Sunday, January 15, 2006

That soak in the bath: 1kg or is it 0.5 ?

Just checked before and after for my weekly indulgence (in place of the shower), and it's 0.5 cu mtrs, which translates neatly into 1 kg of CO2.

Considering that the sustainable personal budget (to avoid catastrophic climate change) is said to be only 400kg/person/year, then it's a fair whack, but as it is I thought it might be higher. Shows how poorly insulated our homes are that it takes the heat energy of 60 hot baths to heat my home for 1 week.

Anyhow... off for a soak now... and then... I'm going to reclaim half of the energy by not emptying it until tomorrow morning... it can give it's heat off to the house, before being released, rather than to the outside world :O)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi Neale -
This is great! Love the idea... Hope it spreads! You might be able to leave a message on the BBC website - one of the Radio 4 environmental programmes perhaps?
Had never thought about letting the heat from the bathwater escape back into the house - so obvious really. It points to another area though - bath water is "grey" waste, and as such could be vented to the garden, not that it needs it all that much at the moment one may think, though the water table maybe could do with it... It would make an enormous difference if all new build housing, plus all re-developments, and perhaps all public buildings (over the next, say, 25 years) to split their waste between grey and .. er .. brown (not sure what they call the other stuff). That could save loads of resources in terms of re-processing, etc.
Keep it coming!
Cheers,
Christopher