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A round-up of self-sufficiency news from this week’s papers.

Solar Panel Loans are set to make home-based electricity generation more affordable, says The Independent. Further:

…people who generate electricity via photovoltaic solar panels, wind turbines, hydro power or anaerobic digestion will receive up to 36p per kW/h of electricity, even if they use the power in their homes rather than feed it into the national grid. An extra 6p will be paid for every unit supplied to the grid.

So even if you don’t supply power to the grid you get paid. This could finally encourage mass adoption of solar and wind power.

The Telegraph reports from the house that costs £60 a year to heat yet still boasts ‘hot tubs, a sauna, a state of the art cooker’ and even a banana tree that’s kept warm enough to provide fruit, despite being built not on the equator but in the middle of the Cotswolds. Called Tranquility, the eco-house could be a blueprint for future sustainable design.

The Guardian, meanwhile, is tempting first-time growers with five easy crops for beginners, including potatoes, garlic and chard. The instructions are short and non-challenging, and ideal for the novice.

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We have a cute chicken doorstop at home. It’s like a chicken Tetrapak, made of fabric and filled with rice, that keeps the dining room door from flapping in the breeze.

It always gets comments, so it’s great to see that The Guardian has spotted their genius and published instructions for making your own. It looks very easy, and needs only a little bit of fabric cut from old clothes, some cotton and needles and about an hour of your time.

Although we already have one, I’m quite tempted to have a go at making some more for other rooms in the house or, as the paper suggests, as gifts for friends.

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Want to progress beyond a back yard for keeping your chickens and growing your potatoes? Then it’s time to buy into a proper smallholding. The trouble is they don’t often come up in the local paper, but these sites can help.

Greenshifters has smallholdings both for sale and for rent, and a separate category in which wannabe owners can post ‘wanted’ ads. It feels far more friendly and approachable than a big commercial estate agency, but the self-posted nature of the adverts is variable, and you get far more information on some properties than others. There’s a good UK focus, which puts it ahead of better-known alternatives like eBay, and we love the way that there are RSS feeds for each category so you can keep an eye on just the properties for sale, if that’s your need, without logging onto the site every day. At the time of writing there were 71 properties for sale, sortable by location, price and, perhaps most usefully, size.

Rural Smallholdings Magazine handles more than just property sales – it’s also a good place to look for breeders if you need to stock your fields and barns with animals. Nonetheless it has a small number of smallholdings for sale, a property of the week, and some rental opportunities. These can be delivered to you by RSS, but be aware that if you subscribe to this service you’ll also get editorial features delivered in the same stream. That’s not necessarily a bad thing as the content is informative and well-written, but it means it’s not as clear-focussed as Greenshifters.

The Smallholding Centre is an agency based in south Wales, specialising in smallholdings in that area. It also deals in cottages, equestrian properties, barns for conversion and properties with money-making opportunities. The site itself is in need of some serious TLC as the design is very dated and looks decidedly hand-cranked. The index could do with re-thinking, too, as your main link to the properties on offer is a list of price ranges in £100,000 bands from ‘under £200,000′ to ‘over £500,000′. We’d prefer divisions on the basis of property type or location. Nonetheless, if you’re looking to escape the cities and start afresh in Wales, this is a good place to start looking.

Primelocation is the biggest site here dedicated to selling property, but it’s probably better known for its handling of regular houses and flats than it is for farms and land. Nonetheless, there is an entry for just that in its ‘UK buy’ menu bar, allowing you to search available properties on location, price range, property type and freeform keywords. It offers to keep you updated with emails of matching results or your can subscribe to an RSS feed of the same, and it plots advertised properties on an overview map alongside its listings so you can see at a glance which are of interest. It’s not quite so focused on smallholdings as Greenshifters, and you may have to spend some time scrolling past irrelevant building plots and development opportunities, but as all adverts are posted by agents the write-ups are generally comprehensive and likely to be very accurate.

eBay has a wide selection of properties for sale, from decommissioned nuclear silos to whole villages and towns. To find smallholdings, you’re best off searching the Residential Property category on the term ‘farm’. Our search turned up 43 results at the time of writing, which is impressive, but many were for overseas property, with a particular slant on Bulgaria, and there were a few holiday lets in there, too, which was not at all relevant. Still, if you’re happy to pick your way through the less interesting entries it’s a good place to keep an eye on, and as you can save your search as an RSS feed you don’t need to keep returning day after day.

