Trying to be Green

Last week my daughter had a nasty bout of chicken pox. This meant a lot of telly and later, when she was feeling better, a lot of fighting with her sister and a big dose of cabin fever for all of us. Apart from an expert knowledge of Nick Jr shows I have little to show for my week off. Except that one sunny day I gave her an old camera and asked her to take photos of anything green and this is the result:

I’d love to be able to use it for something in Trying to be green. I can’t think what yet though.

This is the sign on the door of the local shoe repairers where I took my favourite boots to be repaired this week.

All winter I’ve been a little bit sad that these lovely lovely boots are finally on their way out and that next year I will have to find some new boots -but they won’t be as nice or as comfy.

And then suddenly it struck me - I should repair not replace.  I’ve never done that before.  The only problem is that because I left it so late they may be beyond repair.  If I’d thought of it only a month ago I’m sure they would have been fine.  Oh well they’ve sent them off to a specialist to see if he can fix it.  I am still hopeful.

Oh my god! I have been washing my clothes in cold water for so long that I had forgotten what clean clothes look and smell like. They are so clean. Stains have disappeared. They smell lovely! I can’t believe how long I managed to ignore the problem and think that there was nothing wrong with my washing machine. Oh how i love my new one.

The instruction booklet comes with stats for your washes - I have chosen the eco 40′c. It takes 1.13kWh of power for a wash - that seems like very little to me. If I do 5 washes a week on average then I am using approx 5.5kWh of power per week. So I won’t be able to blame my washing machine for my high power consumption any more!

We’ve been wondering for a while whether our washing machine is the cause of our rather high electricity bills. Definitely when the machine is on you can watch the meter spinning rather rapidly.

Well we’re now being forced to put that to the test as I’ve just had to order a new machine. An enthusiastic repair man turned up last night to check out the washing machine which seems to be working normally: except the clothes just don’t seem very clean - and that, surely, is the point. And yes the nice man stroked his beard and said that actually we’ve been washing our clothes in cold water for months and that its ready for the scrapyard.

I would like to point out that we are surprisingly clean looking and unsmelly (honestly). And I think it might be about Christmas when it stopped working properly!! Goes to show that you don’t need a hot wash to get your clothes clean - and I’ll find it hard to justify washing above 30′c.

So a new machine has been ordered - a Zanussi 1600 if you’re interested - it is A rated. Hopefully our electricity will go down this week (no washing) and we’ll see if we have an overall improvement. I am secretly hoping that this was our electricity beast and we’ll be ultra-efficient with our new one. We shall see…