Remember how pleased I was to find those energy efficient GU10s?

Guess what - they didn’t fit my light-fittings. Why make energy efficient bulbs with a different profile to the standard ones? These fancy - and very expensive - new GU10s flare out faster, so that they are fatter nearer the base … and don’t fit any of the lights using GU10s in my house.

So. My father visited, and noticed these sitting on the side. Like me, very excited to see energy efficient versions. “Have them” I said “Useless to me - they don’t fit”.

Guess what again - they didn’t fit his light fittings either. But, not one to be defeated, he took a hacksaw and caused the light fittings to fit the bulbs.

How difficult can it get to fit an energy efficient bulb? How far will you go?

Seth Godin has a post discussing the slow take-up of energy efficient lightbulbs. This is one unnecessary reason why it is so slow - bad design.

Just how long are these bags for life supposed to last?

I’ve got quite an array of bags for life bought from Tesco - all looking increasingly crumpled, but pleasing in their different seasonal colours. I’m feeling quite proud of the fact that some of them are ages old - though I’m sure not the oldest ones still in service.

However, due to a sudden increase in the range of Sainsbury’s gluten free food, and decrease in Tesco’s, I recently bought a Sainsbury version of a bag for life, and may well be switching my allegience. (Access to a good selection of gluten free food matters to us - see my Free From blog). Although I do have to drive further to get to a Sainsbury’s - and they won’t deliver to me, while both Tesco and Ocado do - so they lose Brownie points for that too.

Sadly, this bag for life wasn’t even up for two trips - it didn’t last even as long as an ordinary carrier bag would have. I am deeply unimpressed, and shall be returning it to Sainsburys. Not to get the replacement - though I shall ask for one, and use it - but to make the point that recycling a bag for life after only one trip is rather missing the point.

The Carbon Neutral Company has some fantastic ideas for ecologically aware Christmas presents. I love the idea of the medieval sundial kit for children to make.

They also enable you to buy the usual suspects - a tree, a windup radio, and dryer balls, to name but 3. These items are all widely available these days, but they are very nicely packaged at this site, where you can also host your wedding list.

I have been trying very hard not to use our tumble dryer at all, but must confess to running it twice this week to get sheets dry in time to go back on the bed. I have been using the Aga (yes, I know, I’m really lucky, and it is a luxury in itself) to dry the washing overnight. So the tumble dryer balls aren’t much use to me. However, they are also selling balls to go in the washing machine, to both clean and soften the clothes, and these are tempting. I’m not convinced by the softening thing though - doesn’t anyone else find that clothes sometimes go stiff on the washing line, and need to be ironed to soften them again? No, I don’t mean just when the clothes freeze!

Ironing - something else I’ve been cutting out. No carbon emissions from this house due to ironing!

So, I’ve ordered more lightbulbs (I order my lightbulbs from www.lightbulbs-direct.com) - I’ve ordered 6 more energy saving lightbulbs, at a cost of £80 - including free postage and packing. And they come remarkably quickly.

I reported before that I had 78 still to replace - at this rate, we’ll be bankrupt - though most energy saving bulbs don’t cost as much as these specialist ones. Now, most of our remaining lightbulbs are halogen (those little conical bulbs with 2 pins) and these cost only about £2 each. But do these count as energy efficient? I suspect not.

(… time lapse while conduct research …)

Not energy efficient. But …

Thanks to the helpful people at lightbulbs-direct, I have found some energy efficient halogen bulbs. There is a sister site dedicated to energy saving lightbulbs, unsurprisingly named www.energysavers-direct.com, and the bulbs are subsidised by the UK’s Energy Efficiency Commitment (EEC2), so in fact they aren’t as expensive as I had feared. The bulbs I would need cost just under £4 each, so when we’ve saved up a bit, I shall buy more. And some types of energy saving bulbs could cost as little as 99p (+ vat) each.

And, in theory, once I’ve invested in these bulbs, they should save money, because by saving energy costs of up to 80%, they should pay for themselves after a while.

Sadly, these bulbs are not available at these reduced rates for businesses (at least not from this site) despite the fact that businesses must be much heavier consumers of electricity than households. Something wrong with the Governments support for energy saving here … And here’s another question - why are we paying VAT on energy saving lightbulbs? Surely these shouldn’t count as luxury items in today’s world. Better to remove VAT from the energy saving versions, and leave it on the old inefficient types of lightbulb.