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Found this excellent site full of instructions for making pop-up cards – the kind of thing that would cost £4 or more in the shops. For anyone thinking of making their own Christmas cards, it’s got instructions for turkeys, snowflakes, snowmen and Christmas trees. All you need is a printer to print the templates, scissors to cut them out and some glue to put them together.

It’s been put together by Robert Sabuda, whose name means nothing to me, but in the US it would appear he’s a childrens’ book creator, so I guess he’s something pretty big. Either way, these are really inspirational, and although they’ll take some time to make, they could be just what we were looking for.

Only this weekend we were planning a trip out to pick up supplies and ideas for this year’s cards…

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• Hens eggs exploding because of hot-air balloons
  "Hens are dropping dead on a free-range farm because hot-air balloons and low-flying aircraft are causing their eggs to explode inside them."

  Apparently the sound of the burners firing sends them into a panic. They run for cover, bumping into each other, and their eggs break internally. Scary stuff.

  (tags: chickens)
• London mayor promotes growing your own food
  "Just under a third of London’s total area is either green space or water. There is also a large amount of roof space that can be used to great effect. We have the space available, we just need to use it!"

  What an excellent idea. A politically-backed drive from the mayor to use London's green spaces to grow food locally, rather than shipping it into the supermarkets.

  (tags: self-sufficiency london)

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How will you power your gadgets when the lights go out? We consume more energy than ever these days, and with that comes the potential for brown-outs and black-outs, plunging us into darkness and making our gadgets worse than useless.

And while running your own home turbine may make you immune to power cuts, it only makes issues of energy conservation are ever more important. Every minute of listening to a mains-powered radio on the electricity you produced yourself could mean ten minutes less of light at night.

So it’s fortunate that clockwork technology, made popular by the introduction of the Baygen wind-up radio, is coming on in leaps and bounds, and it’s now possible to power all but the most esoteric of everyday gadgets with a quick burst of hand cranking. Here, we’ve rounded up five essential clockwork add-ons to keep close at hand.

The Cyba-Lite Wind-Up Lantern is a powerful, bright lantern that’s perfect for camping or lighting up the greenhouse when you’re doing some after-work planting. There are two intensity settings – low and high – allowing you to maximise either running time or illumination, with a minute of winding giving up to 10 minutes of light. A bundled adaptor lets you charge it from a car cigarette lighter, to passively feed the batteries as you drive to wherever you’ll use it. When not in use, the lamp part retracts into the base, keeping it safe from knocks and bumps. Expect to pay around £30.

There are more wind-up radios than trash tracks in the charts these days, but with features and prices to suit every pocket and need, there’s sure to be one that meets your requirements. You want digital? Check out the £99 Freeplay Devo Portable. Too expensive? Then how about the budget, FM-only Solar Wind-up Radio, which as you’ll guess from the name includes a solar panel. It costs £10.99. The best looking, though, has to be the Eton FR200 (right), which comes in a choice of red or blue, costs £24.99 and includes a built-in torch.

At £4.95, this wind-up mobile phone charger is nothing short of a bargain. It comes with five different adaptors that should happily interface with 99.9% of current phones and PDAs (there’s a list on the retailer’s website). It’ll also charge an iPod, with the addition of a £1.50 adaptor, which is truly impressive. So how long does it run for? Well, according to the specs, a 60-second crank will give you two minutes’ talktime or an hour’s-worth of standby, so while it’s not a replacement for proper socket-and-plug charging it’s great for emergency breakdowns.

You’d have to have a pretty big car to fit the Cyba-Lite in your glove box, but a wind-up torch, like this handy £3.99 one from Robert Dyas (which comes bundled with a free keyring light) should be small enough to fit just about anywhere. A minute of winding should provide enough power for 30 minutes of illumination from its three built-in LEDs. With no need for batteries, though, we have to wonder why Robert Dyas is trying to sell Duracells alongside it.

Finally, a wind-up watch is a total no-brainer. There’s something special about tending to it, caring for it and feeding it with a little twist of the winder each morning. Wind-up watches cost next to nothing when bought second hand (no pun intended) and you can pick up a nice one on eBay for less than £10. They’re usually older, and have a little bit of history, but that all adds to the charm. The history of mine? It’s an old Soviet propaganda watch, complete with hammer and sickle, shipped straight from Siberia, for £10.50 all in. It looks and feels cheap, but that’s half the fun.

