Unless you are a certain flame-haired supermodel who can afford a flat in London and a first-class commute to lectures, shared accommodation is a necessity during university. I have to say my experience of shared living was mixed: communal baking, charades and having friends around were excellent; dying rats under the floor boards and shelling out for monthly bills; not so excellent.

If you have ever had to suffer the stench of a decomposing rat, you have my sympathies. Equally, if you have tried to explain to a housemate why having four light bulbs on in one bedroom is a waste; I also feel your pain. There is an element of reason involved, of course. Walking around the house with three jumpers, two t-shirts, gloves, tights, trousers and several pairs of socks on at once is definitely no fun (believe me, I would know), but it is surely important to save money– and the planet too. If SJP of Sex and the City had practiced energy-saving initiatives, she could have bought more shoes instead of needing a bail out from Big. And who wouldn’t want more shoes, or anything else for that matter?

There are many ways to cut down on unnecessary energy use but measuring your electricity use is a good place to start. There are ways to get free measurement devices that plug in and calculate your costs . Oxford University have also created an imeasure which is more work but still provides results as you can find out which appliances eat up your money and use them less. One ‘out there’ suggestion is to use cling-film for secondary glazing – tape it around your windows and then hair dryer it taut. I did this to keep a ladybird infestation out, but it works just as well to keep heat in. Tin foil behind a radiator may help too; recycle foil take-out boxes to be optimally sustainable. Alternatively, sign up to People & Planet’s Big Green Makeover project and you’ll get all the training and resources you need to help fellow students do this for free!

I also recommend outlining the ‘Landlords Energy Saving Allowance’ to your landlord. Up to £1,500 can be claimed against tax each year to improve a property’s eco-credentials. Who knows, there may be some green landlords out there, so spread the word. Encourage your landlord to install better insulation on the roof or around water pipes, and point them in the direction of claims information.

There is one caveat to implementing energy saving suggestions: the rest of your household. Lead by example, gentle persuasion, reminders, and advice as the first steps to switching off appliances and turning down the heating, which can then be backed by technological solutions. Forgetting to turn something off is not an excuse anymore. There is of course an App that can remotely turn off electronics – can you believe that? If nothing else works, try positive conditioning. Get housemates to turn off lights or computers then surreptitiously give them a sweet. Repetition is key. Soon energy saving behaviour will occur with just the vague memory of a delicious sweet for encouragement. In a nod to Thorndike, like rats pressing a lever, those lights go off.

The latter suggestion may not be such a good idea (though I’d love to try it just to see if it works!) but it is definitely hugely beneficial to try and implement energy saving initiatives around the house you’re letting. If nothing else, try it for a month as evidence for the months to come, and watch your bills go down. Before you feel the pinch of huge bills, try turning to this advice. It just might help!

Katie

Neus Giner Garcia attended the official Transition Network training in North Howe in February. Read about how she got on.

From my own experience, it is not only knowledge that you gain through trainings and gatherings.

I did gain a lot though, the Transition Training at North Howe increased my knowledge in Peak Oil and Climate Change but, most important, the skills in spreading that knowledge. As they say, the knowledge has been there for ages, and so far it is obvious that catastrophic messages do not have the needed impact in terms of behavioural change. The key issue, they say, is to sell the sizzle, not the sausage. The issues of Climate Change and Peak Oil are already dangerous and sad enough for us to keep embittering our lives; the fight back should be, at least, of some fun. How else will be bring people on board?

In this sense, in the training we did look at how to engage people. It is no secret that building a conscious community is at the core of the transition empowering ideas. However, talking about the different techniques and ideas to attract people’s attention and bring them in raised some moral issue: where do the blurred boundaries of manipulation lay? We might want to be wary of behaving as if we had the ultimate truly solution for the dynamics of this world.

Not that I think we are doing this, I think transition gets across, very well indeed, the message that it is an open movement for each community to apply, change and challenge to fit their needs. Nevertheless, I feel in my own behaviour how easy it is to fall off in a patronizing discourse due to the urgency I see in climate action.

But, as I started saying, there is something else beyond all these knowledge and discussions that you get out of any training or gathering…

… you get hope, strength, will; you get this magic sensation of knowing that it is indeed going to work, sooner or later. After some psychological exercises of thanking each other’s presence, visioning the future… I felt an extraordinary good vibration that ensured me that it could not be otherwise: there is no way to stop this positive energy from spreading around and fill even every single speck.

And it is quite funny, because in my rebellious teenager thoughts I always believed that adults were too comfortable in their lives to care about anything at all nor have the energy for it. It is quite comforting to keep being proved wrong.

On the overall, the training did not only fill me with fresh knowledge and skills but with a renewed desire to apply it.

Neus Giner Garcia is Co-convener of Edinburgh University People & Planet Society.

The Transition Edinburgh University initiative was set up to put the Edinburgh University community on the road to transition, lowering carbon emissions and finding a community response to peak oil and climate change. TEU was set up partly as a consequence of the People & Planet campaign Go Green and partly as a consequence of the work of the Energy Manager of the University, David Somervell. (more…)

Firstly, I wish to apologise for this blog being such a late starter, and perhaps secondly for it not being about Copenhagen. I’m not there. As a blog, I intended it to document the progress of the Transition Edinburgh University (TEU) initiative, hopefully giving ideas to other People & Planet groups and whoever else stumbles upon it about ways to begin their own Transition initiatives and projects. (more…)