I’ve been doing some reading around about eco-living and generally doing one’s bit for the environment.

Gareth Kane defines this as:

Eco-living is the art of living your dreams while minimising your impact on the environment. To include: waste, energy, recycling, green building, transport, food, product reviews, book reviews and anything else to help readers live within ecological limits.

We’ve just pretty-much built a new house (as you can see) and there are some good eco benefits that come from simply observing the current building standards, such as:

• Double-glazing everywhere including energy efficient K-glass
• Thick layers of insulation – especially in the roof
• Boiler is a high-efficiency “System” boiler which should mean less gas used
• Dual flush, compact toilets which should mean less water usage for flushing toilets
• Recycling – a lot of our weekly rubbish gets recycled by the council here who have a pretty good scheme for paper, card, bottles, cans, metal, plastic bottles and organic waste.

However, there are also things we’ve done which probably aren’t ideal – such as using halogen lighting (which ends up using a lot of power relative to energy efficient bulbs…) and decadent large shower heads.

We have made some improvements in the garden already which will help the effort:

• Rainwater harvesting – as soon as the new deck is down, we’ll be harvesting all the rainwater off the roof for watering and gardening
• Composting – we’re already composting using a large Sankey compost bin. All the waste from the kitchen, garden and paper shredder makes it into here and should give us “soil enhancing” compost in the future
• Growing our own vegetables – as previously mentioned, we’re on with growing our own peas, beans, carrots, corriander, tomatoes, courgettes,  pumpkins, chillis and basil – to varying degrees of success. This is never going to make us sustainable but it’ll help and it also is fun to do.
• Chickens – we plan to keep 3 rescued battery hens in a coop in our garden which will produce eggs as well as being fun.
• Cycling – both S and I are cycling to work almost exclusively. In my case this is cutting down on wasted bus trips and in S’s case, more importantly, cutting down on expensive short 5 mile car rides.

Here’s a few things which are on my list to review as we try to make our house as green as possible:

• Standby power – since we use a lot of electrical items (TV, PVR, routers, wireless storage devices, shaver sockets etc etc), I’m concerned about the power they all use when “not in use”. I was particularly concerned by the shaver socket in our new bathroom which seems to be an unwelcome heat and noise source during nights which are warm enough… I have not been able to find any information so far on “eco-shaver sockets” but there must be some out there.
• Solar heating – although possibly disruptive to fit at this late stage in our building programme, I am interested by using some solar heating panels to help us heat our water etc
• Buying “local food” is important. Especially buying products which are in-season – we might sign up for one of those organic vegetable boxes etc.

I’ve been reading info at the Alternative Technology blog for interesting advice.

More to come.