It would be easy to see this as the two extremes of the green agenda. SLACC/TT worries about the two life / civilisation threatening issues of climate change and peak oil; SLDC worries about recycling plastics and card from remote Cumbrian farms and villages – and litter (especially dog poo). There are of course areas of overlap – Clare had just visited an eco-school, which I’m sure SLACC/TT would endorse equally enthusiastically.

Pressure groups exist to form public opinion, and then elected bodies respond to the wishes of their constituents. Pressure groups will of course try to short-circuit the process and influence the elected bodies directly, and it is arguable that elected representatives have a leadership role too. However, after knocking on lots of doors during the recent election campaign, I did hear a lot about dog poo, but very little about climate change. The challenge for councillors who share SLACC/TT’s convictions will be to help them get the message across to ordinary Kendalians.

The owner and the architect had obviously studied the Green Building Bible and taken it to heart. From a “green” perspective the new design had everything, from its re-used brickwork, its low carbon footprint timber, its Thermafleece (local sheeps’ wool) insulation, its use of natural daylight, to its flat sedum roof. The porch was literally in the back garden of the property, and not visible from any public road. The ideal place you might think to experiment with how well “green” building could be blended with a traditional Kendal property.

However, on the other side stood the barrier of being in a conservation area, where there is a rigid policy of not just replacing like with like, but even replacing like with original to correct “mistakes” in the past. For example, people living in property with uPVC windows will not be given permission to replace them with uPVC, if the property traditionally had timber windows.

There was a lively debate, which came to a vote – quite unusual. For the record, the conservationist line won, and the application was recommended for refusal when it comes in front of SLDC. Kendal may be officially a Transition Town, but the transition to green building faces an uphill struggle.

A number of towns announce their Fairtrade town status on the signs at the town boundaries. I think it’s time that Kendal did the same: “Welcome to Kendal – a Fairtrade Town” – and for that matter “A Transition Town”.

Now to canvass opinion, and find out who is responsible…

In use, the aerated shower certainly feels powerful – at full blast, it feels decidedly aggressive.

But now for the science. With the help of a 2 litre measuring jug and a timer from the kitchen, we ran a series of tests to see how much water came out of the shower (lpm = litres per minute). Note: it is quite instructive to see a large jug fill up in under 10 seconds – if you have a family member who spends 10 minutes in a shower that’s a lot of water!

The results are interesting. We have a combi condensing boiler feeding the usual thermostatic mixer unit.

So, the aerated shower does reduce water consumption, but not as much as the manufacturers claim (8 lpm). I’ve posted a review with these figures on their shop website – currently awaiting moderation…

We decided the safest plan was to create four temporary beds, plant potatoes and some spare onion / garlic / shallot sets, and see what happens. If all goes well, the conversion to raised beds will be an autumn project.

As the photos show, the initial results are encouraging. There’s a good spade and a half depth of good soil, and the odd earthworm wriggling around under the weed control fabric suggests that there isn’t anything too poisonous there.

One bed dug, three to go, then wait and see what grows!

TT’s grew as a response to the challenge of Peak Oil – the date when forecasters state that oil production will start to decline irreversibly. As the global economy is built on the relatively low cost and high availability of oil, environmentalists predict that without corrective action, this shortage would have catastrophic effects on the human race.

TTs are one attempt at corrective action at grass roots level – encouraging communities to start to transition now to a low carbon future. Last night’s meeting showed excerpts from In Transition 1 – the movement’s video manifesto, and there was no doubt about the enthusiasm and committment of the fifty or so people in the room.

However, earlier in the day I had watched the Tory prospective parliamentary candidate campaigning in the centre of town. He was attempting to raise the closure of a free informal car park in Kendal as a major issue in the area. If he is right in identifying this as the biggest issue in the town just now, then I think the good folks in TT have some way to go to winning hearts and minds of the people in the street in Westmorland.

All the experts suggesr that the best way to go for this sort of house is external wall insulation (EWI) – like putting a tea cosy on a tea pot – and our house would appear to be perfect for this treatment. One of our neighbours’ houses has had its walls ‘thickened’ in the past, presumably by EWI (the work was done before the present owners bought the house). There are a number of proprietary products on the market, and the work would appear to be easily within the grasp of the average local builder.

Unfortunately, trying to find someone accredited to carry out the work is proving difficult. You can find installers’ websites which claim they do EWI, but a phone call shows they actually only do cavity wall insulation. The government is pouring grant money into cavity wall insulation, so the suspicion must be that installers have decided to concentrate where easy money is to be made.

Given that 1 in 4 homes in the UK have solid walls, this would appear to be a very short sighted approach. Our quest continues … watch this space.

The companies involved would all hotly deny that they have sold out figuratively, and that their ethical values have been preserved intact. There are certainly some advantages – you see a heck of a lot more Green & Black’s in shops than you used to in their independent days.

But how long can the ethical principles of a small company survive as a division of a multinational? Time will tell…

And the answers? a-5 b-1 c-4 d-3 e-2

We’ve just had a letter from them to tell us that they’re bringing their prices down in line with the falling market prices. Our bill is made up of a ‘per kWh’ usage component, plus a ‘per day’ standing charge. I would have thought that a genuinely ‘green’ company would do everything it could to minimise the standing charge ,and maximise the usage charge, so as to encourage customers to reduce their usage as much as possible.

Sadly, as the graph shows,  it appears that Good Energy don’t share this view…