How to Make Your House as Eco-friendly as Possible?

Environmental concerns are more widespread than they ever have been, thanks to high-profile documentaries, a raft of alarming science, and some determined activism from green pressure groups. And these concerns are helping to shape the modern home, too.

There are myriad environmentally-friendly ways in which the environmental impact of your home can be lessened. Some of these involve major investment and upheaval; others, however, offer a considerable return on just a little bit of effort.

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The good news is that anything that can be done to make your home more energy-efficient will also make it greener. For example, replacing an old boiler with a modern combination one from City Plumbing will tend to yield a substantial improvement, even if it’s not an electric one. Let’s look at a few popular means of making a house eco-friendly, and see which will provide the greatest benefit to your home.

1. Light Bulbs

Swapping out older halogen-style light bulbs for newer LED-based ones can save enormous amounts of energy in the long-term. They’re more resilient, and they’ll pay for themselves within a few weeks. Of course, there’s also an environmental cost associated with manufacturing a new bulb – and thus it may be worth waiting for your old bulbs to fail before investing in a replacement.

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2. Insulate

If you’re burning gas in order to replace the heat that’s escaping through your windows, doors and walls, then you’re imposing a burden on the environment. Anything you can do to improve the insulation situation will therefore confer an environmental benefit. Often, the best results can be had by improving the situation in the loft.

3. Install a compost bin

Your kitchen will produce food waste, which can be put to use in the garden. Install a compost bin, and use the results to grow yourself some quality vegetables. You’ll be slashing your food miles in the process, too.

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3. Heat Pumps

A ground-source heat pump is a device which draws energy up from deep in the ground, and uses it to help heat your house. Despite the name, the heat-pump can actually help to cool your property, too. Plus, you won’t have the visual upheaval that comes with solar panels. With that said, they’re tricky to install into existing builds, and their efficiency can vary according to the type of soil heat is being extracted from.

4. Photovoltaic Solar Panels

If you can claim a little bit of the energy that strikes your roof, then you’ll reduce the amount of fossil fuels that you’re indirectly causing to be burned. Over the course of decades, again, the investment in solar panels will pay for itself – and you’ll get the benefit of solar grants to sweeten the deal still further.

Everything You Should Know About Electricity

Electricity, we use it every day but what is it? The dictionary defines it as a form of energy resulting from the existence of charged particles (such as electrons or protons), either statically as an accumulation of charge or dynamically as a current. This may sound confusing, but by breaking it down we can understand how it works. Electricity is used for many everyday things but breakthroughs of how to use it have resulted in many cool inventions, some of which you can explore on thehomesecuritysuperstore.

A Closer Look at Atoms

So, what is electricity? To understand how electricity works we have to break it down, starting with the charged particles. Everything is made of atoms, and these atoms are mostly empty space. Moving around in the empty space are electrons and protons. These each carry an electric charge, electrons being negative and protons being positive. These opposite charges attract each other. The atom is in balance when there are an equal number of protons and electrons. The number of protons determines what kind of element the atom is, and these numbers and elements are shown on the periodic table.

Imagine the atom as having rings around the nucleus, the center of the atom. These rings can hold a certain number of electrons which move constantly around the nucleus which holds the protons. When the rings hold electrons that are attracted to the protons the strength of this attraction can push an electron out of its orbit and even make them shift from one atom to another. This is where electricity occurs.

Traveling in Circuits

Now that we know the basics of electricity, we can look at how it works. For a basic understanding of how electricity travels through circuits and how we use electricity we will look at batteries and light bulbs. Batteries can produce electricity through a chemical substance called an electrolyte.

The battery is attached to two metals, one on either end, and produces a negative charge in one metal and a positive charge in the other metal. When the battery is then connected on either end by a conductor such as an electrical wire the electrical charge is balanced. If you were to attach a light bulb to the wire in between the sides of the battery, the electrical current would then travel through the light bulb to get to the other side of the battery and thus powering the light.

LED-lighting-workplace

Electricity moves through electrical circuits and must have a complete path for the electrons to move through. The switch or power button on electronic devices opens and closes this path. When you turn on the light switch the circuit is closed and electrons can move freely to turn on your lights. When you turn off the switch it opens the circuit not allowing the electrons through and turning off your lights. When light bulbs burn out the small wire connecting the circuit inside the light bulb breaks and stops the flow of electrons.

Final Thoughts

Energy flows through our entire world and understanding how electricity works is just the beginning. Of course, most of the electricity in your life is not connected to a single battery as in the example above, but the understanding on a basic level is very interesting.

Electricity literally powers everything in our lives and a world without it would be very different. Understanding how these things work lets us enrich our knowledge of the world around us and provides us with practical information we can use in our everyday life. Electricity is all around us and is used in more interesting ways than just light bulbs and batteries.

Additional Resource: What Are The Different Types Of Magnetic Susceptibility?