I am wholeheartedly converted to the virtues of the freecycle movement, and have been for some months now. In fact, I’m boringly evangelical about it - so much so that the local PTA has taken to asking me about ‘that website of yours’ … I wish it had been my idea.

The concept is simple - an email list of people living locally to you, to which you can post emails either informing the list of things that you have that you no longer want or need, or asking the list whether anybody has an item which you do need but which they don’t any more. Then people who want an item contact the person offering it to see if it is still available, and to make arrangements to collect it. The only real rule is that no money must change hands.

So far we’ve given away a climbing frame, a toddler slide, three bikes, a play house, jigsaws, a Tractor Tom kit and a rocking horse - all of which my children have outgrown. And we’ve received some fish for the pond. Fantastic. None of that stuff went in the skip - instead it has gone to a new home. Eventually, of course, those things will no longer be reusable, and will have to be binned, but they will have made lots of children happy, and - for example - three households will not have bought a plastic play house, but will be using the same one bought years ago by the first family.

And it isn’t just childrens toys - I’ve seen computers, furniture, paving slabs, a shed and topsoil all on offer.

Changing the world one gift at a time, as they say - there are 2.8million members of the Freecycle movement now. That is a lot of gifting. Do have a look, and see if there is a group near you.

Have you visited the icount site yet?

Apparently the average house has 12 items on standby. Now, we’ve been doing our best to switch everything off at the wall, but if I just go round and check … oh dear, the children left the DVD on standby. It is now off, but I will have to remind them.

Icount also have downloadable ’switch this off’ stickers, and a reminder to email your MP to vote for cutting carbon dioxide emissions. Surely you could do one of these? I’ve done all of them now, including emailing my MP - I’ll let you know if I get a response.

I’d like to suggest that www.icount.org.uk should link to a list of email addresses for MPs (perhaps via www.theyworkforyou.com to make this easier.

My (plastic, council-issued) recycling bags have gone …

Roadside recycling arrived here in the rurals about 4 months ago. We’ve been given a green bin for compostable waste, a bag for collecting paper, a different bag for collecting cardboard, a box for glass and a black bin for everything else. I’m sure this is nothing new for most of you, since we’re the last people in the area to get recycling facilities. (We were the last exchange in the northwest to get broadband enabled too - a whole other story).

Since there are five of us, we are entitled to a larger black bin, but I see it as a personal green challenge to stick to the smaller black bin. This means that every other Monday (yes, fortnightly collections) you can see me squashing ‘just one more bag’ of rubbish into the overloaded bin, using my complete body-weight. Not the most sophisticated or decorous of activities to be seen doing.

Anyway, this week, I put out my plastic bags full of paper and cardboard, and they’ve been disappeared. Now what? And have the binmen simply chucked the whole bag into the hopper, thus contaminating the load? To think we worry about putting staples into the paper recycling bag …

New venture in the summer - a wormery. I cadged one from a friend who’d given up on it (husband asks - did I check with her why she’d given up?) and then ordered some worms from Wiggly Wigglers.

I dutifully ripped up paper, scattered soil, added worms and a small amount of food - and then, after the prescribed time, started adding our foodscraps.

Since then (some months now) I haven’t seen a single worm. The wormery is producing a huge amount of vile smelling liquid, which is apparently full of nutritional goodness for plants, and a lot of flies.

I think I must be doing something wrong. Not enough ‘browns’? (New technical term for cardboard). Have my worms drowned in the slurry? More research needed …

We have been gradually changing our lightbulbs to energy efficient versions, but I am astonished at how many lightbulbs we use.

We’re a family of five, and we have 106 lightbulbs installed, ready to use.

That’s in a house with four bedrooms and a garage (with lights). Obviously, we don’t use them all at once, and many get used very rarely. I’ve counted lightbulbs in the sewing machine, inside cupboards, bedside lights, in the microwave, cooker hood, fridge, freezer and external lighting. I haven’t counted freestanding lightbulbs in torches or toys, so in theory the number could be even bigger.

It seems that I spend a large part of my life replacing bulbs (though that has got a lot better now that the electricity supply cables run underground and not overhead - not so many pop these days).

Only 10 of those lightbulbs are solar powered, and these light the path to our door - we live in a small village with no street lighting, so it can get very dark.

So far I have replaced 16 of the others with energy efficient bulbs. That’s 78 still to go …