How do you keep food and drinks cool when you’re outdoors far from home? With bags or blocks of ice, of course!

Ice is a precious resource when you're in the great outdoors. The container you store your ice in will dramatically impact how long your ice lasts: keeping your sandwiches in an open metal bucket will require much more ice than if you choose a well-insulated cooler.

Getting to Zero

If you want to reduce your home's impact on climate change, zero-carbon electricity is your precious energy resource. Poorly insulated, air-leaky homes waste energy just like an open metal bucket wastes ice on a hot day.

We all want to live in a comfortable home that is affordable to heat and cool. Most of us also want to reduce our impact on the environment. Sometimes we invest in major upgrades for better comfort in hot or cold weather, like an air-source heat pump. But sadly, if our home isn’t properly insulated and sealed we may never realize the gains we hope for. Investing in the efficiency of your home will lower energy costs and reduce the burden on any heating and cooling system. With efficiency upgrades we can use less electricity to get the same result.

Energy efficiency alone can’t solve the decarbonization riddle or save the planet. But using efficiency to get the very most out of every zero-emission kilowatt-hour is smart science, smart economics, and smart home ownership.

Just like putting the ice in a cooler, upgrading the insulation and air sealing in your home will achieve better results.

A Vacation From Worry

Trying to decarbonize without energy efficiency would be much harder. Let’s work on increasing efficiency in your home, so that your money and energy resources can stretch further to provide you a safe, comfortable, and efficient home.

Adapted from the original with permission from the author: