Decide what to buy: the Reevoo.com blog

Today’s Green Piece looks at three products that will keep your house warm, save you energy and provide you with some veggies.

First up - Using your own waste to heat your house? Sound wrong? Well the Logmaker, despite the dodgy name, can be used to compress waste such as wood chippings, tea bags, olive stones and shredded junk mail and turn it all into a log for your fire. The logs will burn for between 10 minutes and an hour, depending on what you put in them. You can also add the remains of scented candles, cinnamon sticks, lavender or a few drops of scented oils to make your logs smell lovely too.

Not a bad use for all the things that normally end up in landfill sites. They’re currently £24.99 +p&p.

Talking of logs, this next product is a grow-your-own-mushroom log. It comes with spores inside it already. All you need to do is keep it moist in a shady spot to magically grow 2-3 harvests a year. Not only do you save money on mushrooms from the supermarket, you’ll also be saving the environment from the extra packaging and possible air miles. At £25, I think it’s a great investment.

Finally, there’s the Leaf Lamp. It’s made from 95% recyclable and 37% recycled materials and has a 100,000 hour life-span – that’s 100 times longer than normal lights. It also claims to use only 40% of the energy used with energy saving bulbs.

But this light doesn’t just save energy. It’s touch sensitive so you can touch it on and off and set and memorise your own intensity and warmth of light settings. Although this lamp is cool in more ways than one – the LEDs stay cool to allow further adjustment – it is £349. Bit steep for a lamp but when you way up life-span and energy-saving, it might just make it worth it.

This Green Piece is made up of three totally different products to help you on your way to green living.

A couple of weeks ago, we gave you the stapleless stapler and today we’ve got something else for the office - recycled paper biros. They’re 59p from Ecotopia and made from de-inked consumer waste paper.

Next up is a product that will save you money on detergent and machine repairs. The Anti-Lime Scale Ball is a multi-field magnetic ball that prevents the deposition and precipitation of calcium carbonate (lime scale) in your washing machine or dishwasher. According to The Green Store, lime scale “leaves clothes tacky and dishes less than shiny” and we all know that it “clogs up the heating coils in your machines”, so you could save some serious money by investing £4.99 in one of these balls. By using less detergents, you’re also cutting down on the amount of chemicals you use and the amount of plastic packaging.

Finally, we’ve got something to green-up your bike. Green Oil Chain Lube is great for your bike and much better for the environment as it doesn’t contain any solids like wax, graphite, plastic or Teflon. That means it’s non-irritant and non-hazardous. Bikegoo says that it’s “Super green, super effective. Really good stuff”. It’s £5.20 from the Green Oil Shop.

There’s a real treat in this week’s Green Piece. You may have heard about it already but I thought it still needed a mention. Wind-up radio king Trevor Baylis has upped the ante to bring us a wind-up media player. We had an interesting stat about batteries in a previous Green Piece - just to recap, according to WRAP, around 600 million UK household batteries (22,000 tonnes) – the equivalent weight of 110 Jumbo Jets – are sent to landfill unnecessarily every year. So anything that we can do to alleviate the environment of that burden would be a good thing. That’s why this media player is so great. For one minute of winding, you get 40 minutes of audio play. When fully charged, which you can also do through the USB port on your computer, you’ll get around 20 hours of constant music, or around 10 hours of video play.

It only has a 2GB memory but you can use SD cards and it’s got a 1.8 inch, full colour screen. OK, so it’s not the biggest of screens but if you’re all for helping the environment, it’s not too much of a sacrifice.

Back onto the positives – It’s got a FM radio, it can act as an audio and voice recorder and it can even charge your mobile phone. If that wasn’t enough, it also has an awesome torch!

I think this is a great green gadget that will solve the endless MP3 charging saga in the evenings. Just think of all the batteries and hassle you’ll be saving. They’re £129.95 at the Ethical Superstore.

This week’s Green Piece sees three handy gadgets that will save you money on heating, electricity and batteries and will help the environment too.

First up is the wind-up remote control. It spells the end for those awkward sized batteries that nobody ever stocks and for that crucial moment when you go to use your remote and discover that the aforementioned batteries have run out.

