RefurbN16

Author: Jamie

  • Behavioural Measures Pt 1 – Thermostat & Standby

    In my post on Measuring Electricity Consumption, I made reference to changing habits to reduce electricity consumption. These are known as “behavioural measures” and these should be the first steps taken when you start to reduce your energy consumption. They’re free and they’re easy to do – you just need to think about how you interact with energy in your life and adjust your habits ever so slightly.

    You’ve probably heard some of them before and no doubt you are doing some already but there’s always a few others you can adopt. In this first post we’ll cover a few of them but please feel free to add your own in the comments below. I’ll do two or three per post so this could be quite a lengthy series 🙂

    Thermostat

    First of all there’s the old chestnut of turning down your thermostat. The temperature you keep in your house affects your energy consumption a lot. For every degree higher you set the thermostat, it increases your heating consumption by roughly 10%.

    Generally people say “turn your thermostat down 1 degree” but really what you want to do is turn it down to the lowest temperature at which you still feel comfortable. For most people this should be somewhere around the 18 or 20 degree mark but the lower the better.

    This saves energy for two reasons: it takes less energy to warm up your house to the required temperature but it also means that your house loses heat at a reduced rate because the temperature difference between the inside of your home and the outside air.  All in all, your boiler will be working less hard.

    Your room thermsostat is only one of your heating controls and setting these controls correctly is key to getting the best efficiency out of your heating system. It’s a complicated topic and deserves posts of its own and I will cover this soon. All I’ll say at this point is that you want your heating on for as little time as possible and at as low a temperature as possible while maintaining a comfortable, warm living environment.

    Standby

    Many homes have quite a variety of electrical equipment nowadays. Just take a moment to think about what you might have out of (deep breath)…. TVs, VCR, DVD player, digital radio, hifi, MP3 player, games console, digital camera, set top box, mobile phones, computer, monitor, printer, scanner, broadband modem, wifi router, electric toothbrush, shaver, washing machine, dishwasher, tumble dryer, microwave, oven and hob.

    All of the devices in that list will have some sort of standby consumption to a greater or lesser degree. The better performing products might have standby of 1W or less but a few can easily be over 10W and in a couple of cases even up to the 20W mark.

    A good rule of thumb is that for every watt of standby you leave on, it costs you about £1 per year. This may not sound like a lot but it adds up across all of the devices you have in your home and it’s so easy to avoid!

    Some things, such as video recorders, portable phones, clock radios, security systems etc have unavoidable standby because they need to be left switched on. There’s not much you can do about that except for if you ever come to purchase a device such as this, try and find one with low standby consumption.

    Portable devices such as the camera and mp3 are less of a problem. They are very efficient and use very little energy to power themselves, but their chargers do draw a small amount of current if left in and plugged on. The old, clunky chargers that were slightly warm to the touch were quite bad, drawing 2 or 3W if left plugged in but now the lightweight chargers are a lot better and there is a European directive in place (the Energy Using Products directive) that will keep driving down standby consumption. Until that happens though, it’s worth making the effort to switch stuff off.

    The ones to watch out for are the set top box, hifis and digital radios. Set top boxes have, in some cases, eye watering standby consumption. The more complex digital TV boxes (like Sky and Virgin) can knock out 15W to 20W so having it just sit there not doing anything can add about £15 to £20 to your electricity bill. I unplug my Virgin set top box when it’s not being used – it works just fine and boots up quickly.

    You can measure standby using plug in electricity meters but these can be a little inaccurate and this really affects things at low, standby wattages (I’m trying to track down a very accurate plug in electricity meter and if anyone knows where to find one, please let me know). You don’t need to know how much power is being drawn on standby, just assume that it is and unplug it.

    If unplugging something is awkward then there are standby saving devices which you can buy that make things a bit easier.  Simply plug everything that you want to be able to turn off standby into a 4 way socket and then plug that into a standby saving device such as a Standby Buster or an Energenie.

