July 1, 2010
Now we’re into Summer, our Carbon Footprint results are well overdue:
And, as we’re still with Good Energy, who only supply electricity from renewable sources, we can remove electricity from our carbon footprint:
So there we go – going down, albeit affected by the driving from our recent holiday. We need to work on getting the gas down further though.
February 20, 2010
It’s been a while since I posted our Carbon Footprint results, and what better time to do so than just after such a brutally cold spell. This really highlights the difference between the light, warmer months and the dark cold winter.
That’s a major difference from our starting month (August) of 1396 kWh – and all the increase is due to gas used for heating.
Interestingly, there was not a significant change in electricity consumption, even though the aquaponics system is now running and we did use an electric heater in the polytunnel on several occasions.
We just scraped in under 1 tonne, mainly thanks to an extremely low mileage this month (thanks to being snowbound mainly).
And, as we’re still with Good Energy, who only supply electricity from renewable sources, we can remove electricity from our carbon footprint:
So there we go – still going up rather than down! Very interesting going through our first winter in the house, let’s hope the consumption is down from here.
October 4, 2009
Our second full month in the eco-house, the figures this month are affected by the 12-day holiday we took this month. It was a serious driving holiday – Trafford to Central Germany. We could have flown, but decided to take the “eco” option – we’ll have a look at how green that was later. This month saw the heating start to come on – albeit on a very occasional basis, and we’re using the lights a lot more in the evening.
That’s a pretty big number compared to last month’s 1396 kWh – and almost all the increase is due to the car:
That’s the difference you see when you drive 2154 miles instead of the 830 in August. Interestingly, there was not a large drop in electricity consumption, even though we were away for more than a third of the month.
And, as we’re still with Good Energy, who only supply electricity from renewable sources, we can remove electricity from our carbon footprint:
So there we go – going up rather than down! Not a great start to the monitoring, but mostly due to the one-off impact of that 1800 mile across-Europe driving holiday. We’ll see how we go in October, now that the heating is on and the lighting is getting good use too.
September 8, 2009
We’ve had our first full month in the Eco-House, so here’s our monthly report – our Carbon Footprint for August. We’ll be plotting these each month on a graph to see how we go. I’m anticipating that this’ll be one of our lowest months – the lights have hardly been on, and there’s been no heating used. It’ll be interestiung to see how we go through the winter, and then how next year’s figures compare.
As you can see, the majority of our energy came from using the car – 830 miles at an average 49.9 MPG . That’s significantly higer than previous months – not helped by a 300-mile round trip on the bank holiday weekend. Now lets convert this into our Carbon Emissions:
What’s interesting to see here is how the electricity we use has a much higher impact on our Carbon Footprint than it should for the energy we use. With that in mind we’ve changed electricity supplier to Good Energy. Good Energy only supply electricity from renewable sources, so we can remove electricity from our carbon footprint.
So that’s a significant reduction – 37% off our carbon footprint in one go. If every month was the same as August we’d be on track for an annual carbon footprint of just over three tonnes. Not bad for the four of us. Unfortunately not every month will be like August – so we’ll see how we go!
Our initial target is to come in well under the nine tonnes of CO2 per adult that is the average Mark Lynas quotes in the Guardian. To make the comparison fair though we need to include a couple of other things on the graphs – water consumption and public transport use. I’ll try and get some of those on the September figures.
