I wrote this last week but totally for­got to post it so I will added this and a quick update on this week:

Not hav­ing the best week at the moment, it started off okay went to uni­ver­sity on Mon­day which this stu­pid cold but my mother was late pick­ing me up so instead of get­ting home at 4.30pm did not get home till 6pm. Tues­day I did not go in due to the fact I am run­ning out of money and half my lec­tures were can­celled, but I did man­age to get the web­site I have been work­ing on for the last 6 weeks to be com­pleted, it is a to-do list web appli­ca­tion made up of css, php, javascript, jquery and sql, I am really pleased with it and I hope I get a good mark

Wednes­day was a waste of a day had to go in for this stu­pid career devel­op­ment for a cou­ple of hours which was a com­plete waste of time and I do not know why we had to go, after this there was a protest at uni­ver­sity, 50 stu­dents had got into the man­age­ment build­ing protest­ing the cuts in infor­mat­ics, about 6 police vans, sev­eral police cars and a police dog later.  In the end 2 stu­dents were arrested and 6 stu­dents were sus­pended

Thurs­day to Sun­day my hus­band was off so the bath­room was being done and now it is nearly done, apart it from it need­ing to be painted.

I had a really embar­rass­ing time on the train this morn­ing, I was on the train, my stop was com­ing up so I stood up wait­ing for it to stop but it never came, the train went speed­ing pass and I ended up at a totally dif­fer­ent sta­tion 20 min­utes later. Lucky for me I already know that area quite well so I man­aged to get back to the uni­ver­sity stop.

I am sorry I haven’t posted other than green related top­ics, uni­ver­sity is so busy and they already have me choos­ing next years mod­ules.  It is a lit­tle too much right now, feel like I am going to explode with all these exams, group work, dri­ving, house and baby related items.

Saw an amaz­ing film this week, Valen­tines Day, so cute!

Hav­ing some issues with my cur­rent theme hope­fully get it back up again by today.…

I have fixed it now, hur­rah, unsure why it went ran­dom on me for a day, I think it had some­thing to do with my stylesheet… I am going to work on a new theme in sum­mer as there is too much uni­ver­sity work going on right now, plus my exam timetable is up and it horrible!!

Long await post about being green in the kitchen, this one is more than likely going to be a long one as I can think of so many way of being green in the kitchen.

Dishwasher

Now I know a lot of peo­ple worry that using a dish­washer is worse than hand wash­ing but I have researched this in depth, and it turns out that no using a dish­washer on a ECO wash is cheaper and uses less elec­tric­ity than hand wash­ing.  But I would like to men­tion please remem­ber to turn the plug off while not using it as this is use wast­ing energy that doesn’t need to be wasted.

I found this arti­cle which works out how much energy and water you will use in a dish­washer vs hand washing

Water use, energy use, and car­bon foot­print
There are three big fac­tors we’ll con­sider: water use, energy use (for heat­ing the water, largely), and the car­bon foot­print that results — we’ll save things like soap and dish­washer cook­ing for another post. And, of course, fol­low­ing energy-saving tips like run­ning the “light” cycle and turn­ing off the “heated dry­ing” option will change the way the num­bers work.

Built-in dish­washer effi­ciency
The aver­age dish­washer uses 6 gal­lons of water per cycle; the aver­age Energy Star-rated dish­washer uses 4 gal­lons per cycle, and their energy use ranges from 1.59 kWh per load down to 0.87 kWh per load. Using the Depart­ment of Energy’s car­bon diox­ide emis­sions num­bers of 1.34 pounds of CO2 per kWh, that’s 1.16 to 2.13 pounds of car­bon diox­ide emit­ted per load, to go along with 4 gal­lons of water.

Energy Star assumes each load in a “stan­dard” dish­washer (usu­ally 24 inches in size) has “a capac­ity greater than or equal to eight place set­tings and six serv­ing pieces,” so we’ll go with that when con­sid­er­ing how many dishes need to be washed by hand.

