Loft and cavity wall insulation retain the heat in the house to make it warmer in the winter and cooler in summers. 60% of the heat in any UK house goes out through the roof and walls, making home owners and tenants spend a big amount of money on the heating bills and air conditioning.

If you’ve ever experienced heat loss in your after just a couple of hours from turning the heater off, that would indicate your house was not properly insulated. 25% of the heat escapes through the roof, while 35% is lost through the walls.

How to determine whether or not your house is properly insulated

The first step would be to take a look into your loft and check whether the wooden joists are still visible. If they are then your insulation is not thicker than 4-5 inches which will require topping up. The current UK standard for loft insulation is 11-12 inches deep.

If your loft is insulated up to the recommended standard but you still lose heat in your property, it will be very clear that the walls have not been insulated. In most UK houses built after the 1940s, the external walls are made of two layers with a small gap or ‘cavity’ between them. If your home has unfilled cavity walls, a considerable portion of your heating bills will be spent warming the air outside.

How much money your loft and cavity wall insulation could save you

If you insulate your loft up to the UK recommended standard you will save around 20% on your annual heating bill. For an average size property that means you could save between £180 and £220 and around 400kg of CO2.

If your house was built with cavity walls, insulating them could save you around 25% per year on your heating bill which for an average size property is between £200 and £250 and around 1 tonne of CO2.

These figures are provided by The Energy Saving Trust and are based on an average size property heated by gas. Greater savings can be made in larger properties or those heated by coal or electricity.

More energy efficiency tips

Turn your thermostat down. Just by reducing your room temperature by 1°C you could save around £50 per year. If you have a programmer, set your heating and hot water to come on only when required rather than all the time.

Set your cylinder thermostat at 60°C/140°F.

Close your curtains at dusk to stop heat escaping through the windows and check for draughts around windows and doors.

That’s it for now. Please stay tuned for more energy efficiency articles.

It’s shocking how much it costs to fill a car’s gas tank these days. Increased fuel costs are having an impact on almost every aspect of life. Food costs and other physical product prices are inflated due to increases in transportation and shipping. For those who drive, a majority of Americans, disposable income is decreased. It is hard to find a silver lining in all that.

However, there is one positive side effect. Just like in the gas crunch of the 1980s, the steep cost of fuel has turned the public’s eyes back toward alternative energy and sustainable energy. In other words, the pain of fuel prices has exceeded the complacency. There is now an increased interest in fossil fuel alternatives.

Renewable energy is most often defined as the ability to generate energy in the present without compromising that ability of future generations to generate energy. It most often refers to using natural energy sources which replenish themselves. Unlike oil, which will eventually be consumed entirely, other sources, like sunlight, wind, rain, and tides will last as long as the planet does.

Solar power involves harnessing sunlight to either generate electricity or heat water. The effectiveness of solar power varies depending on climate and geography. However, that issue can be overcome by feeding the national electric grid from areas with suitable characteristics. For individual home owners, the main disadvantage of solar is the up front, installation costs which can be quite high, even though the long term savings and tax breaks can totally offset the initial expenditure within the life of the solar power system.

With the recent introduction of electric cars and electric cars with gas back up generators, solar energy now has the potential to replace the majority of gas use in non-commercial vehicles. The current generation of such vehicles will run eighty to one hundred miles per charge. The average American drives less than forty miles per day with work commuting.

Using windmills to generate electricity is a spin off of a thousand year old technology that uses windmills to pump water. It has different but similar geographic limitations to solar power. However, windmill farms in mountain passes can generate power for the national grid just as desert solar farms.

As far as water goes, technology has come a long way since the hydro-electric dam. That’s still a very valid technology that has been around for a long time. Today, research is under way to use the wave action of the ocean to generate electricity with a buoy system.

The clear theme here is that renewable energy technology has been in use for quite some time. However, only the recent pain of high fuel costs have motivated consumers to turn away from the far more convenient fossil fuels. All growth comes with some discomfort.

After a mild winter, most of us are preparing for yet another intensely hot summer. For frugal homeowners it is always a struggle to lower electricity costs in the summer time. Business for air conditioner repair companies also escalates in the summer and winter when your air conditioner is running at full blast to keep the home comfortable. To avoid costly repair or replacement, make your unit more energy-efficient, and save you money on electricity bills, it is a good idea to change your air filter regularly. Here are three reasons to change your air filter.

Dirty Filters Increase Electricity Use

Whether you know it or not, there is an entire ocean of microscopic dust particles, skin cells, and other detritus floating around your home’s air. As your HVAC unit pumps air into and exhausts out of your house, it sucks in a great deal of that debris. Over time, the debris collects on the inner walls of air ducts and on your filter especially. Your filter prevents the majority of this dust from being breathed by the home’s inhabitants.

As more and more dust accumulates, your air conditioner has to work harder and harder to force air through the filter. Unattended, this can cause little to no air to pass through the filter, and the air will have to escape through the ducts into your crawl space. This is an example of an inefficient air conditioning system that can be prevented by simply changing your filter regularly.

Clean Filters Reduce Energy Costs, and Prevent Unit Breakdown

On the other hand, a clean filter allows your system to run smoothly and efficiently. When there are no gaps or blockages in your system and clean air is allowed to flow smoothly through ducts, filters, and vents, your system can regulate temperature while using less energy. The unit’s motor does not need to work nearly as hard to achieve the same comfortable temperature to which you are accustomed.

Not only does this save you money on your monthly utility bills, it also extends the life of your air conditioner. When your unit works more efficiently and less often, it is less susceptible to the wear and tear that comes from running constantly to keep your house cool. A/C units are built to last for decades. You can ensure that yours do and protect your home’s value by simply changing your filters regularly. A good rule of thumb is to simply change them whenever you pay your monthly bill.