According to WRAP, around 600 million UK household batteries (22,000 tonnes) – the equivalent weight of 110 Jumbo Jets – are sent to landfill unnecessarily every year, so this remote is definitely something to take seriously. It needs 30 ‘winds’ which will then last for seven days, which is pretty good going. It’s £24.95 but if you think about how many batteries you would go through, it’s not so bad.

The next product is something you can use in every room in your house to save you money on heating. It’s called a Radiator Booster and was once on Dragon’s Den. It sits on top of your radiators and takes all of the heat that gets released at the back of the radiator and uses clever fans to redirect it back into your room. It means that your house gets heated faster and that the heating can be switched off sooner.

At the moment, they’re £14.99 over at Nigel’s Eco Store and best of all, running costs are only about 30p a year.

Last is the waterproof torch that is charged up by shaking it. You shake it on down for 45 seconds and then you get five whole minutes of light…it does seem like a lot of work for five minutes but I guess it’s all part of the fun…and the energy saving, of course.

If you’re into science, the torch works with the help of a magnet. As you shake the torch, the magnet moves back and forth and generates an electric current. This current is then held in a holding cell so that you can still use the torch even if you haven’t wiggled it for a while. It’s a bargain at £5.99 and it has some good reviews too.

So there we have it, three great ways to help the environment and your wallets, especially useful now that energy costs are on the rise.

In this week’s Green Piece, we’re looking at the Green Cone Food Waste Digester System - sounds tasty, doesn’t it? It’s quite a handy little addition to your kitchen and your garden that claims to make your organic waste disappear – almost.

The 4 litre Green Cone Caddy sits in your kitchen, which you fill up with all of your organic kitchen waste such as tea bags, bones, stale bread, vegetable scraps or even raw and cooked meat. Whenever you need to, you can then go and empty the caddy into the Green Cone, which sits in your garden.

The Green Cone needs to be placed in a sunny spot in your garden to work properly. It is solar powered and has a double wall which makes things nice and toasty for the micro-organisms that break down the food. The cone actually sits in the soil so that worms and other creatures can move in and out of it freely to promote further break down. But don’t worry, this part of the Green Cone always stays in the garden so you won’t be taking a zoo back into the kitchen with you.

If you’re worried about smells and those pesky flies and rodents, the fact that the cone sits in the soil allows it to filter out the smells and keep the flies and rodents at bay.

When it gets to winter time, decomposition naturally slows down so they’ve got some natural Green Cone accelerator powder to sort that out.

Household food waste is converted into water, carbon dioxide and small amount residue that will apparently only need to be removed every few years. It’s been designed to take three-quarters to one kilogram of food waste each day, which is apparently the typical amount for a family of four - a great way to save on plastic used in bin bags and space in your bin. If you fancy making your organic waste virtually disappear, you can find a Green Cone at Green and Easy.

We’ve got some great products in this week’s Green Piece. The first one will save you money on your water and electricity and it will help to save the planet too. It’s a shower head with a difference. The Oxygenics BodySpa Water Saving Shower Head, as well as saving water, also works as a mini spa treatment in your own home. It uses a narrow channel in the shower head to squeeze all of the water out. This squeezing causes negative pressure which sucks air into the shower head. Then the air mixes with the water and creates a lovely invigorating shower.

You save on water because less is allowed through the narrow channel. You also don’t have to worry that you’ll have a rubbish shower because the air and the extra pressure makes it seem more powerful than your ordinary shower. Less water also means less heat to warm it up so you save on heating too. Bonus. There’s also no need to worry if you’re in a hard-water area as the inside of the shower head are made of high-tech, corrosion-resistant plastic with an extremely smooth surface that prevents the build-up of lime scale. Did they think of everything or what?

The only thing to note is that it won’t work with low pressure water systems e.g. Electric or Venturi Showers. If you’re up on your shower speak, you’ll need minimum water pressure of 20psi (that’s pound per square inch). You can pick one up for £39.95 from Green Warehouse.

The next handy device is called an Ecobutton and it attaches to your computer with a USB cable. Every time you have a break to make tea, pop to the loo or answer the phone, you just press the Ecobutton and it will power-down your computer for you.

