For starters, you can add weather stripping to outside-facing doors and windows. If your landlord doesn’t want to pay for it, then it can be found cheaply on aliexpress. Also, add insulation outside-facing switch covers and outlet plates.

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    1 year ago

    The bathroom/shower.

    1 kW is enough to heat 1 liter of water per minute by 14.3 degrees Celsius. If you have a 20 l/min shower head and water pressure to actually deliver that, that’s 20-30 kW of power for as long as the shower is running (if the water is heated by heat pump, that’s output power, input would be 1/4th to 1/3rd, and wastewater heat recovery is possible - but most places don’t have that and use fossil fuel or resistive heating).

    A 15 minute, 20l/min shower uses 5-7.5 kWh. You can reduce that by a factor of 6 by using a 10 l shower head and 5 minutes of water (turning the water off while you don’t actively need it). At 200 kg CO2 per MWh (natural gas), that’s 0.3-0.45 tons of CO2 saved per year.

    Likewise, lowering the thermostat and saving heating can make a huge difference.

    In general on a large scale, living in a smaller apartment is “greener”, since less space needs to be heated, but also less space has to be built, and higher density means less travel.

    Heating/housing, food, and travel are typically the biggest parts of your footprint. For travel, distance matters more than the way you move. Flights aren’t great per km traveled but what makes them really impactful is that they make it practical to travel large distances. (Keep that in mind when you see “green” politicians trying to propose measures - often these measures are either purely symbolic, adding annoyance without benefit, or work mostly by making it impractical/undesirable to travel or do otherwise enjoyable things).