Can hand wash­ing be as effi­cient as dish­wash­ing?
The short answer: maybe. First, let’s look at water usage alone. The aver­age faucet flows at 2 gal­lons per minute, so if you can suc­cess­fully wash and rinse eight place set­tings — plates, bowls, forks, knives, spoons, glasses, etc. — and those six serv­ing dishes that your dish­washer can han­dle with­out run­ning the faucet for more than 2 total min­utes, then, you might be bet­ter off hand-washing. Assum­ing you’re wash­ing 54 pieces of dish­ware (that’s 48 pieces of dish­ware — 6 pieces per set­ting — and 6 serv­ing dishes), you’ve got about 4.4 sec­onds of wide-open tap water per piece, or about 9.5 ounces of water to wash and rinse each dish.

Impacts of heat­ing the water
Let’s assume you use warm water for both wash­ing and rins­ing — half hot water and half cold water. Heat­ing 2 gal­lons of water with a gas hot water heater (from about 60 degrees as it enters your house to, say, 120 degrees, set by the ther­mo­stat on your hot water heater) takes about 960 BTUs, or about 0.9% of one therm (100,000 BTUs), assum­ing 100 per­cent effi­ciency.
Gas stor­age tank water heaters
Gas water-heaters are usu­ally more like 65 per­cent effi­cient, so it really takes 1477 BTUs, or about 1.5 per­cent of a therm, to heat that water. One therm emits 11.7 pounds of CO2, accord­ing to the EPA (pdf), so heat­ing the water with gas for each 2-gallon load emits about .17 pounds of car­bon dioxide.

On-demand (or tan­k­less) water heaters are closer to 80 per­cent effi­cient, which changes the num­bers a bit; it works out to about 1200 BTUs, or about .14 pounds of car­bon diox­ide.
Elec­tric stor­age tank water heaters
The story is a bit dif­fer­ent when con­sid­er­ing an elec­tric water heater; while most elec­tric water heaters use between 86 and 93 per­cent of their energy for heat (com­pared to between 60 and 65 per­cent for gas), elec­tric heaters aren’t as effi­cient at heat­ing water. It still takes 960 BTUs to heat that much water; it just takes about .28 kWh (since, accord­ing to the EIA, 1 kWh equals 3412 BTUs) to heat 2 gal­lons of water at 100 per­cent effi­ciency, or about .30 kWh at 93 per­cent effi­ciency. Each kWh emits 1.715 pounds of CO2, on aver­age (thank you, EPA), so heat­ing water with elec­tric­ity for each 2-gallon load emits about .51 pounds of CO2.
Built in dish­washer vs. hand-washing: And the win­ner is…
These num­bers indi­cate that it’s pos­si­ble to be more effi­cient when hand-washing, but it’s pretty tough. Can you suc­cess­fully wash and rinse a soiled din­ner plate in just over a cup of water? If you can keep the water use low, equal to an effi­cient machine, you’ll require less energy, but doing an entire load of dishes in 4 gal­lons of water is roughly equiv­a­lent to doing them all in the same amount of water you use in 96 sec­onds of show­er­ing (using a show­er­head that emits 2.5 gal­lons per minute).

So, as long as you don’t often run your dish­washer when it’s only half full of dirty dishes, or unless you are very miserly with your water use (or have an old, inef­fi­cient dish­washer), the auto­matic dish­washer is likely to be more effi­cient. That is to say, it’s pos­si­ble to use less water and energy by hand wash­ing your dishes, but it’s not easy. Of course, if you do it just right, it might just be a wash.

More infor­ma­tion at treehugger.com

Clean­ing Products

Now I have men­tioned this before down in the being green in the bath­room but clean­ing prod­uct are an large impact on the world, using more organic, more nat­ural prod­ucts is always best, the only issue that gets me if the price, I under­stand why that have to be more expen­sive because it is not just chem­i­cals like the cheaper brands but I wish they would bring it down a lit­tle bit as not all of us have money to burn.

