Green houses: Lowering your carbon footprint starts at home | Money | The Guardian

Green houses: Lowering your carbon footprint starts at home | Money | The Guardian

On the floor next to the kitchen in Suzie and Iain Webb's house sits a small terracotta pot with a glazed lid and a knitted cushion on top. "That's the fridge," smiles Iain. "We tend to only eat ice cream when we are round at other people's houses, but this keeps cool most of what we want."

The fact that the "fridge" is leaning up against a radiator might seem strange, but Iain has already explained that the heating is pretty much never switched on.

We are in a 1950s brick-built semi on the east side of Cambridge, and I should not have been surprised by the unorthodox cold store inside. The front of Iain and his partner Suzie's home on Nuttings Road is a bit different from their neighbours'. For a start, there are enormous piles of wood, an extensive vegetable patch and a couple of large water butts.

If ever a family wore "sustainability" on its T-shirt sleeve, it was this one. Iain works for the Wildlife Trust, and Suzie is a local teacher who used to live on a houseboat.

They have kindly (or, rather, proudly) agreed to open up their home – complete with sheep's wool insulated roof and solar heating system – as part of a local open eco homes programme that officially starts today.