Cavity wall insulation

The neighbours had their cavity walls filled this week - you can barely see where the insulation way "injected" through the masonry, so it's about time I had it done on our house too.

Some friends nearby have also had it done, and they swear that they felt the difference almost immediately, but had to have the installers round again when they found that they had a terrible condensation problem in the loft where the insulation had overflowed and prevented air from getting into teh roofspace and circulating.

Anyway, in the New Year it is one of the things at the top of the "to-do" list.

Enrico

Very good november

Just looked at our energy usage in november, and compared to previous years it is very good (I've updated the graphs - click on the images on the right on this page).

I know november has been quite mild, but our gas usage has been half of what it has been in previous years - turning the thermostat down by a couple of degrees has obviously made a big difference.

Enrico

My butt on guardian.co.uk

Was browsing the interwebs on my iPhone the other day and I happended on a picture of my butt on the guardian.co.uk website (on their "Green Living" blog).

It is safe to click on the link, as the butt in question is of the water storing variety....

The water-butt thing is something I have been doing for a while, I have half a dozen of them linked up with plans for more. I even started a group on Flickr a while ago as an experiment to see whether you could get poeple posting pictures of things as dull as water butts, and they did.

Enrico

Measuring....

I bought a energy measurement thingy today which tells you how much electricity is being used by stuff that's plugged in to it.

So you can expect me to be terribly boring and tell you how much electricity each of my TVs/PCs/gadgets etc. use........ Ah, the fun I have.......

Enrico

Huzzah!

Just noticed today that my company's new travel booking system puts the CO2 impact of any flight on the itinerary sheet. Makes it staggeringly easy to measure impact over the year.

Don't know yet whether it is a simple kg per mile calculation, or if it is more sophisticated and takes into account the type of aircraft etc., but very welcome in any case.

Enrico

High Impact Week

This week I'm having a high-impact week, unfortunately, by flying to Korea (I have to say that Incheon Airport in Seoul has the best arrivals experience that I have ever seen - immigration, baggage reclaim and customs were a breeze).

All this reminds me that I need to go back through my diary this year and to calculate my airmiles and hence impact due to air travel.

Even though all my air travel is work-related I still want to measure it and reduce it for 2010.

Enrico

Mayoral support for 10:10

Article on BBC news today about Boris Johnson saving the founder of the 10:10 campaign from some "oiks".

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/8340865.stm - amusing and disturbing in equal measure.....

Enrico

Small steps

I am looking at all angles of our food's carbon impact now, and the research is showing up some suprising and sometimes quite disturbing & counter-intuative information.

For example, which is environmentally better (for a UK resident):

a) buying UK produced lamb
b) buying New Zealand produced lamb

Aha, I hear you say. That's easy, the UK lamb as you don't have to transport it halfway around the world. You'd be wrong.

New Zealand lamb is fed purely on grass and clover growing on the hills and mountains, wheras farming methods in the UK mean that animal feed (produced using a suprising amount of petrochemicals) is used in the UK. Also, a suprising amount of electricty is used in farming, and a great deal of electricity is produced in New Zealand using hydro-electric rather than the mainly fossil-fuelled UK. The result being that UK produced lamb has a larger carbon impact than the stuff produced in far-away lands and shipped halfway around he world.

(note: this difference may evaporate once we clean up our energy generating capability in the UK)

Anyway - the small step (of the title of this post) is that the wife has managed to source, from our local farm shop, flour that is produced within a ten mile radius of our house. So at least our bread is now mostly local....

Enrico

Milk

Did you know what the carbon impact is of a pint of milk? No, neither did I.

Anyway, apparently the humble pinta contributes 800g of carbon to produce it, but you can knock 60g off that if you recycle the plastic bottle it comes in.

To put it another way, it's equivalent to me driving about 6km (or roughly 3 and 3/4 miles) in my trusty Peugeot 206. Or it's roughly equivalent to a unit (1KW/h) of electricity - most calculations come out betwwen 400g-to-1Kg per unit depending on whether it's coal or gas you are burning.

I've got a sneaky suspicion that when I calculate the carbon impact of food miles/production then this will far outtsrip my household electricty usage (meaning I need to take a closer look at this aspect of my overall impact than I have hitherto been doing....)

Enrico

Measuring up

I've now put up on this site some graphs tracking my home energy use. I've been sad enough to have been taking regular meter readings since I moved into our house, so I can now look back and see how we've been doing.

I've been thinking of the other key measures which I need to track to understand if I am making a 10% (or greater) difference and will start to track these too soon, such as:
- petrol usage (for both cars in the family)
- flights (exclusively for work purposes, but am counting as my impact)
- food miles (trying to work out a way to measure that....)
- consumer goods consumption (another difficult one to measure)

Enrico

The 10:10 Campaign

A few weeks back my electricity company emailed me with some info about a campaign called 10:10, whose basic premise is for individuals to try and make a 10% cut in their environmental impact in 2010.

I thought that this was a good idea and so signed up immediately. Since then, the campaign has been gathering momentum with numerous individuals and companies (including the company that I work for) signing up.

I began to think about what is the best way for me to ensure that I do make an effort to make a 10% difference? After some thought I resolved to measure my progress publically in a blog, so I need to make the effort else the world will be able to see that I have not....

So.... here we are. On this site I will be tracking my progress, sharing my ideas & thoughts and writing about my journey.

Enrico