Insulate
If you had a bucket which was leaking water, how would you cure that? Would you:
a) add more water?
b) fix the leak?
Amazingly, what we do with heating our home is to add more water. Yes, we really do. Our home leaks heat, but instead of stopping that leak of heat, we just add more heat! When you think about it, that's completely insane. Worse, some idiots who can't do basic maths, go out and buy solar panels and/or heat pumps. 'Look at me' they say, 'I am saving £400 a year'. They forget to tell you that they spent out £4,000 on it, that it will cost them X amount of money to maintain, and that they have lost X amount of money in loss of interest (on the money they removed from their bank account to pay for it).
But my point (at least on this page from my blog) is that may not be the right thing to do, anyway, EVEN IF it did save you money. Like I said, isn't it better if you fixed the bucket?
Insulate
Insulate
Insulate
It is, to be real, very difficult to convert your house into a 'passive house'* unless it is of timber frame construction, as a stone-built house – brick or block – can easily leak heat. You would have to seriously increase the thickness of your outside walls with sheets of Celotex (PIR) boards which have great insulating properties, as well as a raft of measures such as even changing your door handles.
*Passive house: A home which is insulated to a very high extent
Then there’s your floor – most homeowners have no idea just how much heat you lose through the floor – and the windows, the doors, and the loftspace. You should also have your windows facing south or slightly south east in order to pick up free solar heat in the winter. In fact, it’s so difficult (but not impossible) that an alternative was devised – EnerPHit – an alternative to passive. It aims to reduce your heating demand by 90%. So if you were using 8,500 kWh a year, going EnerPHit would reduce that to 850 kWh. This means paying £178 a year for your electric heating rather than £1,785. Appealing, eh? It’s still major work, but do-able with very many homes by using something called a ’trombe wall’ - a wall constructed close to a bank of south facing windows. Winter sunshine – being at a low angle - pours in and warms the wall, which acts as a heat battery – releasing it immediately and also later in the day. You don’t have to worry too much about summer heat, because a shade, built horizontally at the top of the windows, stops the main solar energy which is primarily downward during the height of summer.
Trombe walls aren't used very much in the UK, and yet they do provide some heat, even in our winter climate. They are very simple to construct (being just a wall) but do take up space which you might need, and many people would rather see a view out of a window rather than a blank wall.
With insulation, and any money-saving scheme, you have to be careful how much you spend – to make sure it isn’t just lost money which you could have spent on your energy bills. Spend £10,000 on insulation – with your annual saving at £1,587 a year - and that’s a payback period of six years (but take your lost interest on investment into account - let’s not join the game of lies which solar panel and heat pump companies partake in). Shouldn’t we be building homes to passive or EnerPHit standards right now? Of course we should, but we have inept and gimp politicians, remember, who are too preoccupied with telling you that carbon dioxide is warming the planet. So let’s do the maths:
Capital invested in a major insulation programme £10,000
Amount saved on energy bill £1,607
So it would look like a 6.2 year payback. But we have to take loss of interest into account…
Interest lost per year £300
So £1,607 minus £300 is £1,307
So actual payback is 7.6 years. This is real payback for your £10,000 invested in insulation. This is far and away better than ANY solar panel or heat pump. In seven and a half years, you’ll get your money back, and from then on, it’s just an out and out saving every year on your energy bills.
After your insulation programme, my strongest advice would be to use an electric heating system, as that has the lowest maintenance and servicing cost of all fuels and systems of heat – no boiler, no annual service, no insurance required, low cost parts, and 100% efficient and virtually 100% reliable.
All of these videos you see on YouTube about solar panels and heat pumps are all missing the point…you need to keep the heat in, not let it leak out and thus replace it using rare earth and toxic materials, and refrigerant gases. As we said, this idea may be difficult to achieve unless you carry out a truly major refurbishment to your home. But many homes will lend themselves to this, room by room, especially if your home has downstairs wooden flooring. Even if it concrete, there is thermal sheeting like Depron, which has a thermal conductivity of just 0.035 W/m.K. That’s better than fibreglass, which is 0.048. Contrary to what you would think, a wooden floor loses more heat than a concrete one, and is more difficult to insulate. It has to be remembered that all that timber has to be ventilated, so you may lose some of benefits of insulating. It may be better to convert your downstairs flooring to solid. If so, you can lay a vapour barrier and PIR (Celotex) sheeting. This is also very lightweight, and obviously much better than just pouring concrete in – which isn’t advised. You may want to engage the services of a builder and even a surveyor.
Of course, all of this means that you may have to spend more than £10,000 – especially if your house is brick or block, but remember that it is a one-off expense, you never have to do it again. You must do the costings for your own project, but you wouldn’t want to spend much more than £10,000 or your payback period would be too long. The great thing is that it’s one hell of a selling point when you finally decide to sell up.
To finish, remember that conductivity is the problem, here - how well your heat is transferred. Here is a list of materials and their conductivity measured in W/m.K. It is a measure of a substance’s ability to transfer heat through a material by conduction.
Xenon - 0.0051
Krypton - 0.0088
Carbon dioxide - 0.0146
Argon - 0.016
Steam - 0.0184
Nitrogen - 0.024
Air - 0.026
Cotton wool - 0.029
Methane - 0.03
Cotton - 0.04
Rockwall - 0.043
Fibreglass - 0.048
White pine timber - 0.11
Polyurethane foam - 0.124
Helium - 0.15
Insulating brick - 0.15
Engine oil - 0.15
Oak timber - 0.17
Hydrogen - 0.18
Sulphur - 0.2
Polyethylene - 0.33
Firebrick - 0.47
Soil - 0.5
Water - 0.58
Asphalt - 0.75
Concrete - 0.8
Window glass - 1
Brick - 1.31
Porcelain - 1.5
Uranium dioxide - 8.8
Stainless steel - 14
Zirconium alloy - 18
Zirconium - 22.6
Uranium - 27.6
Lead - 35
Thorium - 38
Steel - 43
Iron - 67
Sodium (liquid) - 86
Nickel - 91
Brass - 109
Sodium (solid) - 135
Graphite - 168
Aluminium - 235
Gold - 314
Copper - 401
Silver - 428
Diamond - 1000
Look how low down (and therefore poor at retaining heat) aluminium, iron and steel are - and yet they are common construction materials for door handles, window frames, etc...sending all your home's heat to outside. Whereas white pine timber is even slightly better than polyurethane foam.
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