Your family home will have an energy pie looking something like the one on the left.
This will tell you roughly where you can save on your home energy bills. Notice that some slices – like your home heating and hot water bills – are much bigger than the other slices.
Now take any one of the seven slices and have a good look at it. Pull it apart. You will see there are many ways to reduce the size of that particular slice. Reducing the size of each slice reduces the size of the whole pie (your power bill).
Secondly, you will notice that shaving 5% off a big slice – like the hot water one – will cut your power bills much more than shaving 5% off a thin slice. So it really pays to focus on the ‘big ticket’ items as your top priority.
And – this appears to defy the laws of gravity, but its true! – you can shrink the pie whilst saving money and improving your comfort level. All at once. Why wouldn’t you?
Pie with extras please!
Making your home affordable to run and comfortable is a big enough goal for starters.
But keep in mind that your climate footprint is determined by many other things – like the food you eat, how you travel, the things you buy, what you throw away.
While working on your home you will need to keep these things in the corner of your eye.
Here is a home energy pie with the lot…
Notice that your ‘home energy’ slice is only about 17% of your total footprint, that’s all. This comes as a surprise to many.
When you buy food that’s been imported from 1,000 kilometres away your are indirectly using up a lot of transport and refrigeration energy. So too when you buy a new product that has been manufactured with energy somewhere else (it’s called embodied energy).
In fact you will find that the most powerful way to powerdown your greenhouse footprint is to nut out how to reduce those indirect energy uses, particularly the huge ‘food’ slice.
(Note that this pie doesn’t show air travel. If you fly in jet planes extensively this will blow your carbon footprint out of the water.)
