This column by Simon Gear first appeared on the Don’t Be a Passenger blog (www.dontbeapassenger.com) in April of 2010

I recently spent a diverting couple of hours wandering around a completely ‘off-grid’ house, powered by a combination of solar panels and liquid gas.  What continues to strike me about these set ups is the degree to which green energy solutions are about looking at every aspect of your power, not just at where your electricity comes from.

So, an example.  You’ve been listening to the radio ads for ‘no money down, easy payments’ solar geysers.  Brilliant idea.  I’m generally not a big fan of buying anything on an instalment plan, but here’s an option where your repayments should match what your geyser was costing you in electricity bills anyway.  But it isn’t enough to just pop the geyser in and move on with life.  To really make a difference, you need to install energy efficient shower heads that use a third less water than conventional ones.  You’re going to use less water and make the hot water you do have, last longer.  Especially on a cloudy day.

Prefer long deep baths to showers?  Apart from being the least efficient way possible of cleaning yourself (doesn’t it bother you that after 3 minutes, everything that was on your feet is now in your hair?) you’re using a lot more hot water, and you’re having to add more cold because the heat is retained better in a bathtub than in a shower.  So to get the full benefit of the geyser, you want to change your shower head, and possibly modify your behaviour too.

From this change cascades a whole host of others to stretch your hot water supply.  Set your washing machine to cold.  Use your dishwasher once a day instead of heating up a sink of hot water every time you want to wash a coffee cup.  Insulate your pipes properly so that your shower or sink heat up quicker.

What I’m getting at is that to truly make good green changes, you need to allow your thinking to be driven by the problem, not the solution.  Instead of starting with ‘Should I get a solar geyser?’ your starting point should be ‘What (and how many) things can I do to lower my hot water bill?’

The same is true of all our green solutions.  Launching a home grown electric car, while exciting, won’t do as much for the environment as a properly conceived and managed public transport system will.  Using trees to offset your carbon footprint is great, but ultimately meaningless if you aren’t also supporting efforts to produce green power.

More and more, environmentalists are quoting Albert Einstein:

“We can’t solve problems by using the same type of thinking we used when we created them”

In our rush to never be caught re-inventing the wheel, I wonder how often we actually stop and wonder whether this particular wheel was such a good idea in the first place.