Energy Efficiency & Saving

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There are many easy things to do to save energy, as well as many not-so-easy things. Likewise with cost. I’ll kick off talking about the easy, low cost options and then move onwards and upwards from there. For information about efficient consumer electronics (such as TVs) and appliances, please see the Appliances & Electrical section. For a quick guide to making your home efficient on various budgets, see Green Your House on a Budget.

Simple things

The most important actions you can take to save energy are also the simplest: replace all your light bulbs with energy savers and turn things off when you’re not using them. Simple, huh?

People often think that energy saving bulbs are expensive, horrid and don’t fit most lamps. This is no longer true. Prices kick off at around £1 per bulb, but they last for ages and will save around £30 per bulb compared to using standard filament types. They also now come in all shapes and sizes, and often kick out a better quality of light than the filament bulbs. Check out Go Green Lights for the cheapest deals around. A 20W energy efficient bulb will produce about as much light as a 60W filament; 30W will give the same as 100W.

Whilst we’re on lights, I have heard people say that strip lights take more energy to turn on than to keep running. This was indeed true around the time of Boudica, but now turning them on takes the same energy as only 15 seconds running time.

Turning things off, including lights, saves vast amounts of energy and therefore cash. Most standby modes take about 15% of the energy needed to run the thing fully. For most households in the UK, this equated to between £20 and £120 a year. It’s not as if turning things back on is difficult – how much effort does it take to press a switch? If, like me, you have no noticeable memory so tend to turn the wrong things off (like the fridge), try getting an extension multi-block with individual switches and only plug things into it which are OK to turn off. You might get the wrong one now and again, but there will be no harm done.

Considering that the UK spends £2,000,000,000 on electricity to run electronic gadgetry, it is worth trying to save the 15% by turning things off.

When it is hot, draw the curtains to keep the sun out. When it is cold, get as much sun into the house as possible and open the doors from the sunny rooms so the heat can spread.

Turn off all your heating and take cold showers. Not really – only joking. However, I know some people who like to keep their houses tropical all year round, which is great for lounging around in nowt but g-strings (I know some fairly interesting people) but very uncool for the environment. Turn the heating down a bit and wear more jumpers, I say. Or simply snuggle up with your loved one – it’ll warm you up a treat.

Keep the fridge clean (including the dusty bit round the back, if you can face it) and wash clothes on the 30^oC or lower settings. 30^oC is actually very warm and with decent detergents should be hot enough for even the dirtiest of clothes. Wash clothes less often - most people wash themselves daily, wear deodorant and do jobs that are fairly unsweaty, so most clothes can be worn several times without becoming even slightly dirty or smelly. Perhaps hang them up to air for a day between wears? And don’t tumble dry; just don't. 

When cooking, microwaves are great for simple heating requirements and boiling veggies (covered bowl, dribble of water, couple of minutes). Keep the lids on pans and turn off the heat a few minutes before the end (especially standard electric hobs). Only boil as much water as you need.

Try not to waste water. Dishwashers are better for most people than hand-washing, but they do need to be packed full. Use the dishwasher on the eco setting and reduce the hot drying bit at the end, if your machine allows. In the toilet area a lot of water is wasted when flushing, so put a ‘Hippo’, ‘Save-a-flush’ or simply a brick in the cistern to reduce the volume of water used per flush. The first two cost a couple of quid and fit snugly in almost any toilet, whereas the brick can be a little less forgiving. The Hippo will save around 5000 litres of water a year, which could give over 5% saving on your water bill.

One of the most ridiculous bathroom crimes is running the tap whilst cleaning one’s teeth. This is literally pouring money down the drain, so don’t do it: it is quite possible to do the whole procedure in half a cup of water. That may be a bit too frugal, I’ll admit, but it does show what is actually necessary as opposed to simply pleasant.

Baths use lots of water, showers use a lot less. Extremely obvious and dull, but true none the less. When you do have a bath, make sure that you really enjoy it as an eco-luxury. 

Bath and shower water (‘grey water’) is good for using on the garden once you have finished with it. The low concentration of detergents, salts and general filth (usually) means it won’t cause problems, especially if you use the more ecofriendly bath products. There are many ways of capturing grey water for reuse, but it is generally not a good idea to store it for too long as it can get smelly. See Fixtures & Fittings in the DIY & Construction section for more detail.

Walk or cycle more, use public transport and ditch the car etc. etc. etc: see Transport & Travel.

Sign up for a green electricity and gas tariff, especially those offered by Good Energy and Ecotricity, as these guys actually supply all their electricity from renewable sources.

A bit more effort

If you don’t have double-glazing, try putting up heavy curtains: these will be almost as effective as double-glazing. If money is extremely tight, you could buy blankets from charity shops and hang these behind your curtains to give warmth and beauty! Cling-filming across the inside of the window frame to create a sort of double-glazing also helps a bit.

For houses with older windows and doors, put in draft excluder. This only costs a few pounds, but if done well can easily save £10 to £15 per year.

Seal the gaps between floorboards and under skirting boards. This can be done with paper or sealant, and if you sand your floorboards it is worth saving the dust to mix with PVA and use that. This does make a noticeable difference, but is not as warming as carpets. Another good move is to put tin foil or reflector board behind radiators on external walls.

Make sure your hot water tank is properly lagged. A new jacket will cost around £15 and will make a big difference. Lagging hot water pipes can also be important if they run through cold areas of the house.

