Dawn Mellowship reviews the Domia Lite Wireless Remote Control Starter Kit and Lamp Dimmer. At the touch of a button (or few) you can control a range of electrical devices and appliances in your home and dim lamps with the dimmer (if the need takes you). The cost for this wizardry is £29.99
Having read Giles Coren's outstanding review, I was hugely excited about my visit to Acorn House, the first restaurant in the UK to be conceived with environmental sustainability at its core, and is being hailed as 'the most important restaurant to open in London in the past 200 years'. This was to be no ordinary lunch break; I was going to experience the cutting edge of catering!
From the outside, Acorn House is an unassuming but smart modern restaurant, sitting smack-bang in the middle of Grays Inn Road, one of London's busiets and most polluted thoroughfairs. But the contrast on entering is striking: everything about this place is green, from the food to the very materials it's built from. And on closer inspection, they've got all bases covered, with eco lighting from EcoTricity, all bottled water coming from British sources, sustainable Norwegian wood tables and only seasonal food on the menu, which changes every month.
I've bought several reusable plastic bags over the last year and, some how, I've never got round to actually reusing them. Instead they've been folded neatly and left in the kitchen. Utterly useless. However, at the beginning of last week as I popped into Asda's for my daily 'I've forgotten something from the weekly shop' catch up, I remembered to pick one up. The day before, you see, I'd used two plastic bags and promptly thrown them in the bin afterwards. I realised if I did that five times a week on random items then I could use up to 10 bags per week. And if I used that volume every week, it was entirely likely I could use 520 plastic bags per year.
If most homes in Britain bought one of these Bye Bye Standby energy saving kits, we'd all save around £37 a year. Big deal, you might well think, but the green implications a far more impressive.
Currently, by leaving PCs, televisions, printers, coffee machines and so forth on standby, we are collectively wasting the equivalent output of two and a half power stations, while are gadgets to absolutely nothing except blink at us. Installing a gadet that makes it easy to switch them off with one press of a button could prevent all of that waste. Susi Weaser took one home...
It seems like every email newsletter I get now has a reminder at the end to consider the planet before printing it, which makes me feel good about all the years I spent haranguing family and colleagues for wasting resources printing every dull four-line missive they received.
It never occurred to me that I might have to start telling people not to print text messages.
Hippyshopper is growing by the day, and now there's a small army of us on board, you can expect to see more green products and services being thoroughly put to the test by our eco-savvy reporters. We'll do our best to guide you through what's become a green consumer jungle, and would love to hear your feedback on what you want to see reviewed in future.
To kick off the series, we asked Hippyshopper writer Ben Keningale to send his experience of Riverford Organic. Riverford is one of the best known suppliers of organic 'veggie boxes' in the UK, and as one of the largest box delivery schemes, grows over 85 different vegetables. Here's what Ben made of the service.
In my continuing search for the perfect skincare range, I've been trying out the Rosa Fina range from Barefoot Botanicals. The company creates organic skincare products that are choc full of essential oils and natural plant extracts, avoiding petrochemicals and other potentially harmful substances. The Rosa Fina products are produced using "oil expressed from the macerated seeds of a wild rose growing only in
the Chilean Andes" (so not good news for your global footprint, I'm afraid). According to the blurb, "Rosa Mosqueta oil... has been used by the indigenous population for all
kinds of skin problems related to ageing" and the products are touted as being good for wrinkles, stretch marks and scars. So how did I get on with them? Find out, after the turn.
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I've bought several reusable plastic bags over the last year and, some how, I've never got round to actually reusing them. Instead they've been folded neatly and left in the kitchen. Utterly useless. However, at the beginning of last week as I popped into Asda's for my daily 'I've forgotten something from the weekly shop' catch up, I remembered to pick one up. The day before, you see, I'd used two plastic bags and promptly thrown them in the bin afterwards. I realised if I did that five times a week on random items then I could use up to 10 bags per week. And if I used that volume every week, it was entirely likely I could use 520 plastic bags per year.
It seems like every email newsletter I get now has a reminder at the end to consider the planet before printing it, which makes me feel good about all the years I spent haranguing family and colleagues for wasting resources printing every dull four-line missive they received.
In my continuing search for the perfect skincare range, I've been trying out the 
