7 Environmentally Friendly Ways to Improve Your Home

When it comes to your home it can really payoff to be environmentally friendly. Not only are you helping to protect the world for future generations, but you can also save yourself a small fortune in bills while doing so!

Here are seven of the best environmentally friendly ways to improve your home:

#1 Insulate your loft

If your home doesn’t have the correct insulation in the attic then this needs to be amended pretty quickly. Around 40% of the heat lost in the average home escapes through the roof, but with the proper measures you can drastically cut down on inefficiency. This means that you can have a much warmer house without as much energy being used.

#2 Use locally sourced materials and tradesmen

It isn’t just your home that carries a carbon footprint, all the materials you use have to come from somewhere. By choosing locally sourced materials, you can stop the pollution caused by transporting them around the world and do your bit to help the country’s economy.

#3 Install Eco friendly guttering

Guttering is one aspect of people’s homes that is never thought about when it comes to being green. There are several eco-friendly guttering improvements that can be made here to build a more environmentally friendly home.  By investing in more robust and durable plastic guttering that won’t need to be regularly replaced will save on both long term cost and excess waste material. You can also have the downpipes channelling into a rain water reservoir so that you can collect the water and use it around the garden etc.

#4 Use low wattage bulbs

When you use the old-style incandescent light bulbs then your energy bill will be made up roughly of 10-20% just from lighting. By replacing every bulb in your home with a CFL or LED light you could cut down the amount of energy used by up to 95%! Not only will this save you a small fortune in electricity bills but it is a much greener way of lighting your home and produces much less carbon emissions.

#5 Install low flow toilet mechanisms

Cutting down the amount of water that your household uses is a fantastic way to reduce the amount of fresh water you waste and can shave some money off your monthly bills. By installing low flow toilet mechanisms you can save around a litre of water with every flush – this is something you’ll hardly notice anywhere but in the meter readings!

 #6 Put insulation in cavity walls

Similarly to insulating your loft, lots of your home’s warmth escapes through the walls. Pumping insulation into these cavities keeps the heat inside the home with less effort. This will save you hundreds on your heating bills during the winter and reduce the amount of fuel needed to heat the home.

 #7 Upgrade your appliances

Old TVs, ovens, fridges and other electrical appliances will not be as fuel efficient as newer products. Modern appliances tend to be much more environmentally conscious and use far less energy to perform the same tasks as the old appliances. Spending the money to upgrade these devices will help you have a more eco-friendly home that is also much cheaper to run.