Sustainable Ways to Make Old Homes Cosy for Winter

With the Met Office forecasting the UK’s coldest winter for five years, Mukti Mitchell - home energy saving expert and author of The Guide to Low Carbon Lifestyles - has top tips to share for making old homes warm and cosy for the months ahead.
Mukti is Director of CosyHome Company, a leading specialist in sustainable retrofitting solutions for period properties. CosyHome has just been shortlisted for two environmental awards for its work restoring the iconic heritage village of Clovelly, renowned worldwide as one of the UK’s most picturesque, historic villages.  The company was shortlisted for the “Home” category of last month’s P.E.A. Awards and for the "Environmental Champion" category of Devon's prestigious DEBI Awards (to be announced on Thursday 24th November).
CosyHome’s exemplary insulation of all 120 properties in Clovelly (having just completed Phase One) provides a timely model for how old buildings – and even whole villages - can be restored and insulated so they are warm for winter, preserve their beauty and character, save energy and protect the environment, while also reducing heating bills.  In addition, the sustainable insulation techniques employed meet the ‘e-rating’ energy performance standards soon to be legally required by landlords renting out properties.

Mukti’s ten top sustainable ways to insulate your old home are as follows:
1. Draught-proof your doors and windows, which lose 30% of household heat.  Old properties do need ventilation though, so only treat doors and windows with noticeable draughts.
 
2. Top up your loft insulation to 300mm (12 inch) thickness.  Rockwool is the cheapest, however Thermafleece sheep wool insulation is more efficient, lasts far longer and supports British farmers.  Typical lofts lose 10% of a home’s heat; this is reduced to just 3% after a top-up.

3. Double or secondary glazing can save 70% of heat lost through windows. Rotten windows can be replaced with double glazing, but for beautiful windows in good condition secondary glazing offers nearly the same efficiency, yet with better sound proofing, while also preserving their character.  ‘Advanced secondary glazing’ (developed by CosyHome), comprises of Plexiglas fitted to existing sashes which is more thermally efficient and virtually invisible.

4. Insulate sloping ceilings - if your bedroom ceilings have a sloping part this is usually because plasterboard has been fitted allowing cold external air to circulate above to ventilate the rafters, which can lose a phenomenal amount of heat.  To prevent this, insulation boards can be fitted on the inside and re-plastered.  Called “Room-In-Roof” insulation, this is more costly than the earlier measures but makes a big difference to warmth in the room.

5. Have Radiator Enhancers fitted behind your radiators.  These heat-reflective panels stop heat going into the walls and reflect it into the room where you want it.  Estimated to save 7% on heating.

6. Seal up the gaps in your floorboards and skirtings. CosyHome Company offers a long-term solution using marine deck caulking, which is completely unnoticeable.

7. Fit thermal lining to your curtains.  The speed of heatloss, called a “u-value”, is 5.5 for single glazing, 1.8 for double or secondary glazing and just 1.0 with lined curtains – so curtains save half the heatloss.

8. External wall insulation (EWI).  Ideal for rendered or slate hung walls, EWI consists of insulation boards such as Celotex (synthetic) or Diffutherm (wood fibre board) glued to the external walls, covered with wire mesh and re-rendered.  EWI has no risk of condensation being trapped behind it, protects the wall, and reduces its u-value from 2.0 to as low as 0.2, majorly effecting warmth.  Costs start from around £10,000 for one dwelling.

9. Internal Wall Insulation (IWI).  If you can’t fit external wall insulation because your home is listed, or have stone walls you don’t want to render, internal wall insulation can be highly effective.  The technique is similar to EWI, and insulation boards are glued to internal walls and covered with plasterboard.  IWI is sensitive because if done incorrectly condensation and dry rot can get behind it, so an architect’s specification is recommended.
 
10. The last measure is floor insulation.  If you have cellars you’re lucky because insulation can easily be fitted up between the ceiling joists and covered with netting or boarding.  Otherwise floorboards need to be taken up and insulation fitted below.  Solid floors can be excavated and insulation put below new floorboards.
 
Mukti Mitchell - who once sailed a micro eco yacht around Britain (launched from Clovelly) - is aiming to catalyse an insulation revolution across the UK.  “Insulating all Britain’s homes would reduce the national carbon footprint by 10%,” he says. “While CosyHome is ambitiously aiming for over 50% growth per year, one company could never insulate even 1% of Britain’s 27 million homes, so we hope other companies will copy our techniques. Meantime, with freezing temperatures predicted across the UK in the coming weeks, now is the time to insulate your period home and get it cosy for winter.  And you can do so safe in the knowledge that you’ll also be preserving its beauty, saving energy and money, and helping to avert climate change.”
          
More information
For more info about CosyHome Company and sustainable insulation solutions for period homes, visit: www.cosyhomecompany.co.uk  For more info about Mukti Mitchell and the Guide to Low Carbon Lifestyles visit: www.lowcarbonlifestyle.org.uk

Kinkeling Community Garden– Fruit trees and Music make the world go around

This story begins back in 1998 when a friend and I, being young and naïve, bought some land in the Nuimi district of The Gambia in West Africa. I had only meant to have a quick adventure, get some headspace and learn some traditional African drumming. Anyway, we teamed up with some local Gambians and started working together on this four-acre plot of semi wild scrub. The land lies on the estuary of the river Gambia and it supports an amazing array of birdlife, as well as some huge baobab trees, a giant teak, lots of palms, and an area of rice field.

