Posts Tagged ‘green in bathroom’

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.