Pet related

This one is a tough due to the fact it has taken me for­ever to find cat lit­ter than is not going to kill the envi­ron­ment, I have tried loads of cat lit­ter for one I hate the clump­ing ones as they take for­ever to clean (which wastes water, clean­ing prod­uct and not to men­tion it smells), I have gone for a one at the  moment which is lit­tle tubs of old wood shav­ings, the think I like about it the most is the fact when the cat goes to the bath­room the lit­tle tubs dis­ap­pear a leave what I can only describe as saw­dust (kind of like a ham­ster cage lin­ing) but it does have a nice pine smell and lasts longer so you don’t use as much sav­ing money and sav­ing time.  If you can go for an eco cat lit­ter it is nicer for the cat and for your noses.

Cat food tins wash out, I know it is a huge pain but if you have one cat or three like myself you will end up going through at least one tin a day, with mine it is two tins a day (I swear Onion steals every­one else’s food but I can’t prove it!), I did try putting these through the dish­washer but every­thing smelled of cat food so now I have to hand wash them with bleach as well as wash­ing up liq­uid, please use a dif­fer­ent wash cloth as it is not nice otherwise.

Also check out Eco-Me Cat Kit Nat­ural Tool Kit, you can make your own cat lit­ter and flea spray, also cat treats, I might have to give this one ago.

Recy­cling

I am huge on recy­cling, lucky for me my coun­cil pro­vide me lit­tle pink bags which I put out every week, what I have found is a lot of items can be recy­cled, in my house­hold we have one bin for rub­bish and one for recy­cling, my mother is even bet­ter and has a bin for veg­etable ends, egg shells and other organic food mat­ter which she puts in her com­post down at the end of the gar­den.  I haven’t got a huge gar­den more like the size of postage stamp but I could fit a small one in my mother informs me.

Hav­ing two bins really saves me the headache of hav­ing to keep the bag some­where, since recy­cling (I even have my hus­band doing it who told me it was a waste of time) we hardly but out much black bin bag rubbish.

Grow­ing your own Vegetables

See I tried this last year but only man­aged to grow a cucum­ber and some herbs, my mother on the other hand split half her gar­den into her veg­etable and fruit patch and grew so much, loads of leeks (I love leeks), but this year I am going to grown my own car­rots, pota­toes and leeks plus the nor­mal amount of herbs, I’ll have to update you about this later in the year.  I think grow­ing your own veg­eta­bles doesn’t take a lot of work but it is so pleas­ing to see them grow even for me grow­ing any­thing makes me happy and I suck at gar­den­ing in gen­eral, I get the hus­band to do it for me.  Even if you don’t’ have a gar­den just a small bal­cony you could grow new pota­toes in big pots.

Gen­eral Tips

• Don’t over fill the kettle
• Don’t waste food
• Bulk cook where you can
• Make your own lunches
• Re-use items where you can
• Turn the lights off when you leave a room
• Re-use pack­ag­ing
• Use energy efficient
• Only wash full loads this goes for the wash­ing machine, dish­washer and the tum­ble dyer

Next week I am cov­er­ing female prod­ucts and make-up   Sorry I haven’t been around so much uni has me all tied up.

Just like for car insur­ance there are web­sites out there that help you find the cheap­est and most cost effec­tive life insur­ance. It is easy and sim­ple to use and it only takes a few min­utes to get a quote, you should have life insur­ance just in case some­thing hap­pens to you and what will your part­ner do if they have to pay the bills on their own, I would say you should have it!

When I went to Florida about five years ago now (whoa that makes me feel old) to visit two friends out there, we drove from Ohio down to Florida and went Dis­ney world which to me was like being in some weird world but the gift shops were lovely!

Now when we brought out tick­ets for Dis­ney world, we stayed in some rub­bish motel but I wish we had stayed in one of the Dis­ney World hotels. When I went the weather was in mid sum­mer and it rained all the time (hot rain, very strange) and we had to buy these big plas­tic bin bags to wear!