I fell in love with this place, where life felt very simple and where we were able to work without the sense of bureaucracy that I was used to in the UK. At that time, aged 23, I knew little and learned a lot. On and off, I spent seven years visiting, digging wells, drumming, planting trees and inviting visitors to camp with me over the winter months. We helped to support the maintenance of the project through our humble means. Then came studies, two children, and life. I left my Gambian friend Kabiro and his family living there, I didn't visit for a long time, and lost touch.

When I returned earlier this year after a seven-year absence, I had no idea what to expect.
What I found was that the place has now become a community garden and is used by several local families. Although many of the wells have fallen in, and the fence has half disappeared, the trees we planted fifteen years ago are now producing coconuts, mangoes, cashews, and other fruits. There is a sense of both dilapidation, and vibrant growth, and I hope and believe, that a crowd funding campaign can help to create a sustainable sense of growth within this small community. 

I enjoy getting my hands in the earth, and I am also a musician. One of the things that I love about working in West Africa, is that instead of taking a break to collapse into a chair, people often drum, dance and sing to generate energy. Now that I’ve grown up a bit, I feel that I have an opportunity to do something really positive, and to give my energy to a place and to people who don't have the same benefits and opportunities as we have in the 'West'. If I can keep drumming and dancing I’m sure it will all work out.

I don’t feel that it’s about ‘us’ helping ‘them’. I feel it’s about helping each other. There’s a lot we can learn from Africa; how to smile in the face of adversity, how to work to a rhythm instead of to a deadline, how to make do with little and how to be in community.

I'm now hatching plans, not just to maintain this wonderful resource, but to grow it and help to make new and exciting things happen. We are raising money through a crowd funding campaign to set up accommodation on site and a borehole for clean drinking water. With these two things, we can improve both the quality of life for the Gambians involved, and create opportunities for visitors from abroad to come and support and experience the joys and challenges of Gambian life. From the amazing birdlife, to the goats that roam and destroy the gardens - From the traditional Mandinka drumming and dancing to the fixation of the youth of living in Europe - From the battle to stave off the Sahara desert, to the peace and tranquility of the nearby Atlantic Ocean, there is a lot to be experienced.

Some of the things we want to bring to the project in the future are:  Facilitate and encourage organic vegetable growing, develop the forest garden, start a community tree nursery, explore alternative technologies, and support local musicians and craftspeople.

Please help to do this by contributing what you can! Every little helps, and you needn’t go away empty handed either. We are offering loads of great perks including a range of drums made by our favorite wood carver in The Gambia, kinkeling calendars full of bright images from the garden, music downloads to keep you dancing, and much more.

Thanks for your support.

You can support the Kinkeling Community Garden - Sound Of The Gambia project through the crowd funding campaign here (until 7 December 2015).
Allan Kerr, a musician based in Devon, UK. He performs with the band Ombiviolum who have played at the Resurgence Summer camp.

Salvation Within Paradox

Sara Zaltash reviews FutureNOW – the pioneering Spiritual Ecology conference with Tim Freke, Chloe Goodchild, Joe Hoare, Peter Owen Jones and Satish Kumar.
We met there on a grey Saturday drenched with autumn rains, perhaps 120 of the West Country’s bright-eyed devout; activists and herbalists, healers and meditators, growers and thinkers, each seeking the sound and vision offered by the pioneering pilgrims on the panel. As I looked around and locked eyes with a neighbour over here or smiled at a stranger over there, I knew that I had personally been called by the promise of a community coalescing around a certain truth: “that unless you have some roots in a spiritual practice that holds life sacred and encourages joyful communion with all your fellow beings, facing the enormous challenges ahead becomes nearly impossible.”

Ecology. Economy. Humanity. Spirit. Challenges indeed for a consciousness that is making leaps toward to collective realisation everyday. The Internet, of course, has gifted me the above quotation from Joanna Macy’s contribution to the community-defining collection of essays Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth, edited by contemporary Sufi teacher Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee. At futureNOW I asked myself the same question as in present times: if all beings were truly to be given equal internet access, then why would some choose to become more enlightened than others? Perhaps because enlightenment is shrouded in mysticism, in mandala graphics and incense smoke, and social conditioning against such motifs is so strong that even a geezer like Russell Brand has to mind his patchoulis and quantum realities if he’s to get his meaning made. I confess that I am from another community too: I am an artist, an e’er-do-well and erstwhile academic. But that’s alright. Queuing up for morning tea I asked Will from Wiltshire, a university lecturer in environmental literature, whether he knew anyone else at this rock star convention of spiritual ecology leaders. “Not a soul,” he said, “But that’s alright. It’s important to be brave sometimes.”

