This week in the Junior School teacher and Be Green teacher representative gave a Morning Talk on our pledge to ‘Go Zero’, reducing our carbon emissions to zero by 2030, and what that means.
She shared a challenge for pupils from the Young Climate Warriors…
In the cold weather adults are drinking cups of tea, and boiling the kettle – but are they boiling more water than they need for their cup?
The young climate warriors at St Chris are going to be checking that parents and families aren’t wasting energy by boiling too much water.
It only takes a few minutes to boil a kettle so it can’t use that much energy, right? Wrong. Kettles actually require a much larger blast of energy during the short time they are in use than most other appliances. An average kettle uses as much energy in the 3 minutes or so it takes to boil a litre of water as an energy-efficient LED light bulb uses in ten hours!
It is a small but important thing to only heat what you need. Our motto is “Little by little, a little becomes a lot.”
Did you know a spike in energy demand can be seen when a popular TV show finishes and people around the country all jump up and put their kettle on at the same time. This is called a ‘TV pick-up’. The biggest spike ever – equivalent to more than a million kettles being turned on at the same time – came in 1990, after England were knocked out of the Football World Cup in the semi-finals.
So if, over half term, you’re making a hot drink to stay warm, remember to only boil what you need!
