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get permission to put one in a residential area.
The couple don't see themselves as being anything out of the ordinary, just practical. "I cannot see a single disadvantage to living a green life and, of course, much of the time we are no greener than anyone else," says Pauline. "Recycling and reusing are good habits to re-acquire. I say 're-acquire' because almost everything I now do to be green, my parents did in their day because that's how you did it: you re-used your shopping bag; kept useful bits of string, screws; put vegetable peelings on the compost heap; used loose tea and composted the dregs - I could go on.
"I do worry that we are not doing enough and my biggest luxuries are my tumble dryer - so we got one that stops drying as soon as it has dried the clothes - and the central heating. I justify this by reassuring myself that I'm saving energy by not ironing anything. Of course, this is mainly my energy that I'm saving.
"We purchase our energy from Npower juice [from renewable energy sources developed with Greenpeace] but would like more to be done; we buy our milk from the milkman which means the bottles are re-used." Needless to say, Mark almost always uses public transport for work, but when forced to use the car (about once every two months for work) his car is a hybrid, a Vauxhall Zafira Dual Fuel, which he uses on very high efficiency liquid petroleum gas as often as possible.
The Barthel daughters - Rowena, 16, and Natalie, 13, - used to be constantly ticked off for leaving the light on in the understairs cupboard. The problem is neatly solved by a simple, automatic off-switch whenever the door is closed.
Even the windowless garage is lit naturally during the day by a sun-pipe, a tube bringing down light from a hole in the roof and magnifying it 20-fold with a special reflective material. Further natural light comes through ingenious turquoise glass tiles that separate the garage from the family room that serve the dual (but undetected) purpose of feeding light to the garage while forming an attractive feature inside the house.
The other windows in the house are all triple-glazed, a feature that cuts 15 per cent off heating bills but costs only an extra £400 to install. Underfloor heating was installed downstairs - it produces a more efficient and even heat - with thermal insulating panels fitted below the floor to prevent heat wastage into the ground. "That's one of the biggest wastes of heat," he says. "You need to reflect the heat back up into the house."
Mark insists that all these devices are both easily sourced - he found many on the internet - and installed. "We just used a local builder, who had done bits of energy-saving work before but not altogether like this," he says. "But it all worked out." The recycling went even as far as the shower room tiles - a pretty mosaic of small dusky-pink and mauve tiles cut ingeniously out of old ones and stuck on to a mesh for easy installation.
But conserving and recycling does not end with construction. The Barthel family compost practically all kitchen and garden waste, creating a mulch that helps to reduce water evaporation in the soil. Needless to say, most of the plants in the well-stocked garden are in any case drought-resistant to beat the hosepipe ban, but nevertheless hundreds of litres of rainwater are trapped in his series of wall-mounted water butts. Not a drop is wasted.
Even the "grey" water from the bath, shower and washing machine is channelled into a tank and used to flush the loos. This is a good alternative for people unwilling to adopt the "if it's yellow, let it mellow" method, championed by Ken Livingstone last week when proposing that Londoners save water this summer by not flushing urine.
"Mark has made sensible choices that have been cost-effective as well as fitting in with family life," says Fridey Cordingley, National Campaigns Manager for Recycle Now. Is there any more they could do to be greener? "They could consider using their compost to grow their own vegetables," she says.
The Barthels make sure non-compostable waste - such as paper, plastic, tin foil and glass - is all recycled. So are batteries when they come ready-fitted in a new appliance, but they are replaced with rechargeable ones as soon as possible. In over two years, they have got through just a handful of batteries. That's not to say that the Barthels forsake the pleasures of modern gadgets. But their fast-expanding collection of iPods, for instance, have solar-powered chargers.
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