As part of my degree I’ve been calculating my own carbon footprint. I think because I’ve been aware of the choices I make for a little while it came out below the UK average but it did get me thinking as to how I could improve it.
Approx one third of the greenhouse gas emissions for any household is due to household heating/water & cooking. Where we live there is no mains gas so all our heating and cooking is on gas from an underground LPG tank. Not only is this expensive but it involves burning fossil fuels and, fundamentally, that is a bad thing.
We are in the process of getting quotes for solar panels and battery systems so our electricity will be “greener” than our gas supply. Even using the grid electricity at the moment it is still better for the environment. We have signed up with Octopus Energy on one of their green energy tariffs that means our electricity already comes from renewable sources.
So, something I need to do is to reduce our gas usage as much as possible. I’m not sure with the current alternatives available if we can move our heating system away from gas (we do have an economical combo boiler) so the only other thing I can look at reducing is our gas usage for cooking.
I’ve just bought a Ninja Foodi multi-cooker to use in place of our oven, grill and possibly hob. It will certainly be a different way of cooking and I’ll have lots of experimenting to do. As I get to grips with it I’ll post more about it here 🙂