RefurbN16

Tag: CO2 emissions

  • Sustainable Refurbishment – Towards an 80% Reduction in CO2 Emissions

    The UK’s building regulations didn’t start to consider energy consumption until the 1960s, when very basic requirements to conserve energy were placed on house builders. These requirements have slowly been tightened over the decades and the introduction of the Code for Sustainable Homes has accelerated this in recent years.

    The intention is that new build homes built from 2016 will be zero carbon (although the exact definition of ‘zero carbon’ in this case is still up for grabs). The problem is that the UK’s housing stock is the oldest in the developed world, with 8.5 million properties over 60 years old and an estimated 24 million homes built up to 2016 expected to still exist in 2050.

    Zero carbon new build homes are definitely needed so that new homes don’t add to emissions, but all of the carbon reductions will have to happen in homes that have already been built.

    In the previous post we looked generally at a whole house approach to sustainable refurbishment. The Energy Saving Trust has recently published an interesting new publication which looks at this in more detail and points the way towards an 80% reduction in CO2 emissions in existing homes. This guide is aimed at homeowners as well as housing developers and builders and is clearly written and nicely presented.

    It gives an excellent overview of the energy efficiency measures that can be implemented in the UK’s homes including the different types of wall, roof and floor insulation, improving windows and doors, increasing air tightness as well as efficient heating and hot water systems and lighting and appliances. Also covered are microgeneration, water efficiency, waste and recycling and even climate change adaptation.

    If you want to get a good picture of what needs to be done to our homes, then this is a good starting point. Hopefully it will stimulate you to consider which of these measures can be applied in your home.

    The Energy Saving Trust has lots of interesting technical guidance. More information can be found here.

  • The Whole House Approach to Carbon Reduction

    The challenge to reduce CO2 emissions from the UK’s homes by 80% by 2050 is a tough one. The good news is that this target is very achievable but there is a lot of work ahead of us in order to see it happen and cutting emissions this far will require us to take a different approach to improving the energy efficiency of our homes to the one taken to date.

    Financial support for carbon reduction measures in the home has mostly come from the Carbon Emissions Reduction Target (and before that the Energy Efficiency Commitment). Both programmes are obligations on the energy suppliers to reduce carbon emissions from UK homes by subsidising a range of energy efficiency measures.

    The activity is funded by a levy on our energy bills (the energy suppliers aren’t doing this out of the kindness of their hearts), which means that they opt for the cheapest route to achieving their targets. This isn’t the most effective means of starting us on the path to an 80% reduction in CO2 emissions.

    Mostly this support takes the form of piecemeal work such as discounted loft or cavity wall insulation, energy saving light bulbs (too many of them) and assorted other measures. Lots of homes have taken advantage of these offers and if you have a loft that hasn’t been topped up yet or a cavity wall that hasn’t been insulated, you should too.

    But this activity only tackles one aspect of a home’s energy consumption and this tactic will not be sufficient to achieve an 80% reduction. Instead, a whole house approach is the most logical way to go about it.

    A whole house approach doesn’t mean that the whole house has to be done in one go. Instead you want to consider all of the solutions that are appropriate to your home, work out the order you need to do them in to deliver the biggest carbon savings at lowest cost and then do the maximum amount possible as each opportunity to do the work arises.

    These opportunities might include moving house, redecorating, roof repairs, re-pointing your walls or redoing your kitchen. It might even be something as simple as doing a spring clean and Freecycling the contents of your loft, freeing up space to add more insulation.

    If you are considering doing any of this sort of general work to your home, you should be looking at improving the building’s energy performance and do as much work, to as high a possible standard (beyond building regulations) as you can afford.

    While it will stretch your budget, the cost of doing that same energy efficiency work in a few years time will in many cases be considerably higher because you might have to strip back to the brickwork, put up scaffolding, do the work and then redecorate all over again. If you are going to have tradespeople on site anyway, there are savings to be had in the long run by doing that extra bit of work at the same time.

    You also want to have to do each energy efficiency measure once only so you should look for the best solution for each aspect of your home. For this reason, measures that appear to be a cheap fix (insulating wallpaper springs to mind) are best avoided. While the costs are often a lot more modest than the alternatives (in this case full solid wall insulation), so are the energy savings and you might well find that in some years time you’ll need to go through the whole process again.

    Financial support is moving in the direction of a whole house approach at the moment. In the next couple of years we are going to start to see the introduction of funding that pays for the more costly measures up front. You then pay this money back from the energy savings, with any outstanding balance remaining with the home, not the homeowner.

    Between now and the introduction of this support, there’s lots that you can be getting on with to reduce energy consumption in the home. Work out what could be done to your home and what you can afford and then keep an eye out for those times when you’re going to be doing work anyway and take advantage of those opportunities to invest in energy efficiency.

    The next post will point you to a guide that goes into more detail on this whole house approach and should stimulate some ideas.

  • Track Your Carbon Footprint with The Carbon Account

    In a post on measuring electricity consumption I wrote back in December, I briefly touched on a fantastic website called The Carbon Account and thought I’d go into a bit more detail about it because it’s really very good.

    This is a dead easy to use carbon monitoring website that allows you to track your carbon emissions from gas and electricity consumption in the home along with car and flight emissions.

    It displays your carbon footprint for the last year in a neat little chart to which you can add notes to flag up changes that you have made to your home or lifestyle or any times when your house was unoccupied. Unfortunately it only shows your carbon footprint for the last year (it would be great if the developers could fix this at some point).

    There is even a social networking element to it so you can see how your friends’ energy consumption has changed and congratulate them on the steps they’re taking to reduce their emissions.

    You don’t even need to do any conversions of your gas meter readings into kWh (something I’ll touch on soon) as it does it all for you. All you need to do is input the actual meter readings. It literally takes two minutes to take your electricity and gas readings and add them to the website.

    When you first get an account, it asks you a few questions about your home and make a stab at what your annual carbon footprint might be and gives you a flat graph which doesn’t vary over the year.

    As it takes a while to build up a profile of meter readings, I would suggest digging up any old bills you have lying around and adding the readings from them. Just do the “actual” or “customer” readings because the estimated readings are usually dodgy. If you don’t have your old bills, see if you can get your energy supplier to send you your past meter readings or check out their website as they may have a section where you can download your old bills.

    Then take a gas and electricity meter reading on a regular basis, ideally each week, so that you can see how your energy consumption changes. You can even set up an email reminder to give you an e-nudge every week.

    Bear in mind that the outside air temperature is a big driver of your heating demands so it’s quite possible that you might do some energy efficiency work and you don’t see the drop you were expecting to – it might just be that it’s been cold outside. You will still have made a saving because your energy bill would have been considerably higher than if you hadn’t done that measure.

    Taking weekly readings is a good thing because it allows you to do some calculations which remove these temperature effects, another topic that I will cover in the future.

    There’s plenty of information about how it works on the Carbon Account website, along with the calculation methodology. One thing to note is that if you’re getting funny results for your gas meter, it might be because it measures in 100s of cubic feet. Check out the info about this here.

    So set up a Carbon Account right now and start monitoring. If you don’t know what your carbon emissions are, you won’t know how far you’ve cut them!

  • 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.