Dear Ed,
Well it certainly is now, for whatever your postcode, you need clean AIR, AIR you and your children and grandchildren can safely breathe.
So let’s have a look at a new, large housing subdivision where the COVID pandemic is not wanted, at a time when the health and safety in your children’s new world is of the utmost importance to you, at a time when every day is world environment day.
What features might you choose for your new home or the home and garden where you now live to help cut the cost of your weekly household budget? These feature you choose will also cut your impact on your four basic, vital needs of air, clean enough to safely breathe, unpolluted water to drink, uncontaminated soil to grow your food as well as the natural environment?
Have a look at water, one of your four basic needs. Half your household water use is used outside your house for watering your lawn and garden and for washing your car. So if you install a large water tank you can then use your rainwater both for outside use and for washing your clothes. None of these uses require expensive treated water when rainwater will do.
If your garden is one of your great joys in life, why not grow more native plants as they require less water and more birds will visit your garden. Installing a water-efficient shower head also cuts your water use on a daily basis.
What can you do about cutting your electricity bill? About 30% of your household electricity use is spent on heating water; so installing a solar water heater is a great way to cut your electricity bill. If you have it installed close to your kitchen where you use small amounts of hot water throughout the day, so much the better.
Today five million households in Australia are already cutting their electricity bills with their BYO electricity straight from the sun by installing solar panels on their roofs. However if you’re not yet in a position to have solar power, there are other ways to cut your power bills, just by keeping your home cooler in the summer.
Our children are very concerned that climate change not being addressed. In the future will result in more extreme bushfire seasons like this year’s Black Summer bushfires and there are plenty of things you can do to help cut the amount of electricity you use to cool your home; so perhaps our local paper will put together a short article to look at these electricity-saving ideas that don’t cost the Earth, as after all, the future is what you choose.
Harry Johnson, Iluka