The Living Room
The living room in Green Cottage is situated to the North side of the building, which makes it a cool, darker room in the hot summer months. This is important, as although Green Cottage has loft insulation, the outer walls do not have a wall cavity like many other terraced properties in the area, which does not allow for cavity wall insulation. Having a room which is cooler in the summer removes the need for costly and energy-inefficient air conditioning systems.
In the winter, the room is the centre of the house, as it houses a log-burning stove. This stove runs the cottage's central heating and hot water in the winter, and provides heat to the living room itself. The stove itself is a "clean burning" stove, which means it can be used in smokeless zones such as Bury. Log fuel is delivered from a local source - it is cheap, and "carbon neutral", which means that burning logs only releases the same amount of carbon dioxide (the main "greenhouse gas") into the atmosphere that was absorbed by the tree whilst it was growing. Because logs are grown and delivered locally, there is also very little fossil fuel used in transporting them to their final destination. And of course, they are a renewable fuel - it is easy to grow more trees, and with the price of fossil fuels on a permanently upward trend, log fuel is both a cheap and reliable source of heat for a household during the winter months.
