Fracking is an environmental nightmare in lots of ways and it puts drinking water in the areas it is carried out at risk as this video explains

Aside from shouting frack off from the roof tops, joining in protests and raising awareness of  the problems with fracking, the faster we can switch to renewables the better because when fracking no longer makes economic sense, the government will be a whole lot less interested in it. They might try to export the gas to other countries, but that is just an argument for people in those other countries to switch to renewables too.

Good Energy is a UK based renewable energy provider. They provide electricity that has come from 100% renewable sources and they also provide green gas, 6% of which comes from ‘biomethane: gas produced from organic matter – like manure and sewage – here in the UK’. Switching a renewable energy supplier like them is one way to say frack off to fracking companies and the government! There are other renewable energy suppliers out there and I would encourage you to shop around on sites like uSwitch before making any decisions about switching suppliers

This blog post contain affiliate links and going through these links, won’t cost you any extra, but  will help to support the blog as I will get a commission. Thanks!

Have you ever felt really frustrated because you couldn’t quite place a word you wanted and then felt so relieved when it eventually comes to you?  I had a concept floating around in my head and I decided there wasn’t a word out there that was working for me. I had a burning need to put a word to it though, so I made one up and here it is: upuse – ta-da!

I might not be quite the Oxford dictionary, but here is my definition of upuse:

The reason this was bugging me so much was because it is something I have started doing semi-regularly. The closest descriptions to it I could think of were making do, but I didn’t feel that was specific enough and upcycling but I think that implies that the item is altered in some way.

Some examples of upusing I have done around the house include:

• I used to have large mixing bowls and similar sized serving bowls. It honestly had never occurred to me that I could use my serving bowls for mixing (or vice-versa), but the mixing bowls disappeared during my Year of Eco Challenges (read more here) when I was buying nothing new for myself and it didn’t take long to realise that my serving bowls, which were rarely used previously, would work just fine as mixing bowls. Now I make bread dough in them regularly. Incidentally it turns out after getting Mr ETL to read this post before I published it, he has been been doing some upusing of his own and we do still have them!
• I used to put the plastic bags I brought home from the supermarket in a plastic bag dispenser. Now I use the dispenser to store and dispense reusable cloth wipes for use around the kitchen (read more here)!
• I have written about this quite a few times on the blog, but I now use a freezer bag to keep food cool and hot and as a kind of thermal cooker – perfect for making yogurt in or to keep bread dough warm .
• My kids decorated some mugs at a club last summer, which I haven’t used because we didn’t really have room for them on our shelf of mugs. I didn’t want to get rid of them, so now they are being used as attractive and personalised pen and pencil holders!

As far as printers go it seems like a really good one so far. I have been doing a lot of decluttering recently and managed to free up a cupboard which has power in it and love the fact I can keep it in the cupboard and print to it through wifi! This printer is not zero waste as it came packaged in plastic and the ink to fill up the tank was provided in disposable plastic containers which were again wrapped in plastic. The benefit of these over other cartridges though are that less of them are needed and there is less ongoing waste with this printer. Also as the ink can be refilled, although it is an expensive initial outlay, it is likely to work out cheaper in the long run than using a printer which won’t allow cartridges to be refilled.

Putting the ink into the machine was quite simple. Working out how to get it to work with my computer was a little complicated but once we got it all set up it has been easy to use. I particularly like being able to scan things in like my kids artwork, so that I can then put the originals in the recycling or use it to wrap gifts without feeling too guilty :).  As much I would like to reduce my printing there are times when I need to print and it came in really useful for printing out pictures for one of my kids homework recently.

You can adjust how quickly the printer goes onto standby with the eco setting and it is worth changing it so that it isn’t on fully for too long (or even better turn it off when you aren’t using it). It isn’t going to cost big bucks either way though. We plugged it into a plug-in energy monitor and worked out that if it was left on all year (without printing) it would cost us around £6 a year in electricity costs and if it was on standby (again without printing) it would cost us only about £2 for the year!

There is a range of these printers to suit different needs, which you can find out more about on the Epson site.

UPDATE: I have found that I have struggled to keep the printer connected to my laptop via WIFI, I don’t know if this is something to do with my home network, laptop or the printer though.

Disclaimer: a printer was received for review and affiliate links have been used in this article, but the opinions were my own!

