Green Ideas

How energy efficient is your home? Even if you turn the lights off when you leave a room and turn your washing machine to 30 degrees, you still have a long way to go to making anywhere near enough of an impact on your carbon footprint. You may be a size nine instead of a ten, but you should really try and get your footprint down to a five or six.

Making your home energy efficient isn’t as hard or as expensive as you may think, but it can make a huge difference, 1.5 tonnes of CO2 difference in fact. By installing insulation, improving your heating system and using such things as energy-saving light bulbs, this is the amount your household could save each year.

For instance, according to the Energy Saving Trust, if we all switched our boilers to energy-efficient condensing boilers, as a country we’d cut our emissions by 6.7 million tonnes plus we would save ourselves £1.3 billion per year on our energy bills. So although it might cost you more to buy one of these new boilers, you will make up the extra cost in savings after the first year or so.

To minimise the impact of any problems with your new energy-efficient boiler, buy British Gas’s boiler cover. It costs from as little as £7 per month and includes boiler repairs, 24-hour customer service line, unlimited call-outs, boiler control repairs and parts and labour costs, so British Gas engineers can keep your boiler running as efficiently as possible so you want go wasting any heat, electricity and money.

Cavity wall and loft insulation makes a huge difference too. We could reduce our emissions of carbon by another 7 million tonnes each year. It is also worth noting that the government, through your local council is offering a tax rebate and extra help to anyone wishing to install better insulation in their home. So not only will you save money on your heating bills but also on the cost of installation.

Little things can have a big impact. If everyone in the UK switched just one regular light bulb to an energy saving one, we could save enough CO2 to fill the Albert Hall in London over 1,200 times. Plus these light bulbs last much longer and give off just as much light as the normal ones.