Eco-Friendly Changes You Can Make At Home

In the wake of the United Nations Climate Change Conference this year, it is now more apparent that we must all continue to search for ways to reduce our overall impact on the environment. While many big businesses and governments hold the majority of this responsibility due to their greater impact, individuals can also make changes in their lives at home to collectively bring about change. It may often seem futile to make such small changes, but the more people that make these changes on a small scale, the greater the impact will be overall. There are a number of changes you can make to your home, for example, that can offset your own carbon footprint and reduce the amount of waste you produce, and to help guide you on this, we've listed a number of changes that you could consider.

Use Energy Efficient Devices

Your first choice should be to switch out items that use more energy than alternative options. Lightbulbs are the most commonly changed items in the home, with people choosing more energy-efficient LED lights over the older variants. As well as lightbulbs, changing some of the appliances in your home, when you get the opportunity to do so, can help to save power, too. Certain newer models of fridges, dishwashers, kettles, ovens, and microwaves will have a much better energy efficiency rating. This means that they'll waste much less power than older, less efficient options. This saves you more money in the long run as you'll use less energy.

Get A Smart Thermostat

Using smart devices, in general, is often a great way to help you save energy, but one device, in particular, can really help you with this. Using a smart thermostat has a few benefits and will allow you to have much better control over your home's heating. Rather than just having a simple dial to control the temperature, a smart thermostat will be able to better monitor the temperature of your home and can more accurately change the overall temperature around the whole building. This will help you to better control your heating bills. You can also control it remotely, turning off your heating if you forget to do so when you leave your home. Many people have experienced astronomical heating bills after leaving the heating on and going on holiday for two weeks with no way to turn it off.

Insulate Your Home

When it comes to heating, a lack of quality insulation in your home is going to result in your home struggling to maintain a constant temperature easily. Heat escaping from your home via doors, windows, walls, and your roof is a common cause of households using more heating than they can comfortably afford. Adding proper insulation into your wall cavities and your loft is a great first step here. As well as that, changing your doors and windows to double-glazed variants and ensuring the frames are properly sealed is another great way to reduce the amount of heat that escapes. You can also insulate the doors between rooms using things like draught excluders.

Turn Down The Heating

While the winter months can get significantly colder, leading many of us to bite the bullet and turn the heating on, there is something you can do at a time like this to save a bit of energy as well as money. Turning your thermostat down one or two degrees can help you conserve energy; a few degrees less is unlikely to make you uncomfortable. It's said that simply turning your thermostat down by just one degree can save you up to 10% on your heating bills. This is due to the lower energy usage of your central heating as it won't have to heat your entire home up as much.

Switch To An Electric Vehicle

Our cars understandably play a huge role in our impact on the environment. Petrol and diesel cars are bad for the atmosphere, spewing pollutants into the air and contributing to climate change. Changing your family car to an electric model and installing a charging point at home will cut those emissions out of your life. You can see more about the benefits here. When installing a charging point, it's also worth noting that the UK government will offer you a grant covering a substantial amount of the installation. 

Buy Secondhand Stuff

A huge problem for our environment today is how much waste we produce. Daily waste is one thing, with bin bags piling high on rubbish tips and landfill, but larger items like furniture also get thrown away regularly. While some of these items may be broken beyond repair, many get thrown out simply because they've been replaced by something else after a room has been redecorated. Buying secondhand items is important as you're actively preventing that item from going to landfill. As well as this, you should give away, donate, or sell your old items instead of throwing them away, as the chances are you'll be able to find someone who can use them. 

Use Better Clothes Washing Practices

Using appliances in the home often wastes a lot of energy. While you can't run your refrigerator without using energy, you can dial down the temperature setting, reducing the amount of power it uses while still keeping things cold. Similarly to this, when washing your clothes, you can reduce the heat or even wash with cold water to remove the need for your washing machine to heat up that water to clean your clothes. With a good detergent, you won't need heat to wash your clothes at all. You should also avoid using a tumble dryer to dry your clothes as this uses a lot of heat and, therefore, a lot of power. Save that energy and improve your carbon footprint by drying your clothes outside on the washing line or inside on a clothes rack.

Grow Your Own Food

The carbon footprint we contribute to when buying food from abroad can be huge. The emissions from planes, cargo ships, and truck deliveries are some of the highest contributors to global warming today. Growing your own food at home reduces your reliance on these purchases. While you won't necessarily be stopping those food shipments, collectively, if more people grow at home, our dependence will drop, and fewer deliveries will need to be made.

Start Composting

Another thing you can do to reduce your waste is to start composting. If you start growing your own food, the compost you create from your food waste can feed your crops and help them flourish. Getting started with composting is a pretty straightforward process and can significantly reduce the overall waste of your household. Of course, some things like meat, fish, dairy, and fats shouldn't be composted. However, rotten vegetables, peelings, paper, cardboard, eggshells and egg cartons, grass cuttings, leaves, nutshells, stale bread, and teabags are just some of the many waste products you can throw onto the compost pile.

Collect Rainwater

Another great thing you can do for the environment is to collect rainwater. This can then be used to water your plants and for cleaning outside so that you don't have to waste water with your hosepipe. This significantly reduces your water bill and helps to promote water and energy conservation efforts. The more people that are doing this in your area will also reduce the demand for water, reducing the risk of things like hosepipe bans during hot summers.

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