  • Buildings Group Meeting @ Pangea Project on Monday 12th December

    Just a quick note to say that there will be a Transition Town Stoke Newington Buildings Group meeting at Pangea Project on Monday 12th at 7pm. More information can be found here.

    Don’t worry if you can’t make it. We’ll be meeting on the 2nd Monday of each month so the next one will be on 11th January of the next decade.

    Hope to see you there.

  • Measuring Electricity Consumption

    Keeping track of how much energy your home gets through is a very useful thing to do when you start to look at reducing your home’s carbon footprint. By measuring how much energy you get through you can accurately measure how much CO2 your home generates and you can also track the effects that energy efficiency measures have.

    The two energy inputs for most homes in N16 are, of course, electricity and gas. First up we’ll deal with measuring your electricity consumption.

    Start by digging out your old electricity bills going back as far as possible for the house you are in. If you can’t find them, they might be available on your account on your energy supplier’s website.

    Ignore any readings that have “E” or “Estimate” or similar beside a reading as these are guesses made by your energy supplier. By looking at only the customer readings or official meter readings or a combination of the two, you know you’re looking at the actual consumption over that period.

    Each unit represents 1kWh (kilowatt hour) of electricity consumption (I’ll be doing a post on the maths and physics behind energy, power etc soon – don’t worry it’s quite simple!)

    This historical bill data will give you a coarse picture of your electricity consumption – it’ll be low resolution but it’s something. You can take this data and work out average electricity consumption per day across a period and you might be able to see that your electricity consumption is generally a bit higher over the winter months than it is over the summer. But meter readings taken infrequently like this don’t give you a very good picture and you can do much better.

    The simplest and cheapest way of tracking your electricity consumption is to take a meter reading once a week and make a note of it. Even better, upload this information along with your historical meter readings to a website such as The Carbon Account or imeasure. These will automatically convert your electricity and gas meter readings into CO2. I use the Carbon Account as it’s a very nicely presented website and it also allows you to track your transport emissions.

    If you want to pay more detailed attention to your electricity consumption you can purchase clip on electricity meters. These are nifty little devices that clip on to one of the cables coming out of an electricity meter. The box measures the electricity flowing through the cable and transmits a signal to another box which you can take from room to room (mine sits by my TV).

    The accuracy of these devices is so so, maybe to 10W (Watts) or thereabouts, but the main purpose is to see how your home’s electricity consumption changes in real time as you turn things on and off and you can get an idea of how often your fridge’s cooling cycle kicks in and out.  Some people leave it by the door so they can easily see if something’s been left on. Don’t expect to be able to detect every device’s standby consumption with these – it’s really to highlight where the big hitters are.

    If you want to measure individual appliances more accurately then you’ll need a plug in electricity meter. These often display down to 0.1W, although again the accuracy of these can be a bit iffy so you shouldn’t read too much into the readings.  You can also leave them plugged in so that you can measure consumption over a day or a week (important if you’re measuring appliances that operate on a cycle like a fridge or washing machine).

    Electricity Monitor is a useful website that allows you to compare the features of a selection of clip on meters and then buy them. You only really need to have one in your home for a month or two before you’ll have a very good idea of where your electricity is going and then you can pass it on to a friend or neighbour.  Alternatively some libraries are now offering them on loan which is a magnificent idea – you can borrow them in Islington and I might see if I can persuade Stoke Newington library to look into it too.

    Simply measuring your electricity consumption won’t reduce it of course. To do that you need to change your habits – turn off the lights when not in use, don’t run the half empty washing machine, switch things off standby. Alternatively you might see that the old freezer in the corner is munching through the electricity or those last few light bulbs which you haven’t changed yet are getting through more electricity than you thought.

    By making simple changes such as these you can do a lot to cut electricity consumption, but knowing what to change is the first step.

  • Stoke Newington’s Homes

    Most of the homes in Stoke Newington were built during Victorian times.  Victorian homes look great, were solidly built and are long lasting, but energy efficiency was not a consideration in the minds of the architects and builders back in the latter half of the 19th century – it wasn’t until 1965 that energy efficiency became a consideration in the building regulations. It’s worth remembering that back in the 60s, only about a quarter of homes had central heating (6.3 Central Heating Ownership, Domestic Energy Fact File 2008).

