Donnachadh McCarthy: The home ecologist

It was all my homeopath Linda's and acupuncturist Brian's fault, way back in 1992. I was enjoying life as a ballet-dancer, fulfilling my dream of appearing at the Royal Opera House, when a chance conversation during a treatment led to me finding myself alone in a Yanomami settlement in the Amazonian rainforest. The destruction I saw meant that I could no longer ignore the environmental catastrophes unfolding around us.

On returning to England, I decided I must do something about our destructive lifestyle. First, I decided to make my own lifestyle more eco-friendly. I started with buying organic ketchup and gradually have cut my eco-footprint. Over the years, solar panels, a rain-harvester, a wind turbine (a disappointment) and a solar hot-water system have been added.

But the two biggest contributors to slashing my home's carbon emissions have been changes to my lifestyle and the installation of a wood-burner. In 1994, Friends of the Earth organised a pledge where you promised to turn off heating, lighting and gadgets when you left a room. This measure slashed my energy bills.

I eliminated my remaining electricity emissions by installing solar electric panels. It was then that I realised that most of the emissions came from my gas heaters – between 50 and 60 per cent of our homes' emissions come from space heating.

While eco-auditing a family home for the BBC2 series It's Not Easy Being Green, I discovered that there were, after all, high-temperature wood-burners licensed for use in the inner city. I got a Clearview stove installed in October, and it has reduced my annual gas bill to £26. It also added a warm heart to my 1840s market gardener's cottage in Camberwell, south London.

Many people do not realise that burning waste wood is carbon-neutral, as the CO2 you are releasing is CO2 stored from the atmosphere and not from fossil fuels. It's the release of millions of years' worth of fossil fuels and the destruction of forests that are causing the climate crisis now upon us.

Clearly, the Government is still also in the dark, as not only was there no grant available for the wood-burner, but I had to pay £400 in VAT to the Treasury to help reduce my emissions. If you do want to install a wood-burner, it's best to order one now, as they get busy once the summer days start getting shorter. Over the coming weeks, Green Light will explore lifestyle choices and technologies that will reduce your building's CO2 emissions. With the UN saying that 160,000 people a year are already dying from causes related to climate change, we have no time to lose.

Donnachadh McCarthy is an eco-auditor and the author of 'Saving the Planet Without Costing the Earth' (www.3acorns.co.uk)

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