walls, robotic furniture and a price tag that only a millionaire could contemplate. That is not the house I would build. My dream eco home would not be designed to impress visitors with how clever it looked. It would be designed to work. It would be warm in winter, cool enough in summer, inexpensive to run and comfortable during power cuts, droughts and periods of extreme weather. It would generate much of its own energy, store enough electricity to get through the night and make sensible use of rainwater. Most importantly, it would be built around technologies that already exist. Having lived with solar panels, battery storage, a heat pump, solar hot water and an increasingly electrified household, I have learnt that the best green technology is not necessarily the newest or most complicated. It is...
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The Best Green Upgrade Isn’t Always the Most Expensive

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  The Best Green Upgrade Isn’t Always the Most Expensive When we talk about making our homes greener, the conversation tends to move rapidly towards the expensive technology. Solar panels. Battery storage. Heat pumps. Triple glazing. External wall insulation. Electric cars. These can all be worthwhile investments. I have made several of them myself, and I certainly would not argue against ambitious improvements. However, concentrating entirely on the largest projects can create a misleading impression: that going green always requires thousands of pounds, a team of installers and several weeks of disruption. Sometimes the most effective next improvement costs less than a family meal. It might be a strip of draught-proofing around a door. It might be a timer that prevents something running unnecessarily. It might be insulation around a hot-water pipe or a reflective panel behind a radiator. The best green upgrade is not automatically the most technologically impressive one. It is th...
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My Home Generates Its Own Electricity: What I’ve Learnt Since Leaving Gas Behind

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  My Home Generates Its Own Electricity: What I’ve Learnt Since Leaving Gas Behind Solar panels, batteries, a heat pump and solar hot water have changed far more than our energy bills Our home no longer has a gas supply. Heating, cooking, washing, drying, lighting and almost everything else now depend on electricity. At first, that sounds like a risky decision. Electricity has traditionally been the expensive form of household energy, while gas has been seen as the practical choice for heating and cooking. However, that calculation changes when a large proportion of the electricity is generated on your own roof. Our home has 26 solar panels arranged in three arrays, approximately 50 kWh of battery storage, an air-source heat pump and a separate solar hot-water system. During spring, summer and early autumn, we can generate nearly all the electricity we need. On good days, we produce considerably more during daylight hours than the house is using. The batteries store some of that su...
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Are Water Butts Really Worth Having? Can We Store Enough Winter Rain to Survive a Hot, Dry Summer?

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  Are Water Butts Really Worth Having? Can We Store Enough Winter Rain to Survive a Hot, Dry Summer? We have a 250-litre water butt in the garden. In fact, we have two. At first glance, 250 litres sounds like a considerable amount of water. It is certainly heavy enough: when full, the water alone weighs approximately a quarter of a tonne. Yet during a hot, dry spell, watering only the plants that genuinely need protecting can empty one of our large water butts in less than a week. That raises an awkward question. Are water butts genuinely useful, or do they merely give us a few days of reassurance before running dry? And if summers such as 2026 become more common, could an ordinary household reasonably collect enough winter rainwater to keep its essential garden plants alive throughout a prolonged drought? The answer is: Yes, water butts are worth having—but a conventional 200- or 250-litre butt should be regarded as a short-term reserve, not a complete summer water supply. To beco...
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