Better Air Quality

As mentioned before, a clean filter blocks dust, debris and other things you would never want in your lungs from entering your breathing space. Most people do not realize the poor quality, or in some cases, significant toxicity of the average household’s air. Fibers in your carpet break down releasing petrochemicals into the air. Dead skin cells abound and are easily breathed in. Repeated exposure to these particles can cause respiratory illness and damage and other forms of lung disease. This is easily preventable. Protect yourself and your family from this avoidable hazard, and change your air filters regularly.

It may be easy to define pollution but the impacts of pollution are definitely fatal. The process which fully or partially disturbs the natural or balance composition of any part of the nature is called pollution. Flow of untreated waster water into the water bodies, mixing of poisonous or harmful gases into the air or absorption of hazardous waste in soil are dismal examples of the process of pollution.

As a matter of fact pollution can’t be defined as enthusiastically as it can be condemned and censured. Why? Because pollution definition is not as much important as its remedial measures are of utmost importance to save human life from its hazards. Anyway, whatever disturbs the natural composition of any thing is called pollution.

The definition of pollution can rightly be found at a place either at land or water which has been impaired by its hazards. A densely populated commercial hub of backward metropolis, a village at the coastal belt of Asia or Africa or an agriculture land damaged by undue spray of chemical fertilizer and pesticide can unequivocally tells the sorry state of harms of pollution.

In slums of huge city the harms of pollution are visible in its standard of living. Squalid streets, unhygienic food, smelly restaurants, footpaths with heaps of garbage and dirty urchins are enough to tell the fortune of people who lives in such underdeveloped areas. It shows the nexus of pollution and poverty. More the pollution, higher the poverty level and it is proved in poverty-ridden areas of the world.

In the process of pollution it does not evince what is affected most but results are same of all kinds of pollution. Either it is air pollution, water pollution or land pollution; they directly impact the human life apart from marring the natural beauty of environment. We breathe in air but can not feel the level of pollution in it. It dawn upon us when after some times we face problems in breathing. We don’t know how land pollution is contaminating the food we eat but when it becomes hard to digest even softer kind of food we come to know that our digestive system has totally been disturbed.

Therefore, definition of pollution is definitely important to understand how pollution is made but more important is to realize the harms of pollution wherever we observe that pollution is directly or indirectly affecting the natural fabric of our lives. In this way we would be able to take precautionary measures to protect ourselves from its harm and to make efforts to contain it to the lower possible level.

Have you ever wondered why most banks tend to have clocks posted outside their buildings? Is it just some kind of tradition that started somewhere, or is there a deeper meaning involved? Well, it’s not accident that banks and banker are obsessed with clocks. More than anyone else, bankers understand: Time is money.

On a simple level, it’s not difficult to understand why. Just for the sake of example, let’s say you borrow $1000 from a bank at rate of 5% annual interest. In one year, you would pay back the loan, the $1000 plus 5%, for a total of $1,050. The bank used “time” – one year, to change your $1000 to $1050.

The concept that time is money goes back to at least to a man by the name of Martín de Azpilcueta, a Spanish economist who lived in the 1500s. He was one of the first to develop a specific concept or theory of money and its connection to time.

But the idea that “time is money” can be traced back to at least 200 years before the days of Azpilcauta The tradition of banks posting clocks outside their establishments began in the early Middle Ages, according to sociologist Morris Berman. After the Thirteenth Century clocks in Italian cities “struck the 24 hours of the day,” Berman said in his book, “The Reenchantment of the World.”

It’s no accident that a new form of economic commerce was emerging in the 13th and 14th Centuries, Berman said, especially in Italy, where a new form of economic reckoning was replacing the old, crumbling feudal systems. That new form of economics was the dawning of a new kind economic system: Capitalism. Of course, true free-market capitalism as we know it today would not solidify until about the 1700s, but the idea that money could be affected or leveraged by the passage of time was off and running in Europe well back into the Middle Ages.

Today, most people take it for granted that “time is money.” It’s a concept that has become so embedded in our every day way of life, and set so deeply into our thinking, we can’t imagine a time or world when this wasn’t so. But before year 1200, say, almost no one thought of time as money. An actual mechanical clock for people to read was rare. (Sundials and water clocks go back many centuries, but that’s another story!). Before the invention of modern clocks, there was not such an obsession over time.

Millions of people today get paid “by the hour” which really drives home the concept that time is money. “If I work 8 hours for $10 per hour, I earn $80!” And note how the concept of time works into our language in many ways. If a person puts in more than 40 hours per week, that is considered “overtime.” This latter “kind” of time, “overtime,” is often more valuable than “regular time” because the person gets a higher rate for working more hours.

Because time is money, the business of “effective time management” has become an industry in itself. You can buy books on how to use your time more wisely, take seminars on time management, and learn “tricks” to make more effective use of your time. We all are interested in using our time better because this generally helps us to make more money.

Interestingly, one of the ways to make even more money is to get away from working for pay based strictly on time. Some people don’t get paid by the hour, but rather by the year, with an annual salary. Salaried jobs in general are higher paid than hourly wage-working jobs. The trouble with hourly wages is that there are only so many hours in the day, so no matter how much you want to work, your time is limited.

But those who want to make real money, big money, learn to leverage time to their advantage. That’s what banks do. After a banker makes a loan, his work is finished and time becomes his ally. The banker creates a loan, and then another, and another – and soon he has all kinds of instruments earning money for him – and his money is being compounded by time. It’s an incredibly way to make time work for you, rather than working “for a time” to earn a finite about of money.

Most have the “time is money” embedded into our consciousness from a very early age, to the point that we assume it is a natural part of existence. But there is nothing natural about it – it’s an artificial concept that has been around for only the last 500 or 600 years.