Posts Tagged ‘saving money’

Long await post about being green in the kitchen, this one is more than likely going to be a long one as I can think of so many way of being green in the kitchen.

Dishwasher

Now I know a lot of peo­ple worry that using a dish­washer is worse than hand wash­ing but I have researched this in depth, and it turns out that no using a dish­washer on a ECO wash is cheaper and uses less elec­tric­ity than hand wash­ing.  But I would like to men­tion please remem­ber to turn the plug off while not using it as this is use wast­ing energy that doesn’t need to be wasted.

I found this arti­cle which works out how much energy and water you will use in a dish­washer vs hand washing

Clean­ing Products

Now I have men­tioned this before down in the being green in the bath­room but clean­ing prod­uct are an large impact on the world, using more organic, more nat­ural prod­ucts is always best, the only issue that gets me if the price, I under­stand why that have to be more expen­sive because it is not just chem­i­cals like the cheaper brands but I wish they would bring it down a lit­tle bit as not all of us have money to burn.

Pet related

This one is a tough due to the fact it has taken me for­ever to find cat lit­ter than is not going to kill the envi­ron­ment, I have tried loads of cat lit­ter for one I hate the clump­ing ones as they take for­ever to clean (which wastes water, clean­ing prod­uct and not to men­tion it smells), I have gone for a one at the  moment which is lit­tle tubs of old wood shav­ings, the think I like about it the most is the fact when the cat goes to the bath­room the lit­tle tubs dis­ap­pear a leave what I can only describe as saw­dust (kind of like a ham­ster cage lin­ing) but it does have a nice pine smell and lasts longer so you don’t use as much sav­ing money and sav­ing time.  If you can go for an eco cat lit­ter it is nicer for the cat and for your noses.

Cat food tins wash out, I know it is a huge pain but if you have one cat or three like myself you will end up going through at least one tin a day, with mine it is two tins a day (I swear Onion steals every­one else’s food but I can’t prove it!), I did try putting these through the dish­washer but every­thing smelled of cat food so now I have to hand wash them with bleach as well as wash­ing up liq­uid, please use a dif­fer­ent wash cloth as it is not nice otherwise.

Also check out Eco-Me Cat Kit Nat­ural Tool Kit, you can make your own cat lit­ter and flea spray, also cat treats, I might have to give this one ago.

Recy­cling

I am huge on recy­cling, lucky for me my coun­cil pro­vide me lit­tle pink bags which I put out every week, what I have found is a lot of items can be recy­cled, in my house­hold we have one bin for rub­bish and one for recy­cling, my mother is even bet­ter and has a bin for veg­etable ends, egg shells and other organic food mat­ter which she puts in her com­post down at the end of the gar­den.  I haven’t got a huge gar­den more like the size of postage stamp but I could fit a small one in my mother informs me.

Hav­ing two bins really saves me the headache of hav­ing to keep the bag some­where, since recy­cling (I even have my hus­band doing it who told me it was a waste of time) we hardly but out much black bin bag rubbish.

Grow­ing your own Vegetables

See I tried this last year but only man­aged to grow a cucum­ber and some herbs, my mother on the other hand split half her gar­den into her veg­etable and fruit patch and grew so much, loads of leeks (I love leeks), but this year I am going to grown my own car­rots, pota­toes and leeks plus the nor­mal amount of herbs, I’ll have to update you about this later in the year.  I think grow­ing your own veg­eta­bles doesn’t take a lot of work but it is so pleas­ing to see them grow even for me grow­ing any­thing makes me happy and I suck at gar­den­ing in gen­eral, I get the hus­band to do it for me.  Even if you don’t’ have a gar­den just a small bal­cony you could grow new pota­toes in big pots.

Gen­eral Tips

Next week I am cov­er­ing female prod­ucts and make-up   Sorry I haven’t been around so much uni has me all tied up.

So after hav­ing all this work done on my bath­room, I thought I could go through ways of being green in the bath­room, I’ll slowly move to other rooms in the house when I chance of course.

The bath­room nor­mally uses a lot of energy also a lot of money due to the fact you can nor­mally have your wash­ing machine in there, all hair related items (hair dry­ers), toi­let and of course the bath/shower, any­thing that uses gas or elec­tric­ity. (NOTE,  Nor­mally plugs out­side of the bath­room also you might have a sep­a­rate clean­ing area for the wash­ing machine and laundry).

Clean­ing Products

First I would start with clean­ing prod­ucts bet­ter for the envi­ron­ment, some­times more expen­sive but they do reduce poten­tial aller­gens, and toxic clean­ing prod­ucts have been linked to child­hood wheez­ing and asthma. In the UK our main green clean­ing prod­ucts is ecover, which smells good, my par­ents have been using it for years, I have started to recently. What I find about the prod­ucts some­times you might have to scrub a lit­tle bit harder but other than that no difference.

Home-made solu­tions to clean­ing products:

Wash­ing Machines

Now we all know that wash­ing machines use a lot of water and even more so if you have a baby or a young fam­ily, now I have tried a few dif­fer­ent types to save money.
First one was this soap­nuts, now it says this about them:

Which I thought would be an amaz­ing idea, and I was keen on them, I tried them so many times but they did not work for me which was really dis­ap­point­ing.  I per­son­ally think it was because my hus­band (who I adore) is a lit­tle overly sweaty.
At the moment I am try­ing ECOZONE — ECOBALLS which are two balls con­tains these nat­ural pel­lets, they are hypoal­ler­genic and only cost 7p a wash.  So far with these I have had clean smelling washing.

Some other home-made solu­tions to wash­ing machine clean­ing related:

Toi­let

It was not until I had an issue with my toi­let that I realised how much it costs me to run my toi­let about £500 in six months just from the toi­let alone, it was leak­ing day and night.

Now I would rec­om­mend to every­one that you get what is called a hippo bag they are nor­mally free from your water com­pany, you place them in your toi­let inside the cis­tern under the ball­cock and fill up with water while you are flush­ing, this saves about 3 litres of water when flushing.

Bathing/Showering

As they always say to save money and water have a shower, we had one fit­ted recently and it is amaz­ing how much less water you use, I am hop­ing that the bill will show how much it is sav­ing plus it takes less time and the water stays hot the whole way through washing.

Ideas around this one is to have a low-flow shower head and if you have a shower cur­tain use a vinyl one instead.

Paint

Now see I didn’t think of this one so much it wasn’t until I was research­ing that I came across this one, accord­ing to it you should use paint with a low volatile organic com­pounds (VOC) label as it is not so toxic.  I guess I will have to try this one out when I get around to re-painting the bathroom.

Also another idea is the nor­mal one replace light bulbs with energy sav­ings ones.

Links of interest:

Whoa long post, okay next week I’ll move onto the kitchen area.