Q How can I descale my kettle?

A Of all the eco-friendly domestic duties, this is a good one to start with. Foolproof and deeply satisfying, once you have descaled your kettle with vinegar, you’ll wonder why you ever wasted money on special products. My number one favourite evening activity it is not, but at least you get to reward yourself with a cup of tea from a fur-free kettle.

Here’s how to do it: fill your kettle half full with a mixture of water and vinegar. I try to do more vinegar than water, but if it’s only half and half, that will be fine.

Leave it for several hours, ideally overnight. In the morning rinse and dislodge any stubborn bits of limescale with an old toothbrush, or your finger. Then rinse it again and boil some water to get rid of the vinegar smell and you’re ready for that cuppa.

As well as being cheaper, vinegar generates less packaging – usually a glass bottle that can be reused or recycled – and you don’t end up flushing nasty chemicals down the loo, the sort that require further research, according to Friends of the Earth, to assess their impact on aquatic life.

Your loo can receive the same treatment: scoop out the water in the bowl with a paper cup, replace it with undiluted vinegar and then leave it overnight before scrubbing it. Not a pleasant job, but nonetheless important if you want to keep a limescale coral reef at bay.

Speaking of the seaside, I keep a few shells in the bottom of my kettle to prevent limescale from building up. They work as an abrasive, rattling around inside while the water is boiling. I have recently replaced some Norfolk shells, which lived in my kettle for several years, with some from Devon.

A good excuse for a weekend walk on the beach anyway.

Q My husband says that it’s better to have the heating on constant than turning it off and on twice a day. Is he right?

A Like a James Bond baddie, this urban myth fails to die. Such is our love of warm homes, it is likely that we choose to ignore commonsense as well as a widely publicised campaign from the Energy Saving Trust, to defend keeping our boilers fired up 24/7.

I know the arguments likely to be wheeled out by your hubbie: that you waste energy heating a cold building twice a day; that it’s better to keep the building warm constantly; that setting your heating at a lower temperature constantly saves you money. Well, that’s rubbish. Tell him that from me.

The longer your boiler is in use, the higher your bills are going to be. Think of it this way. Would you opt to keep your kettle boiling so that you don’t have to heat the water from cold when you want a cup of tea? Exactly.

According to the Energy Saving Trust, this goes for your hot water as well. “Boilers use more power initially to heat water from cold,” it says.

“However, the cost of this is far exceeded by the cost of keeping the boiler running all the time.”

In cold weather, it recommends that you programme your heating so that it comes on only when you need it. For most people, this will be an hour or so in the morning and again at night. Your home will stay warm for at least 30 minutes after the heating has turned off, so make sure that it clicks off before bedtime.

Still don’t believe me? Then conduct your own heating experiment. By reading your gas meter – most people’s boilers runs off gas – at the beginning and at the end of the week, after you’ve trialled the different approaches to heating, you will see the difference.

For Anna’s e-mail address and Eco-Blog, go to

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Too much silver foil going into one packed lunch. That tends to be my verdict when I watch my boyfriend prepare his midday meal. What really winds me up is when he wraps up a couple of chocolate biscuits in what seems like several metres of the stuff. So, blog readers, what did you come up with to ease domestic tensions in the EcoWorrier household?

Some of you wanted him to reuse the foil. “Even here in the tawdry States, we reuse foil all the time,” writes Ohiogirl. Or at least, she says, he should be buying recycled aluminium foil (from naturalcollection.com ).

Karen writes that she saves bread bags for this sort of thing, while Mathew suggested using old hoummos tubs, which would prevent biscuits being crushed in transit, as would Lakeland’s solution, sent by Yorkie, a Tupperware box that holds three biscuits, £1.79 ( lakeland.co.uk ).

The obvious solution, as pointed out by Jess, is to keep a packet at work, no extra packaging required.

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