Good Energy customer, homegrown energy entrepreneur – she has both solar-thermal and solar pv panels  on her North London house - and environmental journalist, Nicola Baird’s latest book Homemade Kids: thrifty, creative and eco-friendly ways to raise children (Vermilion, £10.99) has just come out. Drawing on Nicola’s own experiences as an eco-mum, it’s full of top tips, inspirational ideas and practical advice that will help you raise your child in an eco-friendly way.

Issues addressed range from decorating the nursery, choosing nappies and feeding, to childcare and play – with a whole chapter dedicated to energy efficiency.

Read an extract below:

Give your home a green makeover

Most families with antenatal appointments and a snapshot of their bump cannot resist doing up a room. But do you really need all the paraphernalia that advertisers bombard you with? Is decorating a room for your baby – or is it more for you? It may seem lazy, but doing nothing except insulating your home is the best present you could give any child…

A good tip if you are watching your budget is to concentrate on making the room you use most – perhaps your kitchen or living room – better insulated. Better draught-proofing may be all you need. It’s often more effective finding a friend to help you focus on what might need to be done, and you can even involve young children.

Draught hunting can be fun

Turn your efforts to hunt out draughts into a game with the kids. Explain it costs money to heat space. “Money that could be spent on fruit (or even sweets!)” is one way to motivate your assistants, whose mission is to find all the ways heat escapes from each room. Firstly organise a kit for your energy auditors with a tape measure, notebook, pen and super-sized matches. When it’s breezy outside, look for draughts, flimsy window coverings, gappy floorboards and absent insulation.

A good trick is to light a match to see if the flame and smoke go straight up. If they do it means that part of your home is well draught-proofed. Pay attention when the smoke angles off at 90 degrees as this is a sign of a major draught (front and back doors are often the biggest culprits for this). Get the children to use their fingers to locate the cold stream of air, then measure the gaps so that you can make a draught excluder.

Make a draught excluder from scraps

You can buy fancy designs – snakes, sausage dogs, longitudinal cityscapes – to place at the floor edge of all doors that let a draught in under them. Or you could create one yourself. If you don’t want to sew, stuff a pair of a toddler’s outgrown or your own raggedy woolly tights with scrumpled newspaper balls or unwanted material offcuts or cut-up or worn-out clothes.

What’s up the chimney?

If you’ve got a fireplace get your children to guess where is the biggest place in the room that could remove heat (clue it’s big enough for a child to hide in). When they eventually spot it, suggest fitting a chimney balloon.

Dress the room

Curtains work best if they do not cover radiators and are lined. With your auditors’ help, take notes so you can fix this (pinning lining material to your current curtains with safety pins or staples is an excellent quick fix if you don’t have much time or budget).

Find out more at www.homemadekids.co.uk