Oh the joys of car insur­ance, this really annoys me just because every year unless you look around for dif­fer­ent quotes your cur­rent insur­ance com­pany puts up the price by hun­dreds of pounds, and this annoys me more because I have never claimed on the house insur­ance, lucky for me get­ting a infin­ity auto insur­ance review is really easy to do these days. I man­aged to find one that only costs us £13 a month also there are reviews about the cur­rent car insur­ance agen­cies out there which always helps

So my word of advice is to def­i­nitely look around and see what other deals you can get out there, you never really know until you try, say­ing that I should go and look into our gas and elec­tric as it is way to high!

I am alive It is 4 weeks before the end of Spring term so all the assign­ments have been com­ing out, so I have been so busy with them oh and my dri­ving lessons are going really well right now, fin­gers crossed I’ll pass at the end of April. I had to cut the lessons down to one a week while all this crazy uni­ver­sity work is going on but in my hol­i­day I am going back up to three a week!

My week is a lit­tle bit crazy at the moment, here is my schedule:

Mon­day — up at 6am, lessons from 9am till 3pm then home again (must add it takes me a total of 4 hours to get to and from uni­ver­sity).
Tues­day — up at 6am again, lessons from 9am till 4pm, home again
Wednes­day — all day uni­ver­sity work, from 8am till 9pm at night I am get­ting worn out
Thurs­day — up at 6am again, lessons 10am till 3pm
Fri­day — dri­ving les­son and more uni­ver­sity work
Saturday/Sunday — uni­ver­sity work, house­work and all that fun stuff

I am so tired from all the uni­ver­sity work I have to do, and it is all I do 24/7 well apart from sleep­ing of course. Drama the other day hus­band fell down a flight of stairs at the train sta­tion land­ing on his tail hone, he was in so much pain he couldn’t move all evening had to lie on the bed, I thought we would have to go to hos­pi­tal but he seems to be okay now still can’t walk very fast, has pain here and there but looks like he has just bruised it, I hope anyway.

Other news we had a power cut yes­ter­day, no power for two hours and I was in the mid­dle of doing an assign­ment and the com­puter went “bing” and every­thing went out, the thing that annoyed me the most was there was no infor­ma­tion on the helpline it kept just telling me that knew about the prob­lems, pfft!

I’m off to do some more assign­ment or sleep or watch Big Bang The­ory (just fin­ish How I met your mother all 5 sea­sons, so good!!), a green kitchen post tomor­row since I had to clean my kitchen for two hours today.

So after hav­ing all this work done on my bath­room, I thought I could go through ways of being green in the bath­room, I’ll slowly move to other rooms in the house when I chance of course.

The bath­room nor­mally uses a lot of energy also a lot of money due to the fact you can nor­mally have your wash­ing machine in there, all hair related items (hair dry­ers), toi­let and of course the bath/shower, any­thing that uses gas or elec­tric­ity. (NOTE,  Nor­mally plugs out­side of the bath­room also you might have a sep­a­rate clean­ing area for the wash­ing machine and laundry).

Clean­ing Products

First I would start with clean­ing prod­ucts bet­ter for the envi­ron­ment, some­times more expen­sive but they do reduce poten­tial aller­gens, and toxic clean­ing prod­ucts have been linked to child­hood wheez­ing and asthma. In the UK our main green clean­ing prod­ucts is ecover, which smells good, my par­ents have been using it for years, I have started to recently. What I find about the prod­ucts some­times you might have to scrub a lit­tle bit harder but other than that no difference.

Home-made solu­tions to clean­ing products:

Scrub­bing sinks, tubs, and counter tops with a paste of bak­ing soda and water effec­tively removes dirt rings and some stains; if that doesn’t work, try a paste of wash­ing soda and water, and be sure to wear gloves.

For clean­ing win­dows, fill your own spray bot­tle with water and either one-quarter cup white vine­gar or one table­spoon lemon juice to cut grease.

Pol­ish fur­ni­ture with a mix­ture of one tea­spoon olive oil and one-half cup white vine­gar, or look for solvent-free prod­ucts that use min­eral or plant oils.

