The man from Warm Front came last week. Warm Front is a UK government funded scheme that offers free advice to eligible householders on how to make their homes more energy efficient. And if you're hard up there's even a chance they can help you get a grant to do things like cavity insulate walls, lag hot water tanks, put insulation in attics, improve your heating systems and put draughtproofing around doors and windows. Well no-one ever said saving the planet was going to be sexy.
Being energy efficient has to be the next best thing to reducing energy consumption. And since we've not begun to figure out exactly how to reduce our consumption, we may as well start with secondary action… trying to make what we do consume go a little further. Being efficient doesn't inspire me much though. It's not a mission that's going to get me out of bed in the morning. But maybe it's more efficient for me to stay in bed with the duvet on and the heating off. Now that sounds more appealing.
Anyway, I got up to meet the man from Warm Front who measured the volume of our house, searched for insulation in our loft, prodded our hot water tank, noted the make and model of our boiler, and finally offered to get someone in to do some draught proofing for us.
"This place is huge," he said logging the results of his survey into the government database on his laptop, "I bet it costs a fortune to heat." He was right there. "These old houses are tricky," he continued, "they don’t meet modern building regulation standards for insulation and it's very expensive to upgrade them. Right now, if your house was rated like a fridge it would probably be rated an E F or G." I shivered at the prospect.
"If you want to insulate these solid stone walls you'll need to do it on the inside, then dry line them and redecorate. It'll take about four inches off each wall and you'll need to reset all your doors and windows too." It didn't sound like much of an option.
"As for your loft, well it's nicely boarded and insulated but with just 50mm of rockwool compared to current new build requirements for 270mm. It's a massive job to lift the boards, remove the ceiling, batten it out to accommodate extra insulation and put it back together. Probably not worth it for the savings you'd make in your lifetime."
It was not all bad news though, apparently our hot water tank was lagged better than most and we were entitled to a free draught proofing service for our leaky doors and windows. Well I guess every little helps.
Before the man from Warm Front left I asked him for a little advice on other ways to become a more energy efficient household. "Make sure you don't leave your TV's on standby," he said unhelpfully. I explained we didn't have a TV. He paused for a moment, a little shocked by my revelation, then continued. "Do you really want to know what I think?" I nodded. "Well, if you're serious about efficiency you should move to a smaller, newer home…. in the future old properties like this will be condemned stock, energy inefficient, undesirable. But if moving is too much I'd just turn the heating off and buy everyone an extra jumper."
And so the Warm Front moved on and left me contemplating the arrival of a cold snap and the purchase of a family pack of woolly jumpers. Along with my duvet and a lie in such changes seem much more practical.
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