Thank you to green queen Joanna Yarrow, founder of sustainability company Beyond Green and eco-lifestyle specialist. This is what she says about the quarrels that emerge in her house. Plus she’s included her favourite gadgets for maintaining peace.

“I guess the most regular issue in our household is the degree of attention to small, day to day habits - turning lights off, not overfilling the kettle, putting absolutely every tiny piece of waste in the right recycling system, leaving the plug in the bath when you've finished so the warmth from the water heats the house overnight rather than going down the plughole, having shallow baths if you must have them at all, keeping showers short, remembering to take shopping bags with you when you go out so we don't need plastic ones.

I'm pretty anal about the details, whereas my partner tends to have his mind on bigger, more strategic issues. The kids are fine when prompted, but need regular prompting!”

Click below for a couple of gadgets that Joanna recommends.

1/ an Electrisave smart meter that measures our real-time electricity use, and converts it into pence spent on electricity per hour and kg of CO2 emitted. It's really shaken things up: suddenly everyone can see exactly what we're spending, and realise they'd rather spend our cash on things other than leaving the immersion heater / lights / oven on. And it means I can police behaviour around the whole house without having to trail everyone!

2/ a digital shower timer that's suction-cupped onto the shower wall. We set it to 3 mins, so anyone lingering under the hot shower for too long gets reminded to move on.

3/ a wormery, which makes composting much more exciting for the kids.

4/ a broken boiler, which has put an abrupt end to my partner and my sneaky game of turning the thermostat up / down a few degrees when the other's not looking... (It will be replaced by a super-efficient condensing boiler, but we've got so used to a chilly house I'm hoping we won't need to use it much.

Comments

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