Energy Efficient how to beTeaching Children

The issue of climate change isn’t going to go away. The adverse effect our energy use over the past 200 years has had on the environment means that the next generations will have to deal with the consequences. This makes teaching our children and grandchildren how to be energy efficient more important than ever.

There’s no better place to start giving the right messages to children than in the home. It’s easier than you might think to spread a green message to all the family without creating another stressful task for yourself. By getting the children involved in saving energy not only will they be helping the environment, but they’ll also save you extra work and money in the house.

Lead By Example

It’s impossible to teach your children to be better with energy if you’re still forgetting to turn off a light or are always leaving items on standby yourself. Overcome your bad energy habits before asking them to do the same. Children will automatically mimic the way you approach tasks, so setting a good example will have a detrimental effect on the sort of habits your children pick up at home.

Make Saving Energy Fun

Try and make energy saving tasks fun. If you make environmentally friendly activities part of playtime, children will be more inclined to get involved and have more fun doing so. Create games or competitions that also make the house more energy efficient. Set up a scoring chart, which awards points to children for completing a task efficiently – from opening and closing the curtains or putting all their dirty clothes in the washing machine to helping Mum or Dad with the washing up.

Giving rewards for progress and achievement is also important. Setting treats and prizes for the best effort are great incentives for children to work harder.

In the Garden

There’s lots of fun for kids to have in the garden, and plenty of ways to save energy outdoors. Why not couple the two together for outdoor fun with an energy efficient twist. Enlist the help of your child to wash the car by hand, water the plants with a watering can or even put the washing on the line.

Get Your Kids Involved

Get your child involved in the household jobs that save energy. Giving responsibility for turning all the lights off in the house, or helping with the recycling helps children feel a part of the process, and they’ll take more pride in the job they do. 

You should also always explain why saving energy is so important, as communicating the right message alongside practical teaching will make good habits stick. Help your child to understand why remembering to unplug their computer consoles or switching the tap off when they brush their teeth is so important.

Work with Your Local School

Try and coordinate your efforts with those of your child’s school. Some schools will already have a policy of teaching children energy efficient habits in the classroom, but the effect it has on your children will be maximised if the same environmentally conscious messages are replicated when they get back home.

If your school hasn’t got anything planned, why not volunteer your assistance in the classroom and get other parents involved? It’s possible to arrange for your local council or other local representatives to visit schools on educational visits that will make learning more interactive for children.

Top Tips for Energy Saving Secrets

The best way to start saving energy – at home work or during leisure time – is to take small and easy-to-manage steps. Often even the smallest of changes to our normal routines can have big pay-offs when it comes to reducing carbon emissions. Every little counts, and if all of us were to make an energy saving change, the amount saved overall would lower the UK’s carbon footprint significantly.

One of the biggest problems to overcome when it comes to energy saving is the attitude that going green will be time consuming, difficult to implement or could cost us money. We’ve come up with a series of top tips for energy saving to help break these incorrect assumptions – they don’t involve lots of time or effort, and could actually help to save you money…

Heating

Keeping your home warm during the colder months is an absolute must, which means being dependent on gas central heating. However there are ways of cutting your energy bills and still staying toasty…

• Turn your thermostat down a degree.
• Use blankets and extra layers rather than turning up the heating.
• Place draught excluders under doors and loose windows.
• Fit an insulating jacket to your hot water tank.
• Place foil around the back of your radiators to reflect heat back into rooms.
• Move furniture away from radiators to allow heat to circulate.
• Close your curtains in the evenings.

Travelling

We all need to get from A to B, which invariably involves some form of transport. In order to save energy and carbon emissions, there are alternative ways to travel than in your petrol dependent car…

• Share your driving burden by joining a car sharing pool.
• Invest in a bicycle for shorter journeys.
• Try walking a short journey you’d usually drive at least once a week.
• If you’re travelling on a longer journey, take a train instead.
• Choose a car with low carbon emissions.

Lighting

Like heating, we all need our homes to be well lit in the mornings and evenings, particularly during the winter months. The key to saving money on lights is not allowing bad habits to become the norm…

• Don’t forget to turn off lights when you leave a room.
• Use your dimmer switch when you don’t need full lighting on.
• Switch off security lights when you return home or go to bed.
• Open curtains and blinds to allow natural light in.
• Avoid energy guzzling lightings fittings, for examples fluorescent lights.
• Replace used light bulbs with energy saving bulbs.

Garden

There’s lots of fun and relaxation to be had in the garden, especially when the sun is shining. There are also plenty of things you can do to help save energy and create a luscious green garden that everyone will enjoy…

• Turn food and garden waste into nutrient soil for flowers and plants using a home composting bin.
• Start growing your own vegetables.
• Use a manual lawnmower rather than an electrical one.
• Make a rock garden using reclaimed stone.
• Use a watering can to water plants instead of a hosepipe or sprinkler.

Work

Saving energy shouldn’t stop as soon as you’re at work. There are just as many simple ways to save energy in the workplace as there are at home, and you should try and implement your energy saving habits in both environments…

• Shut down your computer at the end of the day, don’t just leave it on standby.
• Try to minimise the amount of paper you use to print.
• Set your printer up to print on both sides of a sheet of paper.
• As at home, only fill the kettle with as much water as you need.
• Turn off photocopiers and other office equipment before you leave.

Food and Cooking

There are lots of ways to reducing the amount of energy needed to cook, store, prepare and wash up after our daily meals. Here are a few to get you green in the kitchen…

• Keep fridges and freezers shut tightly and at the correct temperature.
• Avoid heat loss in the oven by keeping the door closed until the food is ready.
• Wash vegetables and fruit in a bowl rather than under a running tap.
• Grow your own vegetables, or shop locally for them.
• Turn your toaster setting down by one.
• Unplug all appliances when not in use, or they will continue to use energy.