Wash­ing Machines

Now we all know that wash­ing machines use a lot of water and even more so if you have a baby or a young fam­ily, now I have tried a few dif­fer­ent types to save money.
First one was this soap­nuts, now it says this about them:

Soap­nuts (Sapin­dus Muko­rossi) are grown in India and Nepal, har­vested in a sus­tain­able way in Octo­ber from 15m high trees. The soap­nuts are sticky and golden in colour when removed chang­ing to red­dish brown when dried. Soap­nut shells con­tain saponin (a nat­ural deter­gent) and when they come in con­tact with water they make mild suds. Soap­nuts are a nat­ural, organic, envi­ron­men­tally friendly alter­na­tive to soap, deter­gent and shampoo.

Which I thought would be an amaz­ing idea, and I was keen on them, I tried them so many times but they did not work for me which was really dis­ap­point­ing.  I per­son­ally think it was because my hus­band (who I adore) is a lit­tle overly sweaty.
At the moment I am try­ing ECOZONE — ECOBALLS which are two balls con­tains these nat­ural pel­lets, they are hypoal­ler­genic and only cost 7p a wash.  So far with these I have had clean smelling washing.

Some other home-made solu­tions to wash­ing machine clean­ing related:

To remove stains from cloth­ing, try soak­ing fab­rics in water mixed with borax, lemon juice, hydro­gen per­ox­ide, wash­ing soda, or white vine­gar. Or, look for “non-chlorine bleach” made from sodium per­car­bon­ate or sodium perbo­rate, avail­able from Bio Pac, Ecover, Nat­u­rally Yours, Shak­lee, or Sev­enth Generation.

Fab­ric can be soft­ened by adding one-quarter cup of bak­ing soda to the wash cycle; this recently worked on sev­eral pairs of catalogue-bought cargo pants made of a cardboard-stiff cot­ton that lit­er­ally scraped a teenager’s skin. A quar­ter cup of white vine­gar will also soften fab­ric, as well as elim­i­nate cling.

Toi­let

It was not until I had an issue with my toi­let that I realised how much it costs me to run my toi­let about £500 in six months just from the toi­let alone, it was leak­ing day and night.

Now I would rec­om­mend to every­one that you get what is called a hippo bag they are nor­mally free from your water com­pany, you place them in your toi­let inside the cis­tern under the ball­cock and fill up with water while you are flush­ing, this saves about 3 litres of water when flushing.

Bathing/Showering

As they always say to save money and water have a shower, we had one fit­ted recently and it is amaz­ing how much less water you use, I am hop­ing that the bill will show how much it is sav­ing plus it takes less time and the water stays hot the whole way through washing.

Ideas around this one is to have a low-flow shower head and if you have a shower cur­tain use a vinyl one instead.

Paint

Now see I didn’t think of this one so much it wasn’t until I was research­ing that I came across this one, accord­ing to it you should use paint with a low volatile organic com­pounds (VOC) label as it is not so toxic.  I guess I will have to try this one out when I get around to re-painting the bathroom.

Also another idea is the nor­mal one replace light bulbs with energy sav­ings ones.

Links of interest:

• http://www.ecozone.com/
• http://www.twinkleontheweb.co.uk/
• http://www.hippo-the-watersaver.co.uk/

Whoa long post, okay next week I’ll move onto the kitchen area.

If you are vis­it­ing Brighton for the first time or for the fifth time, there are always places to go in Brighton, one of my favourite places is now the shabby streets which is a cou­ple of lanes away from the train sta­tion that hold some of the most inter­est­ing shops I have ever seen, since Brighton is a place to be unique indi­vid­ual you def­i­nitely have to check it out, my favourite shop down these lanes is a comic shop.  I have been col­lect­ing comics on and off since I was four­teen years old and my hus­band has been doing the same for about six years so our col­lec­tion is quite impres­sive but you will always need new comics as they are new ones com­ing out each week.  Another places to visit the sea life cen­tre and all the slot machines which are dolt all very close to the sea front edge down on the pier. It was such a shame when the sec­ond pier in Brighton fell down and then burnt down!

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