The electric blanket is back (picture version)

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Open publication - Free publishing - More carbon census

This article was originally posted with a long explanation, but we decided that all you really need to get the point is in the picture above. Enough said?

ISE and the white goods market

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Open publication - Free publishing - More carbon census

This post is to announce our partnership with ISE Appliances, a nice company that makes very high efficiency, long lasting domestic appliances. Their 1607W washing machine (which I have just installed at home, with great pleasure) is guaranteed for 10 years, and is tested to 8,000 cycles - enough for 20 or 30 years in a domestic setting.

To encourage you to buy from this company, when your current appliances need replacement, we will reimburse you the £50 delivery & installation charge. Carbon Census households only! See further details below.

What we like about ISE Appliances

What we like about ISE is the simple insight they've had: that saving energy through appliances is not just about getting an A rating. That's because for most appliances, the potential saving you can expect in terms of energy cost is only in the order of £10 or £20 a year.

So, the bigger issue which nobody is talking about is how long the machine lasts. When it finally conks out, you'll have to incur the environmental cost of :

• Manufacturing a new machine 
• Shipping it to the UK, usually in a container from a long way away
• Delivering it to your house 
• Taking away your old machine 
• Stripping down, recycling or sending the old machine to landfill 

If your machine lasts 20 years instead of 5 years, you save the environmental cost of replacement 3 times over. Or twice over if your machine lasts 7 years, which we think is about the average in the UK these days.

So that's why we think this is a great little company, and why we're happy to send you in their direction with our rebate scheme.

Requirements to qualify for our scheme

• You must have had a Carbon Census at the address on the invoice 
• You must buy through the UK White Goods website 
• Not available in conjunction with other offers (although there are none at the moment, as far as we know) 

I guess that in principle this (like all our offers) is subject to fair use, but we can't think of any ways an offer like this could be used unfairly. If you can think of any, please don't!

Swiftflow - Our new green contractors

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Open publication - Free publishing - More carbon census

New benefits for Carbon Census households

We have today announced a new partnership with Swiftflow, a full service plumbing, electrical and home maintenance supplier. Here are the details:

What you get

• A 10% rebate on any hourly work, e.g. repairs, emergency callouts, etc
• A 5% rebate on any fixed-price work, e.g. a new boiler installation

For example

• £200 replacing your heating controls - we send you a £25 rebate
• £5,000 installing a new boiler - we send you a £250 rebate

What you need to do

• Contact Swiftflow directly when you need them - you don't need to tell us
• Mention CARBON CENSUS when you book the job
• Complete and pay for the job - your contract is with Swiftflow, not us
• Send us a copy of your paid invoice, marked Carbon Census
• We send out your rebate cheque in the post 

How long it lasts

• We intend this offer to be available indefinitely - but it's a new idea, and in all honesty we will need to review progress as we go along. If we extend, amend or alter the offer we will post updates here or on our main website, www.co2census.com, and let you know in our monthly newsletter

Any exclusions?

• No. All Swiftflow services are covered, not just energy saving measures. 
• You can also use this rebate scheme for a broken washing machine, a blocked drain, or anything else that Swiftflow can do for you. 

Key points to qualify

• You must have had a Carbon Census at the address on the invoice
• Your invoice must be marked Carbon Census by Swiftflow
• The offer is not open to the general public, only to households in the Carbon Census.

We could have saved sixpence ...

"Mr Rooney, we could have saved sixpence. We have saved fivepence. But at what cost?" - All that Fall, 1957

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Open publication - Free publishing - More carbon census

This month the government published our latest national CO2 statistics. They are quite interesting to look at, you can read the full press release here or just have a quick look at the chart above.

The headline is that CO2 is going in the right direction and everyone is rather pleased. In total we seem to have cut our national carbon footprint by 28%. That's the kind of good news we like to hear, if things are indeed what they seem.

But of course, things are not what they seem. The first big sleight of hand is to have excluded from the data the only 2 major sectors where carbon emissions are growing massively: shipping (up 17% since 1990) and aviation (up 109%). When these are included, the total UK saving falls to 25%.

But 25% is still good right? Well, it sounds good, but what's strange is that a big chunk of this saving (about a third of it, actually, or about 8% points) has been delivered in the last two years. And because the reporting is all a year in arrears, that means between 2007 and 2009. Hmmm. Can anyone think of anything that might have happened from 2007 to 2009 that would have reduced our carbon footprint by about 8%?

So what are we left with? When you include the boats and planes that refuel in the UK and allow for the recession we've just been having, well then you're left with about a 17% saving over 19 years, or about 0.9% per annum. Somehow that doesn't seem so exciting to me.



Here is the data table as published under, I believe, Kyoto reporting agreements. You'll notice it doesn't include shipping and aviation, we had to dig those out of a footnote to come up with the chart above.