A family are opening their eco-home to the public as part of Brighton Festival Fringe.

The Laidlay family - Cleland and Sharada, both 46, and their sons Roshan, 15, and Kiran, 13 - have been gradually greening their Seventies four-bedroom detached home in leafiest Hove for the past decade.

Cleland used to work in the travel industry, and was even once on the brink of a career in aviation, but he and Sharada started to become worried about the environmental cost of their lifestyle.

He said: "We lived a normal life, travelling around the world and doing all the normal things. It was through travelling that we became conscious of how people live in other parts of the world, and the disproportionately large impact we were having in comparison."

A graph on the wall of their front room, which has been turned into a temporary exhibition space, shows how the family's energy usage has declined by 60 per cent over the last four years as they added a porch, insulation, and one of the solar thermal heating units which they sell through their company Eco Hi Solar.

There are many more things they aspire to do, such as join the city car club and install insulation under the floorboards, but time and money restrict them.

Cleland said: "We've been doing as much as we can but it is difficult.

We'd love to install photovoltaic cells to generate our electricity, for example, but it's very expensive - between £6,000 and £10,000.

"Building new eco-homes which are fantastically efficient is great, but there are 72 million old homes in Britain, which we can't just tear down. We want to show what you can do in an ordinary family home."

The guided tour takes visitors through to the kitchen, where a nifty gadget measuring energy usage rests on the kitchen table.

Plug in the kettle and you can see the reading shoot up from 0.3kw per hour to 2.6.

The tour continues outdoors, where the garden shed houses what appears to be a poteen factory, but is in fact where the family turn cooking oil from schools into biodiesel for their van. There are also a series of barrels storing 1,800 litres of rainwater and you can also see the thermal panels on the roof.

  • 15 Deanway is open today, tomorrow and Sunday, and next Friday, Saturday and Sunday, from 11am to 5pm. Call ahead to book a slot on 01273 555822.