What are your favourite clockwork or wind-up gadgets? Leave a comment below.

Technorati Tags:
electricity+generation, energy+efficiency, energy+saving, home+generation, freeplay, radio, cyba-lite, self+sufficiency

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Gas and electricity prices are on the up, leading many consumers to look for an alternative supplier. Yet it seems there are just as many sites vying to give you that information as there are energy companies clamouring for an ever-increasing share of your cash. If you want to be self-sufficient, saving money is a must.

Here we’ve picked five to help you make the choice. All of them made the same recommendations once we’d filled in their questionnaire about our gas and electricity usage, indicating that they work from a very similar, or perhaps identical, database.

uSwitch is probably the best known of all the utility comparison sites. It was one of the first, and over the years has expended beyond gas and electric to compare loans, insurance, mortgages and digital TV.

The questionnaire for judging the best gas and electric suppliers is couched in simple terms (electricity consumption questions include examples, like ‘family home’, ‘working couple’ and ‘second home’ to cut through the jargon) and you have the option of saying you have no details handy when it asks for your current consumption. Switching advice can then be made on the basis of price, recommendations from users, or a supplier’s green credentials.

It remains an excellent resource, but there is now so much competition in this field, that uSwitch needs no longer be your first and only choice.

Simply Switch, like uSwitch, goes beyond simple utilities to include heating insurance, mortgages and business savings, among other things. Our current energy supplier wasn’t listed among its choices, despite featuring on every other comparison service here. Should this happen to you, it recommends a series of broadly similar competitors: find your supplier in the list and substitute it for the competitor. Sadly there was no equivalent for our supplier, either, at which point we were advised to call the company’s freefone number.

Assuming your supplier is included, we really liked the way this site went about estimating your consumption based on the size of your house and how many people live there. The other sites do something very similar, but it’s more obvious here and great for first timers.

Recommendations can be made on the basis of price, green credentials, Internet administration tools or capped prices, and filtered to include all products, or only those for which you can apply.

Money Supermarket has by far the simplest questionnaire of the lot. You can take either the detailed exam, where you’ll enter the same kind of information as you would for any other site here, or opt for the simple survey, where you do nothing more than choose your supplier. You can optionally change your consumption details, but leaving them set to the defaults gave the same results in our test as running through the detailed option. Very impressive.

Once you’ve switched your utilities, you can go on to compare travel, phones and broadband, among other things. We also like the gas and electricity price rise calendar, which shows who has just changed their prices, and whether they went up or down. Check this before following anyone’s recommendations, as opting for a supplier who has yet to revise their prices could see you switching just before they get a whole lot more expensive.

Money Supermarket is very open about who pays it commission for touting their products, and it was good to see a link to this information right beside the recommended tariffs.

Energy Helpline sounds like a government body, but it’s actually just another independent comparison site. Like the others featured here, it can estimate your consumption if you don’t have your bills to hand, and it lets you do this in one of two ways: the simple way, with only two questions (the size of your home for electric and gas), or the detailed way in which you tell it how often you cook, what kind of house you have and how you use your energy. It uses similar plain-English terms to those of uSwitch, and supplements them with an option for running a ‘very warm house’.

Recommendations can be made on service ratings, green credentials, Internet features or – one we particularly like – extended call centre working hours, so you can have your queries sorted out whenever they crop up, not just when it’s convenient for your supplier.

Energy Choices is a little less flexible than the other suppliers profiled here, as it expects you to know how much gas and electricity you consume, by entering either the total cost of your bills, or the actual kWh used on a yearly, quarterly or monthly basis.

That point aside, it was a quick and easy single-screen process to get to our recommendation, and we liked the way that although we asked for dual fuel, where gas and electric are quoted from the same supplier, it suggested very clearly we might also like to take a look at an alternative option of buying from two separate recommended suppliers, which would save us money over the course of the year.

Inclusion in this list is no indication of endorsement. Other utility comparison services are available.

Technorati Tags:
energy+efficiency, energy+saving, saving

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The saying ‘it’s not easy being green’ no longer rings true. The options for buying cleaner, more ethical, lower carbon products are growing by the day. So much so, in fact, that there are almost too many options. Here is Blagger’s pick of the top five online ethical or eco superstores.

