Take a tour of our energy saving house and the discover how you can save
energy in your home.
Presenter
Amazingly over 40% of the UK’s manmade carbon dioxide emissions come from the energy we use every day. Now we can’t stop using energy but we can stop wasting it. Last year we wasted energy worth a gob-smacking seven and a half billion pounds.
By making just small changes to the way we run our homes, we can make dramatic improvements to the state of the world and our pockets.
Tamara Mauro Trujillo is the energy doctor from the Energy Saving Trust.
She’s at the home of Sarah Harrison to find out how she has transformed the outside of her home into a green idyll.
Sarah
This is one of our three water butts. The other two are at the front and this is the big one. This one takes the water from the whole of the back roof and from the extension roof. It brings it down the pipe in there to the water butt and before it goes to be stored, it goes through a water filter which takes out the worst of the dirt, the leaves and things like that.
Just by a very simple system, pulling this lever, it sends the water that would normally go down the drains this way back through that pipe onto the garden where it can be used for watering plants.
Tamara
So even if your water butts are empty, you’ve still got water for the garden?
Sarah
Absolutely, and without any use of mains water.
That’s my compost bin and that’s a wormery. They’re two different ways of taking waste and turning them into fertiliser that you can use on the garden again. We’ve put in waste from the kitchen, plants, grass mowings. Shall I show you what it looks like?
As you can see, it looks very much like compost for the garden that you would buy from a garden centre only it’s for free and it’s saved all that rubbish going to landfill.
Presenter
There are so many ways we can minimise the amount of energy we use every day. Last year in the UK alone, the amount recycled was equivalent to taking five million cars off the road. We’re moving in the right direction and if we continue to make those changes, we can make a real difference.
