Actually, energy efficiency begins in Nottingham

Yesterday brought us a story about green campaigners who have not necessarily put their own homes in order.

The slebs who have been charged with hypocrisy include Simon Hughes, whose walls leak heat, BOJO the clown mayor, who lives in a conservation area, and Gwynneth Paltrow who was unavailable for comment.

Hughes lives in a flat, and so may not have control over the fabric of his building. Personally, I have argued in planning committees that apartment buildings need to be built as energy efficient as possible since it is much harder for leaseholders and tenants to retrofit green technologies post hoc, and in any case not all flats have eg roofs for solar panels or rainwater harvesting. Others argued conservation areas which makes double glazing more expensive; others had listed buildings or old buildings which are harder but not impossible.

By and large, however, these are wealthy people in expensive homes who have talked the good talk on energy efficiency and really ought to be doing all possible at home.

I consider myself an environmental campaigner – how well would I fare? Particularly since I’m not wealthy and have a home that cost significantly below the national average, even at the time.

I think I’d actually welcome a visit from a heat-detector van – I’d be interested in learning what I need to learn about my house. There was a story on the radio about a council a few miles from me here in Nottingham buddying up with an energy efficiency company to photograph hundreds of houses to show householders just how much money they could be losing. The images highlight missing insulation in wall cavities and attic spaces, missing double or secondary glazing, and structural problems such as damaged walls that could be leaking heat. It’s also a good way of showing how well your house does in comparison to its literal close neighbours.

Of course at this time of year, there is a much easier way to see how much heat your roof is losing, as Magistrate’s Blog highlighted when the snow started to fall: the best insulated roofs will not melt the snow for days.

Here’s a picture of my roof in the snow:

My roof in the snow

As you can see, the snow is not sticking all that well – certainly at the same time, most of my neighbours had much more snow on their own houses. I most definitely do not have a cannabis farm in my house. The answer is more prosaic, I’m afraid: rather than the best practice sea of insulation up there, I need to use the space for storage. So I had the rafters boarded out and instead fixed Kingspan insulation panels right against the tiles. Clearly, this has not been as effective as I had hoped, and my opportunities for fixing it are fairly limited. There is certainly an irony that I am probably losing all the money in heat I have saved as a result of the solar hot water system.

The next big problem I face, in this 1930s semi, is solid walls. There are no cavities to insulate. My understanding is that there isn’t really consensus on how best to deal with these single skin brick walls that are far from rare. There are two approaches to insulation, both expensive and both with their drawbacks. Basically, you can add insulation to the outside or to the inside.

External insulation has the advantage of using the bricks themselves for thermal mass, which can help keep houses cool in the summer as well as warm in winter. But it means a cosmetic change from brick to render, and all sorts of complications as you try and work out what to do around windows and doors. There’d be problems with all the wires coming into the house and all the pipes and tubes poking out and in my case it could mean not being able to get back to repair any damage to brickwork caused by any further subsidence.

Internal insulation is also problematic. There are various products from simple polystyrene to purposely designed materials like Sempatap which can be applied like wallpaper to the inside of external walls. But this means major household disruption: redecorating your entire house, lifting your floor and ceilings to insulate between storeys and probably refitting your bathroom and kitchen to get at those external walls. There’s no additional benefit of thermal mass.

Neither technology is particularly widespread in the UK at present and so it is not easy to find a contractor to do the work. Because both technologies are still being tested there’s a very real fear that whatever you do now could easily be superseded in the coming years, and you could end up doing something expensive to your house that will need redoing before too long – with further implications on embedded carbon.

Fortunately, some research is currently underway that should help us learn more about the dilemma. The University of Nottingham recently received planning permission to build a test house to 1930s specifications – requiring extraordinary permission not to build to current building regulations. This house has now been built, and over the coming three years, there are three distinct phases of research. Firstly the building will be inhabited by a real family using only 1930s technology to heat their home and cook. Extensive monitoring of the house will establish a baseline by which further improvement will be judged. Next the house will be renovated to the best possible standard using currently widely available materials. Basically the research team will pop down to Jewsons and spend £10k on insulation. Finally, after a further year’s monitoring, those improvements will be removed, and all measures taken, almost regardless of cost, to bring the house up to the carbon neutral standard that will be required of all new homes by the increasingly close 2016.

A rather striking demonstration of just what you have to do to a 1930s home to get it to COSH-6 is in the following video:

* Your LDV editor Alex Foster is also a council-appointed director of a district heat company and a trustee of an energy efficiency education charity.

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4 Comments

  • Rob Blackie 16th Feb '09 - 6:02pm

    When we rennovated my house last year we put in dry skin insulation on the inside (also kinspan think) because of the solid wall problem. It’s not cheap but isn’t horrifically expensive either (c.£6k for a four bed house).

    The rooms with modern double glazing are really warm now. Those with the old sash windows are noticeably colder (even with draught proofing).

    Practically I suspect this will only ever happen when there are major rennovations – we could only do it because the entire house was being comprehensively redone – and so replastering everything was practical.

  • “designed materials like Sempatap”

    That’s a handy thing to know for when it comes to decorate my bathroom with an external wall. Part of my problem is that as myhouse is an ex shop it has a very big front window so very little wall to insulate even if if could be done easily (no cavities).

    It is an issue in Pennine towns for certain where there are a lot of 1800s terraces with solid walls and a substantial number of loft conversions (just count the number of velux windows in roofs)

  • A friend recently bought a c 1900(?) detached house. Well, it looks like a back to back terrace, but is not joined up. When he bought it, the energy efficiency rating was 23 (bottom of band F). Since then he has gutted it, following the building inspector’s advice, and installed thermal plasterboard, underfloor insulation, loft insulation, double glazing etc. He now plans to sell the house, and so has had it retested for energy efficiency. The result: 65 on the certificate. (bottom of band D). So he was able to move up two bands by doing “sensible” things – there is nothing fancy here, just better insulation.

    As I understand, LSE believes that it is pretty hard to do better than C grade if you are refurbishing old buildings in central London – and that is with relatively novel things like LED lighting.

    You can find more about my friend’s house energy efficiency improvements here: http://amateurpropertydeveloper.blogspot.com/2009/02/energy-performance-certificates.html

    BTW Why didn’t you raise your rafters to (say) 8″ before boarding your loft? Then you could have had 8″ of loft insulation. That is what I did, and I kept the snow for a long time. I am sure that would have been a lot better value for money than your solar stuff, and I can’t believe that you really needed the 4″ of space that you would have needed! In any case, there are lots of very powerful insulation products now – google champion timber and download their insulation brochure. Put that sort of stuff under the boards, and you will do well. Once the heat has leaked into the loft, you have lost half the battle.

  • “and I can’t believe that you really needed the 4″ of space that you would have needed!”

    Depends on the pitch of the roof – you can lose a lot of effective room by lowering the roof line

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