Nigel’s Eco Store is one of the longest-running online ethical outlets, and it’s well stocked with everyday essentials, like detergent-free washing products, quick boiling kettles and environmentally-friendly pencils. It’s run from Brighton by, not surprisingly, Nigel, who maintains a blog highlighting events and new products. It was also named winner in the shopping category of Yahoo!’s Finds of the Year for 2007.

The Offset Shop is great for those times when you absolutely positively have to shop from one particular retailer, like Sainsbury’s, Boots or PC World. If you go to those stores – and dozens more – by clicking through the links here, it offsets 1kg of carbon for every £2 you spend. There are even car insurance deals which offset a massive 2900kg, equivalent to the amount pumped out by the average family car in a year.

Ethical Superstore runs along much the same lines as Nigel’s Eco Store, and has direct links to your favourite ethical brands, such as Ecover and Cafedirect, so you can do your shopping at speed. We particularly liked the charity gifts section, allowing you to donate mosquito nets, seeds and solar-powered water purifiers to the third world any time of the year, not just at Christmas.

GuardianEcoStore is a re-branded eco-outlet running under the banner of the UK’s most stylish newspaper. Pricing is available in pounds, euros and dollars, but this is more than a money-making affiliate store, as direct links to Tread Lightly, where it encourages readers to make a weekly eco pledge, shows that the environment really matters to this paper.

Ecotopia Eco shop has some wonderfully quirky products, like the return to sender labels specifically for junk mail, mens’ solar shavers and bags made in the Philippines from gathered rubbish. The only thing we don’t like is the delivery charges that apply on orders up to £100 (as with GuardianEcoStore). At Nigel’s Eco Store it’s only £75.

Technorati Tags:
ethical+shopping

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For this week’s Five Friday Favourites, we’re taking a look at video and audio podcasts that cover growing and making your own food, plus one that looks at general money-saving tips.

The links below connect directly to the audio and video streams, which you can subscribe to using iTunes or an RSS reader and listen to or view using your computer or a video-capable media player, such as the iPod.

Martin’s Weekly MoneySaving Musings (right), is a video edition of money-saving expert Martin Lewis’ weekly email. It’s tightly UK-focused, so great for Brit subscribers, and packed full of useful material contributed by both Martin himself and users of his busy forums. Video quality is fair, but neither the podcast itself, nor the presentation style, are up to the standard we’ve come to expect after watching shows like Delicious TV Vegetarian or gardenfork.tv (both below).

Tales from Terry’s Allotment is an audio-only programme, so is great for having on in the background while you do other things. It’s a gentle stroll around Terry’s Welsh allotment – as the name would suggest – looking at what’s currently growing, and what jobs need doing. All recorded on site you get a great feeling of being outdoors with Terry and his interviewer and again, being UK-based, it’s well-suited to British gardeners who may be doing the same jobs on their own plots. Terry Walton will already be known to some subscribers from the Jeremy Vine show on BBC Radio 2.

Delicious TV’s Totally Vegetarian (left) doesn’t ever stray into the garden – except for the odd barbeque – but this American video podcast is great for anyone who wants to cook their own food. It’s purely vegetarian, and the recipes are simple enough for anyone to tackle (although as presenter Terri frequently makes use of a blender you may need one yourself to follow along). Being American-produced, some ingredients have different names to the ones we use, and some measurements are given as cups, which we don’t often use for measuring in the UK, but either way it’s a well-produced, well-presented cookery show that’s as good as anything you’d find on British TV. The recipes themselves can be found on the associated website.

Alternative Kitchen Garden is another audio-only podcast, and like Tales from Terry’s Allotment is UK-produced, so all of the tips are relevant to British subscribers at the time of year you’re listening. The advice is no-nonsense, simple, and easy to follow, although the presentation, by Emma, is a little dry. The only trouble is, the 6th January issue covered things that, although still current, you should have started working on between 21 and 26 December, which is a little late. More information can be found on the show’s weblog.

gardenfork.tv takes you right from the plot to the table, with both gardening and cooking, and branches out into all sorts of DIY tips, like how to strip paint, get rid of beetles and take photos. The style is laid back and the recipes simple, and we like the re-use of an old camper oven for doing the baking, which is true to the spirit of Blagger-style self-sufficiency and making do. The associated episode blog includes all of the recipes included in the shows. More than a few appearances are also made by the presenter’s dogs, which although perhaps not the best example of kitchen hygiene, give the show a quirky life all of its own.

Technorati Tags:
cooking, garden, gardening, self sufficiency, self+sufficiency

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