Saving Energy As a Family In Time for Mother’s Day

I’ve teamed up with Netmums and British Gas, as a follow on from my post I wrote back in January, about the Netmums and British Gas match up. Their site gives you helpful and useful advice on saving energy as a family. I love the look of the site it’s quirky fun and it looks great. I love the slider that allows you to select which stage your child is at and when selected you can get information on how to explain and encourage your child to save energy. Not only saving energy which is great for us parents who pay the bills, but it explains how it all works, educational and interesting too.

I love the way it gets children and us adults thinking about where the energy we use and take for granted every day comes from. Making children aware of how it’s made and what’s involved will encourage them to be more conscientious in their use of power, will hopefully anyway and it will set them up for life.

With Mother’s Day coming up, children all around the country are working out what they can do or make for their Mother’s. Why not use this to encourage them to help us Mother’s out and save money and energy around the home.

Here are my top tips for encouraging your children to save energy in the home in time for Mother’s Day:-

My boys respond really well to reward charts, so setting up a reward chart and making it a fun competition to switch off the lights when they leave the room, don’t charge their gadgets unless they have to, switch off the gadgets when not in use, etc will make a difference.
Rather than putting the heating on with it’s starting to get a little chilly, encourage the children to have a little boogie. Exercise, fun and keeping warm in one. Or build a fun den with some blankets and huddle underneath with a torch.
When they go outside to play, get them to shut the door and not stand in the doorway for five minutes letting all the heat out of the house. Also not to keep coming in and out unless it’s necessary. You’d be surprised how cold it gets in just a few minutes.
My last tip is let them take turn each week to read and record the meter’s. This way they can see how many units they have used and I got my oldest to calculate how much we had spent. He needed a little help but it was a great lesson to encourage their maths skills and their understanding of energy used.

British Gas and Netmums have some great energy saver reward charts that you can use to encourage and reward your children for their efforts. Like I said above, mine respond well to reward charts. These ones look great, are a little different and a lot of fun. I’m thinking of a certificate for the best energy saver. What are you waiting for?

With Mother’s Day coming up this weekend, Netmums and British Gas are encouraging and helping families to take more control over the energy in their homes with Hive Active Heating™. Hive Active Heating™ is a heating device which allows you to control your heating and hot water from your tablet, laptop, computer and even your smartphone from wherever you are. Cool isn’t it!

British Gas and Netmums have not one but five to give away. Fully installed by a British Gas engineer and is worth a total of £199. To be with a chance of winning all you have to do is enter here and fill in your details before the 6th of April 2014. I think this sounds great and I would love to have one, I’ll be entering will you?

What would your top energy savings tips be to encourage children to save energy around the home?