    The Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) has good data on electricity and gas consumption in homes around the UK. It’s available in chunks of about 2,000 homes known as Middle Layer Super Output Area (MLSOA – an area of the UK used in censuses).

    This data shows that the average home in Stoke Newington consumes 3,600kWh of electricity and 15,700kWh of gas (MLSOA) electricity and gas estimates 2007: London Government office region). The electricity consumption generates 2.0 tonnes of CO2 and the gas consumption generates 3.2 tonnes giving a total carbon footprint for our homes of 5.2 tCO2 which is a little bit below the national average (convert energy into CO2 using the carbon factors found in Guidelines to Defra / DECC’s Greenhouse Gas Conversion Factors for Company Reporting).

    Any home built before the 1930s will most likely have solid walls and these allow heat to pass through quite easily. The cavity in a cavity wall home does a reasonable job of reducing heat loss from a home, even when it’s uninsulated, but solid wall homes don’t have this useful gap between the warm interior and the cold N16 air.

    Another way in which our homes lose energy is through having very poor air tightness. The gaps and cracks in the building’s fabric mean that cold air whistles in and the warm air is forced out. Reducing this unwanted ventilation while still allowing some controlled ventilation in order to keep the air in the home fresh is very important.

    These two areas will be amongst the most significant if we are to reduce the CO2 emissions in our homes by 80% by 2050, however there is a multitude of other aspects of the home’s energy consumption which must be tackled also and we will be describing how each can be achieved in this blog in the coming months.

  • RefurbN16 introduction at Pangea Project

    Many thanks to all who came along to hear about our plans for the Buildings Group home energy efficiency refurbishment project at Pangea Project on Thursday.

    The evening started with food and the filming of TTSN’s submission to The Wave. If you’re in London on Saturday 5th December, make sure you get down to the demonstration when we’ll be encircling parliament with a wave of blue to demonstrate our commitment to a safe climate and future.

    I followed this with a presentation highlighting the size of the problem (household CO2 emissions account for a quarter of the UK’s total emissions, which need to be reduced by 80% by 2050), what our plans are for this project and a brief description of the best strategy for reducing energy consumption in the home.

    Fran then took over, explaining the benefits of refurbishing old homes versus building new ones and describing exactly how a typical draughty and poorly insulated Victorian home can be turned into a very low energy consumption home.

    Afterwards we had a lively discussion about the subject and we were both very encouraged by the enthusiasm shown.  We’ve now been contacted by about 10 different people who are interested in taking part in the project which is an excellent start. We’ll be having monthly meetings on the second Thursday of each month with the first being on the 14th December (venue to be decided).

    Now the ball’s rolling we’ve got a bit of work to do…

    Jamie

  • The Blog Lives…

    Oh yes it does.

    Welcome to the RefurbN16 blog. This blog will become a repository for practical information on all aspects of low carbon homes of the type found in Stoke Newington and the rest of North London. We will provide practical information, hints and tips and we’ll also invite people who have actually done these measures to share their experiences here.

    Here are the aims of this project:

    • Guide a selection of homes in the N16 area through an energy efficiency refurbishment project
    • Measure the home’s energy consumption (both gas and electricity) and advise on what the best solutions are and how much they will cost
    • Cover all aspects of the home’s energy consumption from the lowliest light bulb upwards
    • Source the materials and installers to complete the work
    • Explore every opportunity for financial support that is available
    • Keep a record of the project via a blog so that others in Stoke Newington and across London can learn from the project
    • How far we go will depend on the house and the householder

    We hope to find 10 or 15 homes who are willing to go through an entire energy efficiency makeover and we will also happily help people who are simply taking the first few steps, with guidance and advice.

    If you are interested in taking part, lending a hand or even just have a query regarding energy efficiency in your home then feel free to contact us. There will also be monthly open posts where you can pose your questions and discuss household energy efficiency.

    Jamie