Brave words indeed flowed from the radical Church of England priest and BBC TV presenter Rev. Peter Owen Jones, from stand-up philosopher and acclaimed author Tim Freke, and from the ultimate guru of this movement, the environmental activist, magazine editor and spiritual guide, Satish Kumar. These men spoke in turn about the need for humanity to relinquish its delusion of dominion over the planet and about accepting the ultimate mystery of existence. Kumar spoke about the loving sacredness of the soil, of society, of sacrifice – the necessary sacrifices of the mother, of the planet and of ourselves. Inspirational speakers, Rev. Jones and Kumar both upheld the twin peaks of land and spirit in their humbly ad libbed sermons, calling for the acknowledgement of the essential present-ness of our future responsibility to “eco”, our home. Bursting with insight, Freke offered paradoxological thinking as a salvation from the impotence that may come from abiding the mystery of all-being.  A proponent of love as a political act, Freke claimed “You Are The One” in a perfect paradox of consciousness consciously recognising itself, of humanity living its own dream.

As an artist-thinker, I enjoy a bit of practical guidance to usher in my cerebral shift. Noting that only in Western cultures does laughter need to be externally provoked, Bristol’s own laughing yogi, Joe Hoare, led us in several easy standing laughter practices. Stellar spiritual vocalist and teacher Chloe Goodchild was full of her own bright chuckles as she gathered us under the wings of her naked voice practice. Leading singing meditations throughout the day, Goodchild opened and closed the proceedings with her adaptation of Rumi’s well-loved verse: ‘Beyond ideas of right and wrong doing there is a field, I’ll meet you there.” Goodchild’s field is a singing field; in that field we met and she shared the seeds of various Eastern spiritual practices that combined with the voice carry our hidden gift for future generations.

Resounding from that day like the oft-rung meditation bell are some provocative unanswered questions from the closing Q&A session: when does mysticism first appear in children? How can we revere the earth? Are species other than humans involved in the evolution of consciousness? Perhaps the answer, as Hoare offered, is that ‘when you know how to listen, everything is your guru’. Rev. Jones spoke about the need to keep talking, to create space for conversations and community to bring about the changes we wish to be. For a novice pilgrim like me, practical guidance to walk in nature, to wash in the dew and to learn to bake my own bread were as comforting as the evolution of consciousness that is enacted by these actions towards personal, spiritual and environmental empowerment. The challenge of living a peaceful, respectful and unified future now is as real as our fields of land, of work and of energy. Let’s meet in that field, in the future, now.

FutureNOW was presented by Conscious Frontiers and took place on Saturday 8th November 2014 at Trinity Centre, Bristol. For more information visit FutureNow

Sara Zaltash is a British-Iranian live artist and performer. www.sarazaltash.com

Walking The Talk

Steps towards a sustainable life.

For too long now, or maybe for just the right amount of time, I have been living in a way that I knew was not right for me.

To give you a bit of background – before I became the Care Taker at The Yarner Trust I was a gardener and nurseryman. I spent a good 10 years tending to plants, digging, conditioning soil and trying to put plants first whilst caring for the local environment.

I then reached the point when I wanted to know more, to get both the big picture view and the microscopic insight into the workings of a plant and their place in the wider scheme of things.

For me, that meant going as a mature student to university. I had scraped through school and college and was more interested in travelling, partying and visiting my friends who had gone off to uni in various parts of the country than studying for another three years. But now felt like the right time. I don't know who was more freaked out by the sight of me in a white lab coat – my mates and family who had gotten used to me as a bit of Worzel Gummage meets Jack the lad or me? Whenever I caught sight of myself in the reflection of the fume cabinet with my goggles and lab coat on I would wonder if I was in an episode of Quantum Leap and was catching a view of me in another person's body.

Sitting in class doing quantum physics, macro evolution or organic chemistry I just had to keep reminding myself that I had come into this with nothing to lose and with the mentality that you can do anything you put your mind too even if you had failed GCSE maths.

Sandwiching in a year at Kew, a plant-collecting trip to Puerto Rico and a place on an EU funded biodiversity mapping project – alongside being taught by some of the most distinguished lecturers in plant diversity – made me aware of four things:

1. The world we live on is facing an extremely difficult future
2. There appears to be very little work being done to create realistic solutions to the problem of global change
3. The entire human race and the whole biological world depends completely on the plant kingdom
4. The only way to make a real impact is to practice what you preach (or hear)

For me, this makes working at the Yarner Trust the perfect job. More specifically, I can help to organise and run courses that offer practical solutions that contribute towards leading a more sustainable lifestyle. I can also take what I’ve learned about the importance of respecting the natural world into schools, colleges, prisons, business forums, garden societies and anywhere else where there are people in a position to make a positive difference.

Finally, I can use a compost toilet, grow my own food, produce some of my own energy and hopefully by the end of my time here be able to build a sustainable home which will have a minimal impact on the Earth's resources.

Jon will be doing a sponsored walk along The Green London Way, 28 May – 2 June 2012. More information here.

Jon Every is a botanist, working as Care Taker and Education Officer at The Yarner Trust. 

Photograph: Ferns by Colleen Slater