Читать книгу The Self-Sufficiency Specialist - Alan Bridgewater - Страница 7

The benefits are so all-encompassing that they will touch every aspect of your life. You will eat better food, with no chemicals, preservatives, taste enhancers, artificial colours, herbicides or pesticides. You will feel more in tune with nature. You will use less (non-renewable) fossil fuel. Your fuel bills will go down, your stress levels will go down, and generally you will be living a healthier, more exciting, more enriched, more satisfying and more caring life.

ENERGY SAVINGS

One look at the average home will demonstrate that not only are most of us incredibly greedy in terms of energy – we want bigger homes, bigger vehicles, bigger appetites, bigger everything – but, even more illogically, a good part of the energy that we do use is wasted. Our homes and lives are leaking energy at every seam. If we did no more than look at self-sufficiency from a very narrow money-saving viewpoint, it is pretty obvious that most of us could quite easily and dramatically reduce our spending on energy, simply by bunging up a few of the leaks.

If we look carefully at our spending – heating, cooling, lighting, water, waste, transport and so on – and then apply the self-sufficiency mantra ‘little in and little out’, it is plain to see that the best way forward would be to minutely examine our energy needs, and see if we can attack the problem from both ends – meaning reduce both the initial need and the resultant waste. It would be wonderful if we could afford to make huge dramatic high-cost changes, but for most of us the best way of saving energy is to make lots of small modifications. You should not try to change everything at a stroke, either; it is much better to tackle one problem – say lighting – and then to move on to the next one.

So, for example, we could all cut our heating costs at a stroke simply by wearing more clothes, having thicker curtains, settling for a slightly lower level of heating, and living a more active lifestyle. Of course, this advice is rather simplistic, but I am sure you get the point.