More serious again

Insulation is the really big winner in the mid-price efficiency stakes. The first stop is to make sure that your loft is well insulated. This can take a bit of effort if it is full of junk, but is well worth it. If you take all the stuff you haven’t seen for five years to a car boot sale, it should just about pay for the insulation materials. There are some good eco-friendly options in the shop, but anything is better than nothing. Generally speaking, it is a good idea to have 27cm of insulation in the loft, which will cost about £200 if you do not have any to start with and give a saving of about £60 a year. Insulating your floors can also be a good idea and will cost about the same as the loft, but you will have to lift your flooring first to put in the insulation. Plank floors are probably the easiest, but make sure that any air bricks are left free as wooden floors rot without some ventilation.

After the loft come the walls. For most of us with cavity walls, this is a fairly cheap and easy process of filling the cavity with foam: there are lots of companies who do this and who will help you source any grants around. The average cost is about £500, with savings of around £90 a year. For those of you unlucky enough to have solid walls, your only option is to clad the inside or outside with decorative insulation. It is not as bad as it sounds as there are some fairly pretty finishes, but costs are high: £2,000 for an average house for external cladding and about £50 per m² for internal (plus space loss as the walls get thicker). Average savings are around £300 per year. The process also takes a bit more doing than cavity wall insulation, especially for the external cladding systems. More information can be found at the Energy Saving Trust website under the Home Improvements tab.

Next on the list is double-glazing. Replacing your windows is expensive and has quite a long pay-back time, although the really cheap and nasty stuff will probably pay for itself in 5 years or so. Double-glazing halves heat loss through the windows, from about 15% to 7% of total heat loss for a partially insulated house, and it also reduces noise penetration and condensation. The optimum gap between the sheets of glass is 20mm: more is a waste of space, less is inefficient.

Heat loss can be reduced by almost half again if ‘low-E’ glass is used for the inner sheet in the double glazed unit. This is where normal glass is coated with a microscopically thin layer of reflective material, which results in the heat from inside being reflected back whilst heat from outside can still pass into the house. Filling the gap with argon or a vacuum can reduce heat loss further, but be wary of these as they usually leak and revert back to normal double-glazing quite quickly.

Windows should be made from wood rather than plastic (uPVC), as the wood will last a lot longer if maintained and takes a lot less to manufacture. Almost all windows and doors will be made with FSC approved timber, but it is always worth checking. Try to avoid anything from rainforests, even if it claims to be sustainably logged; any logging in rainforests upsets the delicate ecosystem and leads to significant loss of habitat

Secondary glazing is a cheaper and easier option, and involves putting additional sheets of glass in front of your existing windows. These can be fixed, hinged or sliding units that vary from distinctly unpleasant to extremely posh. DIY fitting is often easy and the decent stuff starts at less than £100 per window.

Fitting thermostatic radiator valves is useful for controlling how much heat is delivered to each room. This allows you to reduce the heat delivered to cold and draughty rooms such as hallways, whilst keeping the core rooms warm. The valves themselves are about £10 each, but fitting them is a pain as the system usually needs to be drained first. This makes it expensive unless you can DIY-it.

Taking no prisoners

Once you have worked your way through the above, it is time to go for broke (as it were). Heading towards a C-Zero home will cost a bit, with payback often measured in decades rather than years, but it is worth considering and is often a great idea when your house needs work doing anyway. Renewable energy sources are a good place to start, such as wood-burning stoves, solar panels, wind turbines or ground source heat pumps. Please go to the Renewable Energy & Resources section for details. For most cases though, solar hot water is likely to be the best starting option. Ventilation systems with heat recovery can be good, but this is really the territory of new-build houses rather than fitting in an existing house.

That’s about all I can think of right now, but reading it through again makes me realise that I have already wittered quite enough anyway. Please visit the Forum to chat in detail about this stuff, or follow the links for further investigation.

Funding

There is funding for loft and cavity wall insulation under the Carbon Emissions Reduction Target. This offers a 50% reduction in the cost of insulation for every household in the UK, with the elderly and low income households able to get it all for free (i.e. 100% reduction in cost). The CERT fund also sudsidises other energy efficiency products, such as low energy light bulbs and saver-plugs. Call 0800 512 012 or visit the Energy Saving Trust for more information.

The CERT scheme has been boosted by the Home Energy Savings Programme, which has also swelled the coffers of the Warm Front programme. The Warm Front pays up to £2,700 to low income and elderly people on benefits for upgrading their central heating system.

There are also various local council, quango and basically random sources of funding that apply to specific groups, areas, types, hair colour or names starting with the letter 'P'. Almost. Anyway, it is nigh on impossible to find all of these oneself, so it is luck that those friendly types at the Energy Saving Trust have done it for us with their grant search tool.

What to do

All of the above, really: start at the top and work down. There are some grants available for installing insulation, but these are generally restricted to those on very low income or benefits. However, cavity wall insulation grants are available to all householders in certain areas.  See the Forum or Sustainable Resource Installers for more detailed information.

It is porbably worth contacting your energy supply company to see what they can do for you. Under the Carbon Emissions Reduction Target scheme, gas and electricity companies have to spend about £2billion making their customers' homes more energy efficient. The scheme runs until 2011 and offers at least some discounts for everyone, although the greatest benefits are available to those on low income and the elderly.

Other Sites

Excellent online energy and carbon assessment tool from Act on CO₂
Resurgence magazine has a quick and easy online house energy audit calculator
Reasonable online home energy assessment tool from the Energy Saving Trust.
Green Energy Efficient Homes provides lots of useful articles on saving energy at home.

Angus Middleton

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