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29 Redland Hill

29 Redland Hill (continued)

We use compact fluorescent or LED lights (plus a few conventional bulbs) and this, combined with occupant habits, has resulted in the use of electricity being one quarter of a house of the same size. It should also be said that 1930’s houses are often deigned to let lots of natural daylight in and ours is particularly light, meaning that we don’t need to rely on artificial lighting a lot of the time.

We also wanted to see if we could reduce the use of new, high environmental impact materials and to this end have used the existing floor boards on the first floor and reclaimed timber for the floorboards of the ground floor. Sourced by Bioregional Reclaimed, these boards used to be joists in an old house and were reclaimed, planed down and made into beautiful tongue and groove flooring. We used linoleum and slate where we needed a smooth washable surface and there are no fitted carpets in the house to ensure a healthy interior environment. The old plastic gutters and downpipes were replaced with aluminium rainwater goods and we built a deck on the back of our house with reclaimed decking and green oak timbers.

We wanted to reduce our water use to a minimum – although we will not run out of water on the planet, it still has a carbon load in that each time we flush water down the drain, it takes energy to clean it and pump it back into our houses. We have showers with low flow heads, dual flush/low flush WC’s, water butts in the garden and again, occupant habits (even with two teenage girls!) means that our daily water consumption is 71 litres (the average water consumption in the UK per person is 150 litres per day).