I started off my mammoth mend with a rain coat that had a broken button, a missing button and problems with the seams under both arms. It was a frustratingly slow mend to start off with and took up the entire morning. I began to wonder whether I was being ridiculously idealistic about the whole mending thing and whether I could really justify spending hours mending one jacket.  As the day went on though I felt more relaxed, the mending got easier and time flew. In the end I actually really enjoyed the day.

As I was mending things I was thinking that each mend might be the first of many mends.  We have a backpack (the one mentioned earlier) which we take everywhere with us when we go out with the kids and we have mended and mended it. Things wear out.  Better quality things last longer and taking good care of them helps but eventually almost everything that gets used will wear out.  So the mends I did yesterday may well just be the beginning in a long line of mends on each item.

It got me thinking about two things:

1. there is no better incentive to only buy good quality long lasting items than the prospect that things can’t just be chucked out and replaced i.e. I will have to mend them when they break and that
2. although I did enjoy my day of peace and quiet and mending, if I’m going to be mending things regularly it would have been more fun if I had some company (and I would be more likely to do the mending more frequently).

I didn’t need to spend a whole day mending by myself, some of the mends only took me 5 to 10 minutes. I could have very easily done a mend or two an evening while watching tv with my husband.

I also could mend in the company of other menders:

• I could go to the monthly Brighton Repair Cafe – find out about them here, although they are more there to help with mends that people don’t know how to do themselves, or
• I could start up or look for a more local mending group…  I’m now getting why people go to stitch and b*tch or the more politely named knit and natter groups

This is a guest post from Mr ETL (my husband) about how we found out exactly how much we are spending on our background electricity usage throughout the year and how it is broken down by appliance.

We are spending around £365 a year on our background electricity usage!

When I look at our energy usage we are always using some electricity, even in the middle of the night. It’s only 200-500 watts per hour so not a huge amount but it does mount up, averaging roughly 8.4kwh per day, about £1 a day, so approximately £365 a year which is quite a lot before we actually turn any lights on or cook anything. I wanted to gain a better idea of what’s using all that electricity and a quick search of Amazon came up with quite a few plug in energy monitors which tell you how much a particular appliance uses. The one I bought is a Belkin one. I liked this one in particular because you can plug the appliance you are monitoring into the back of this energy monitors plug and there is a cable leading to a screen.  This is really handy when the plug socket is behind the appliance as not all energy monitors have this feature (i.e. there is no cable between the plug and the screen on some of them) and getting my head down to read the value with all the dirt and creepy crawlies behind the fridge for example didn’t appeal. We try to turn things off when we aren’t using them, so I hate to think how much we could be spending on electricity throughout the year if we weren’t.

Which appliances are costing us the most?

I started with the fridge, plugged the unit into the wall and then the fridge plug into that and left it for a week, it reads the energy usage and estimates a yearly cost based on a electricity cost you can enter on the unit. So it estimates the fridge will cost me about £66 a year, not a huge amount I can do about it, but might look at how much a newer fridge might cost, can’t see it being cost effective though.

Next I looked at my tropical fish tank, I’ve got the lights, pump and heater on a multi plug so plugged it into that. A few days later it told me I was spending about £70 in electricity a year on my fish tank.

The cable box is costing about £25 a year, interestingly it doesn’t seem to make much difference between standby and running but as it’s not advisable to take it off standby, again I don’t have much choice.

That still leaves me with over £200 of “vampire” usage to find, next on my list is the NAS box, for those of you less technical it’s where we put all our pictures, kids films and laptop backups so the whole family can access it, it’s on 24/7 at the minute, it sleeps most of the time and actually is costing me another £45.

We’ve got 2 ponds that we inherited when we moved in, we got some fish from a friend and put some in each pond. They both have filters which need running 24/7, I hadn’t really thought about how much they were costing me but a day of running one of the filters with the monitor told me it was costing us over £40 a year. The other pond has a leak so I moved all the fish into one pond, have stopped running the other pond filter and I think I won’t bother any more. One pond for fish and the other can be au naturel. Saving me £40!Say no to standby – you could save a surprising amount of money!

Disclaimer. I bought the monitor and this is not a sponsored post so have no affiliation to the manufacturer. Of course you do want one and buy it through the link here  we make a (very) small amount of commission from it so buy buy buy