Water heating and Cooking

At the very bottom of this page, we provide the chapter summary for this portion of 'How to Live a Low-Carbon Life'. This provides some of the main conclusions from the material covered in the main text.

Chapter Summary

 Hot water use is creeping upwards as more powerful showers are installed in homes. The average person now uses over 50 litres a day. The emissions from this can be relatively easily reduced by half by taking shorter showers, and not baths, and using slightly lower temperatures. The net impact could reduce the emissions impact of water heating to 0.2 tonnes per person per year. The household cost of water heating could be cut from about £120 per year to little more than £60.

Cooking should be carried out by gas, not electricity. The absolute amounts to be saved are not huge. Cooking uses less than 1000kWh/year in the average home and this number is probably falling as more prepared food is bought and larger numbers of people eat out. Best practice would be to cook as much food as possible in a pressure cooker, which saves large amounts of heat, and to use the microwave to cook pre-prepared foods.