Greening the House

When we bought this house a decade and a half ago the first thing we did was sort out the insulation. It already had secondary double glazing and in the loft, which was partially boarded, there was about an inch of insulation and that was it.

So my first job was insulating up to rafter level, including under the boarding, which took a while. The boarding incidentally adds considerable insulation value in itself, especially with insulation under it. I also wrapped all the exposed hot water pipes in close cell foam pipe insulation.

Next we invested in cavity wall insulation, which they did by blowing rockwool into holes drilled in the mortar where three bricks joined. Clever, you can hardly see it now unless you look carefully.

Then we put a new kitchen in and as part of that we got a modern boiler.

Since then we've had two rounds of replacing external doors and windows, although we've only replaced windows as it's become necessary, so our bedroom, both studies and all three sitting room windows are still single glazed wood with secondary glazing.

And there we stopped. The house was warmer, especially after we did the loft insulation, and we felt we'd done enough. The only other thing we've done is slowly replaced light bulbs with low energy where we could.

But after last winter and with higher energy prices I thought it was time to look at this again before this winter kicked in. It's a harder game this time as we've done all the easy things but this is what we've done this time around:

1. put curtains up across the (glazed, double width) front door. It did used to have a curtain, but it was annoying and after we got double glazing it didn't seem necessary.
2. lined our bedroom curtains with blackout curtains (this has the added benefit of blocking out the light from the new, brighter street light which now shines on our window).
3. lined one of the sitting room windows with a spare pair of curtains.
4. installed Radflek radiator reflectors on all the external wall mounted radiators.
5. replaced the 9 x 20W halogen spots in the kitchen with 4W LED spots.
6. replaced the 3 x 40W incandescent golf ball bulbs in the sitting room with 3W LED golf ball bulbs.
7. doubled the loft insulation in the areas which aren't boarded (still ongoing, I've done a third of it so far).

As I said it's harder this time as each of these is only going to produce small savings and I reckon the pay back on most of these items is in the order of 3-5 years, especially 5 and 7, which were the most expensive items. But if energy prices continue to go up while saving rates remain pitifully low I think it will prove a good investment.