According to the guys over at Nigel’s Eco Store, when your average computer goes on standby automatically, it’s programmed to use a ‘level 1’ standby which means that it still uses 50 per cent of the energy. Apparently the Ecobutton saves even more energy by using a ‘level 3’ standby. They estimate it’ll save you around £50 and 135kg of carbon a year.

Last but not least is the Eco Stapler. This is a stapler…without staples. This neat little device will perform some cutting and folding magic in the same time as it takes you to operate a normal stapler. Waste online  say that “If everyone in UK offices saved just one staple a day, we’d save 72 tonnes of metal a year”. Not bad for a £4.99 product. You can only staple three pages at a time, mind. So if you’re planning on producing a document that will easily take out a few trees, I’d suggest using a proper stapler or more importantly, ask yourself if you really need to use that much paper.

For those of you that find it difficult to remember to turn your TVs and other electrical items off at the switch, this could be the product for you.

According to the Energy Saving Trust, we waste around £37 a year by leaving appliances on standby. If we just look at all of the TVs left on standby in the UK every year, we waste a whopping £88m worth of energy and 480,000 tonnes of CO2. What makes it worse is that they also estimate that the average household has up to 12 gadgets left on standby or left charging at any one time. That’s a whole lot of waste!

So, if that hasn’t shocked you into making sure that all of your appliances are switched off properly, you might need to invest in the Bye Bye Standby kit. The starter pack comes with three plugs or ‘modules’ and one remote control. You just plug your appliances into the modules and then plug the modules into your plug sockets as normal.

You can give each appliance a code so that you can control them separately with the remote. You can now switch your appliances off wirelessly. Even if you forget to switch things off before you go to bed, the remote works from up to 30m away and through walls and ceilings so there’s no excuse!

The Bye Bye Standby Starter Kit is £19.94 at the moment on EcoHamster.

As the days are getting a little hotter, those who are lucky enough to have them will be will be looking to spend more time in the garden. I’ve been looking to see what outdoor green products we could all be making the most of.

First up is some garden lighting. Pretty essential if you decide to make the most of your garden throughout the summer months. Instead of sucking up power from the mains, why not tap into the good stuff and get yourself some solar powered garden lights? Easy as pie to set up and you can pat yourself on the back for all the energy you’re saving.

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This week’s Green Piece is all about a humble backpack. Designed by Voltaic, it’s made from the fizzy drinks bottles that we recycle. Not only does this process save on materials, it also uses a lot less energy that if it was made out of something like nylon.

Think that’s it? Oh no, this is a backpack with a difference. It’s got solar panels sewn into it so that you can save even more energy by charging up your gadgets on the go. You can charge your smaller gadgets like MP3s, cameras or PDAs but the best bit is that Voltaic have managed to create a backpack that can also charge your laptop. Great news! Now if we only lived in Spain…and you have a spare £190 lying around…

You’ve probably all seen the Tefal ad with the super kettle that produces hot water in 3 seconds? Always on the look-out for useful, greener products, this week’s Green Piece takes a look at the mixed reviews the Tefal Quick Cup has got from purchasers on Reevoo.

According to the spec, this mean machine can heat water up to 90 degrees in three seconds and only use one third of the amount of energy of a standard kettle - that’s a 65% saving that will equate to about £30 a year. Not bad. So what do people who have bought it think?

The Tefal Quick Cup scores 7.1/10 from 204 reviews. Let’s see how that breaks down:

Not too great on design and performance, two key areas you’d want to have top marks in a kettle but good marks for ease of use.

Comments vary. Lots of people are very happy with the product. One reviewer says "Very convenient first thing in the morning for that quick cuppa after
you woke up late for work again!…would definatly recommend this to anyone who has a ‘faulty’
alarm clock!". People were also impressed by it’s energy-saving qualities.

However, a few people mention that the water doesn’t get hot enough and that it doesn’t stay hot very long. The noise it makes also seems to be an issue and a lot of people agree with Sharon from the West Midlands, who says "the filters have to be ordered and are more expensive then other filters".

So if you can down a brew, want to save the planet and you live in a soft water area, go check out the Tefal Quick Cup reviews for yourselves.