Green Services Direct

Why do you want a more energy efficient home? That might seem like a silly question as there are two main obvious reasons why you would want to achieve that. One is to save money on fuel costs, the other is to achieve a more environmentally friendly property which will help to cut down CO2 emissions in line with current government thinking. Not all energy saving measures tick both of these boxes however, some heat pump installations, which can cost somewhere between £8,000 - £18,000, may show little or no cost saving on energy bills, depending on the system being replaced. Most energy saving measures will however, show a reduction in energy bills and are certainly worthwhile from a carbon footprint point of view, as they will lessen your CO2 emissions.

Before you spend time and money on improving the efficiency of your heating system, it is worth considering other aspects of your home. For instance, is it insulated, are the doors and windows draught proof? In an older property, probably not and if that is the case, much of the heat you are putting into your home may be leaking straight back out again. That being the case, it is better to ensure that the majority of the heat that you do put into your house, stays in your house.

Modern houses tend to be better at holding heat as they are built to updated building regulations which demand more stringent limits on minimum insulation, standards of glass and other building materials. It is an accepted fact that most houses in the UK lose up to 25% of their heat through their roof, 35% through the walls and from 10% through their windows and doors, dependant on the amount of glass used. That should give a good indication of where we should start to address heat loss from our home.

The best return on investment when insulating your home comes from insulating your loft and roof space. Loft insulation can be a DIY job if you use rolls of fibre glass insulation that would cost around £100. This would rise to £300 to £400 using a contractor or using foam as opposed to rolls of fibre glass. It is worth bearing in mind that if you insulate your attic and stop heat from your home coming up into the space, if the outside temperature drops below zero, your loft space may do similar. In order to cut the risk of burst pipes in the attic, either add a layer of insulation to the roof, which would cost around £400 to £500, or ensure that all your pipes are well lagged. Insulating the loft space not only cuts down heat loss from your home quite significantly but will pay back your investment over a period of two years or less. Care should be taken when insulating a loft that important ventilation is not restricted.

Losing around 35% of your heat through your walls suggests that wall insulation would also be a good investment but the type of wall construction of your property has a big bearing on the cost of this. Most modern houses are built with a cavity between two brick or block walls and it is reasonably easy to fill this cavity with an insulating layer and at a cost of around £400 for a mid-terrace house and roughly £800 for a detached house, it will still have a reasonably short payback time.

An older property, probably built before 1930, on the other hand may be of a different construction and will probably have solid stone walls with no cavity, so these may need either an external or internal layer of insulation to be installed. This is an altogether different proposition, both in terms of work involved and cost.

Internal wall insulation entails either fitting stud walls then filling the cavity that forms with an insulating material, or fixing insulating panels to your internal walls. As you may imagine this will protrude into your home and detract from you room sizes. It will also mean having to rework the sills and architraves round your windows and doors, as well as replacing the skirting boards around the outer walls of the rooms. Depending on the size and configuration of your property (detached, semi-detached or mid-terraced), internal insulation could cost between £4,000 and £15,000.

External insulation will require two or three layers of preparatory materials attached to the outer wall of the house, before the insulating layer is added and finally finished with either a coating of render or cladding. This means that if your property has a natural stone or brick finish to the outer walls, you will completely alter the appearance on the property and on that basis you may need to get planning permission. If your property is listed or in a conservation area you are unlikely to get permission to use an external insulation which would radically alter the appearance of your property in this way. If planning permission were granted, external insulation could vary in cost between £6,000 and £20,000 depending on the size and configuration of your property, a two story detached property understandably costing much more than a single story mid-terrace.

There are government grants available for some types of insulation, although many of them are only available to households in receipt of income support, disability benefits or tax credits. It is also probable that proper insulation will add value to your property.

Once you are satisfied that your home is well insulated and retaining as much heat as is practical, you should then look at using the most energy efficient and environmentally friendly form of heating. One way of doing this is to replace a gas boiler with a heat pump, although changing out a reasonably new gas boiler, which is relatively efficient, may not actually achieve any energy savings, giving only a drop in CO2 emissions. Replacing an older, less efficient gas boiler with a heat pump will deliver a saving in your energy bills as well as being kinder to the planet.

The most common type of heat pump is an air source heat pump, which extracts heat from the atmosphere, passes it through a heat exchanger to increase its temperature and uses that to heat water to provide domestic hot water and heating to the property. A ground source heat pump works in the same way but extracts its heat from the ground around the property or from bore holes. A heat pump cannot produce hot water on demand in the way a modern combi boiler can, so it needs a hot water tank to store hot water for use as and when required. It is also true that a heat pump does not heat its water to the same extent as a gas boiler, so it works best as a heating provider with underfloor heating, which uses lower temperature water over a much larger area to achieve a comfortable room temperature. As an alternative, the same effect may be achieved by installing larger radiators to compensate for the lower temperature.

Heat pumps are expensive to install. A replacement gas boiler can cost in the region of £2,000 to £3,000. On the other hand, an air source heat pump can cost between £8,000 and £18,000 to install, with a ground source heat pump costing between £15,000 and £35,000.

The Government is offering households grants of £5,000 to help with the cost of installing a heat pump as part of the "Boiler Upgrade Scheme". This will run in England and Wales and will initially run for three years. However, with a fund of just £450 million being made available, a maximum of 90,000 (0.3%), of the UK's 27.8 million households will be able to take advantage of this scheme. It does mean though, that if you are able to take advantage of this grant, then a heat pump could become an affordable alternative to replacing an old inefficient gas or oil fired boiler or electric heating system with a new gas boiler. The payback may take a few years to achieve but it will be cost effective in the long term and will reduce your carbon footprint substantially.

Any measures to help lower your energy costs or cut your carbon footprint will require investment to a greater or lesser degree, but having made that initial investment you will eventually see a noticeable drop in your monthly energy spend and have the satisfaction of a more environmentally friendly home.