My wider family use 10x the energy that I do, possibly higher. I am okay with a bicycle but my relatives see no alternative to petrol/diesel cars. An electric car is a joke and not something to aspire to according to them. They also have indoor lighting on when the glowy thing is in the sky. This indoor light colour temperature makes me feel it is dark so I dislike it, turn the lights off and they think it is dark. Discussing these things leads to confrontation.

After being told that electric cars were silly and impractical I had a thought experiment. We had just been using electricity for making cups of tea, plus there was that lighting, which was a practical use of electricity.

So what if I decided to go fully carbon wasteful and not use electricity but burn petrol for everything? Kerosine lamps, a petrol powered generator, LPG in the kitchen, to be fully off grid but in the most oil burning way possible. Have the place reek of bunker oil, make the back garden as nice as an oil refinery.

This isn't going to happen to win a point in the family, but people are deeply wedded to their planet trashing ways. There is no point arguing with them.

I got into super lean energy use thanks to a shared flat which had meters that needed topping up with hard currency, a trip to a convenience store a mile away being the only option.

If you only have $10 of energy before the lights go out you think about whether you want to boil wash and tumble dry your clothes a bit differently and opt for the 'mini 30' wash and drying rack instead. You don't have hot water every day, except with the kettle that boils just the one/two cups needed. All phantom power losses get seen to. You keep what matters - a light bulb and a laptop - and dispense with the rest.

If you live in this austerity mode it becomes a lot harder to go back to the standard way of living where electricity and other energy is continually on. Thermostats are good with heating timers, but, they themselves take electricity. Nobody turns the whole thing off. The advice is to turn it down a couple of degrees, not turn it completely off and wear a jumper + hoodie instead.

Socially it can be difficult to fit in if you prefer austerity energy use. In a workplace you can't just turn off the lights to enjoy natural daylight. Everyone else wants some horrid flickery lighting not the good stuff. Then, if you need to sweep something up, you can't just use a broom or dustpan, you have to get the hoover out.

Which brings me on to another point, there is no way for some people to do things the low power way as they have removed the infrastructure. In my relatives refurbished kitchen they have a dishwasher but no bowl or draining board to go with the sink. So you can't just wash up a few plates with the one bowl of water rinsing the soap off with room temperature water to let the crockery drip dry. The water from the hot tap is scolding hot and it just goes down the plug hole if you use it. This is the new normal and people insist that having a dishwasher on for a few hours a day is more efficient. Contesting this is fruitless.

Hence my thought experiment to have a house where everything is max wasteful and max polluting.