Turning up the green at home? Whether it’s giving your garden a long-overdue upgrade or converting to cleaner energy like solar, these are some of the essential ways to make your home more eco.
As nations across the world have set ambitious carbon emission targets, there are more incentives than ever to convert to greener living and reduce the carbon footprint at home.
Making your home more ecologically friendly and reducing power consumption is easier than you may think and it does not require a large investment. Take a look at these easy and cost-effective ways to make any home greener and cleaner.
1. Green your garden (literally)
Your garden is your piece of the local ecology, and it is up to you to care for it. This requires balance as you want your garden to be a beautiful and picturesque space on the one hand, and on the other, you want to support your local wildlife. Your garden should be carefully tended, and leave room for nature to take over and create habitats for birds, pollinators, and other wildlife.
Consult a local landscape gardener and work with them to make your garden a natural but beautiful garden. At MyBuilder, for example, you can find local landscape gardeners near you that come with recommendations and review from their previous customers.
Consider replacing your grass with local and drought-tolerant plants to reduce water use. Native plants also better support your local wildlife, which can mean more garden visitors such as hummingbirds, squirrels, and butterflies.
2. Use natural light
The electricity we use in our homes is one of the primary causes of carbon emissions. There’s more reason than ever to do whatever we can to reduce our power consumption and our carbon footprints. By letting more light into our homes by adding windows, skylights, or swapping curtains for roller blinds, the demand for electrically powered light through the day drops dramatically.
More natural light in interior spaces helps to reduce the need for home heating too — a welcome bonus. Increasing the number of windows in your home can be expensive, so try to find smart ways to bring more light inside. Curtains, even when open, block a lot of light from a room. By using blinds instead, you can roll them up completely and allow light and heat to pass through the whole window and not just a gap in the middle.
3. Consider a heat pump
Most homes rely on a natural gas supply for home heating. Although natural gas is a low-carbon source of energy, it still contributes massively to the global carbon pollution problem. If you make an ecologically focused change to your home heating system you can reduce your carbon footprint massively, as well as make a huge cut to the cost of home heating.
Heat pumps are a low-power and low-cost solution to home heating that can slash your energy bills with a minimal investment. These systems not only give you low-carbon home heating, but they also allow you to reclaim some space in your home as these systems do not use a large water boiler or radiators. The money they save helps them to pay for themselves within the first few years of use without experiencing a drop in the quality of their home’s heating.
4. Consider solar panels
For the largest reduction in your home’s carbon footprint, home solar is the way to go. Collectively, home electricity use is the biggest carbon emitter in the country, and it is also one of the biggest regular costs of owning a home. Installing solar panels on the roof of your home can take you completely ‘off-grid’ on a sunny day, and greatly reduce the amount of power you consume from the national grid even when it is cloudy.
For an even greater cut in carbon emissions consider installing a home battery system to complement your solar panels. These batteries store power that is generated from the panels during the day to use in the evening, which makes the system much more versatile and valuable. You can light your home at night and watch television without paying for power from your energy company. Though they do require a significant financial investment, they will pay for themselves while you use them and also add value to your property.
Making just one of these changes could have a huge impact on your home’s carbon emissions. Put a few of them together, and you will have made a significant change to your carbon footprint while also making a massive reduction to your energy bills. These cost savings will help you to pay for the additions you make over time, and often very quickly. There are both environmental and economic benefits to making these changes and creating an ecologically friendly home for the future.
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