Those were the biggest two immediate payback carbon saving changes on a chart I saw recently.

> turn-up the ventilation when the temperature is low at night and then close-off the house when it’s hot during the day.

I grew up with that tactic in the US South and it worked fine there before air conditioning was common. Works well.
“Whole house fan” is the term we used.

We now accomplish something similar by just forcing air through our attic space on hot days with a simple little computer box fan, the kind in most desktop PCs of a certain age, and it works surprisingly well. That’s basically a way of faking what we need to accomplish next time we replace the roof by putting in proper eave and peak vents so the hot air goes away by convection.

or turn on the air conditioner when we could open the window and turn on a fan

I think there’s a lot of potential for using ventilation to minimize the need for air-conditioning in places with varying temperatures like Melbourne. Melbourne often has hot days and substantially lower temperatures at night so the logical thing to do is to turn-up the ventilation when the temperature is low at night and then close-off the house when it’s hot during the day. I’ve found that to do this most effectively requires exhaust fans of much greater capacity than the usual ceiling exhaust fans and sometimes requires running fans all night. I’d guess that very few people organize ventilation to this degree. It’s interesting that sometimes in Melbourne, the best strategy is to ventilate the house at night so that it’s quite cool in the morning to avoid becoming too hot in the late afternoon, e.g. if the minimum and maximum forecasts are 15 degrees and 35 degrees.

Can I direct you to http://www.concerneedcitizensofwashingmachinedesign.com/blog

Was that set up in response to http://www.wewontgiveyoucontrolofyourwashingmachinesogetlost.com/blog ?

My front loader would be half full of cold water before anything hot came out of the tap anyway.

Sounds like your supply pipe is so long you’re better off not using a hot water system at all. For any hot water needs you have you’d be better off just using the kettle.

I’d have thought most who cared would just do cold washes all the time and use a cold eco friendly powder regardless.

Perhaps not so great with a water temperature of 10 degrees.

I’d have thought most who cared would just do cold washes all the time and use a cold eco friendly powder regardless. The rare occasion you’d actually need to use hot water would amount to such a tiny amount of CO2 I just don’t see it as a core enough issue to worry about on this blog.

I’ve got two kids under 3 and use cloth nappies and don;t even use hot washes on them!

Can I direct you to http://www.concerneedcitizensofwashingmachinedesign.com/blog

;)

We have a Bosch front loader which is pretty good too.

The 10 kg Bosch front loader that I know of only has a cold water inlet and although it is very efficient with water and thus as efficient as it could be while electrically heating the water, it is nowhere near as carbon efficient as it could be if you could feed it hot water from a low-carbon-emitting source.

40*C – yes the savings associated with our population being wiped out from water borne diseases would certainly put a dent in greenhouse emissions that is for sure.

Not many people sterilize their cold water supply so I wouldn’t expect that’s the purpose of having really hot water. And it’s pretty difficult for micro-organisms to multiply unless they have a food source which city water supplies normally don’t provide. If you’re really worried you could avoid drinking the hot water.

My front loader (LG) takes cold inputs for a normal cold wash. They do exist.

It cuts down the choice a little but in any case, if you want a wash temperature any higher than the cold inlet then you’re stuck with electric heating of the cold inlet water.

We have a Bosch front loader which is pretty good too. However I would give a qualified agreement with your comment on washign machines – I don’t know if there is one that meets your requirements and is reasonably priced. You seem to pay more for being green in many respects, not all of which appear justified by the resources requird for the product.

I’d also like to clarify 9 – buy local. While I agree with the food miles principle, transport modes vary greatly by their oil usage. Sea and rail freight use less than a tenth of the oil per tonne-km that trucks use. Thus produce shipped from NZ may have created less emissions than something trucked from remote parts of NSW or QLD.

My front loader (LG) takes cold inputs for a normal cold wash. They do exist.

Buy energy and water efficient appliances. … washing machines

One of my pet peeves about washing machines is that if you want one that is both carbon and water efficient and not rough on clothes then there is no such washing machine available in Australia. The problem with all front-loading washing machines available is that they don’t allow you to use significant amounts of externally-heated water for a warm wash or even allow a normal cold wash. They use electricity to heat up cold water after the clothes are wet. So if you have gas or solar-heated hot water available then you can use little, if any, of this hot water in these washing machines. The washing machine companies make the excuse that if they let you put hot water onto the clothes then it might set stains in them. And being paternalistic they don’t want to allow us to have the choice.

Until the washing machine companies improve this situation and give people a choice, there is still a long way to go in reducing carbon emissions.

BTW, I made my own smart-arse solution to this problem by feeding my hot and cold water hoses into a tee-junction and taking the output to the cold-water inlet of my washing machine. I turn on the hot water (40 degrees C max) for the washing machine to use at the beginning of the wash and then switch to cold water before the rinse starts. I then turn it back to hot water after the machine finishes, ready for the next wash.

BTW2, I suspect that if everyone in Australia turned their hot water supply down to 40 degrees C, there would be a significant reduction in Australia’s CO2 emissions (along with a significant saving in energy cost).

The greenhouse warming difference between animal and plant foods
are measured in factors rather than percents. The paper that
Barry and I did in Australasian science last year
estimates beef creates 317 times more warming than wheat, with
pig meat coming in at 30 times more warming and chicken at about
4 times more warming.

What about protein? Nobody will change their diet if it puts their
health at risk. The recent Eureka prize awarded to Prof. Stephen Simpson has fuelled the idea that low protein diets cause obesity.
His work is supposed to have “revolutionised our understanding of
obesity”. The European Prospective Investigation of Cancer has
huge cohorts totalling 500,000 people in various countries.
The “health conscious” cohort (about 66,000 people in the
UK) consumes the lowest protein percent of any of the
cohorts (pers. comm with researchers, publication soon, the rest
of this paragraph is published data), has the lowest rate of
obesity, has
about half the rate of mortality from all major diseases as the UK average. Its meat eaters consume an average of about 20g per day of meat including about 7g of red meat (women even less).
Its vegetarians consume no meat. Most of its members (80%) eat no fish and about half the dairy products of the normal UK population.

When the smelters are forced to pay a more realistic price for their energy I might think about it.

No argument with any of the other strategies suggested for helping get emissions down.