Richard and Julia Lawrence

Our house is of the hard-to-heat variety – an older home, which was almost entirely without insulation when we bought it. There is no mains gas here, so people rely mainly on oil. Saving energy requires some very hard thinking for households in our area, because the easy options just aren't there.

There is very little public transport as well. Nothing is close enough to walk to – the nearest school and shop are over three miles away. There are no cycle lanes and the roads are unsafe for cyclists.

There is a will to change things for the better, and a need for tools that help the community pull together on this.

We focused our own reduction efforts on heating oil, electricity, and petrol. We reduced oil by 6%, electricity by 7%, and petrol by an incredible 25%; across the three areas this added up to a 12% reduction in CO2 in 2010. We saved an estimated 2.3 tonnes of CO₂ in total.

Across the three areas our 2010 savings added up to 12% – about 2.3 tonnes of CO₂ in total

The OWL

The reduction in petrol use was mostly down to our decision to work from home more often, but we also reduced our car journeys for work when trains were available on the route. Savings in electricity came mainly from using appliances more economically, while our fuel oil savings were the result of increasing our roof insulation to 270mm and turning the thermostat down to 15C (easier to get used to than we expected).

Our most unexpected saving came from purchasing an OWL, which tells us how much power we are using. We used it to track down unexpected outgoings, and discovered that we had accidentally left our immersion on a few months before when our boiler stopped working. With this saving it paid for itself (about £30) on first use.