RefurbN16

Tag: DIY

  • Energy Efficient Lighting Pt 2 – Halogens

    The first post on lighting took a look at CFLs, the cheap and effective replacement for standard incandescent lamps*, but over the last couple of decades, many homeowners have opted for halogen lighting.

    Halogen lamps are incandescent i.e. electricity passes through a tungsten filament which heats up and emits light. They differ from the standard incandescent bulbs in that the filament is encased in a capsule full of halogen gas which reacts with the filament in a process called the halogen cycle.

    Halogen lamps have a higher efficacy than standard incandescent lamps, but you generally need quite a lot of halogens to light a room so you usually end up using a fair bit more electricity for the same effect. Now, with electricity prices high and rising, what can be done to reduce the electricity consumption from all those halogens?

    The cheapest option to cut electricity consumption from halogen lighting is to buy a batch of energy saving halogen lamps. These cost a bit more than the normal ones but use about 30% less electricity and they usually last a bit longer too.

    You can also buy halogen replacement CFLs. These are little compact fluorescent lamps that are folded up into a halogen-sized fitting. They’re not cheap (anywhere between £10 and £20 each for a good quality lamp) but they are a lot more efficient than the energy saving halogens and should last a lot longer.

    If you have your halogen lights on a dimmer system, be careful as CFLs often can’t handle this, and as with all CFLs you want to make sure that you get one with the kind of light output that you feel comfortable with. Check this post to see what to look for.

    Finally there is also the LED (light emitting diode) option.  LED lighting is much more efficient than incandescent lighting and LED lamps have much longer lifetimes (at least the quoted lifetimes are much longer, actual lifetimes remain to be seen).

    The main barrier to the widespread uptake of LED lighting now is cost. Good quality LED fittings are still eye wateringly expensive (around £20 to £40 each) but as they’re so efficient and as they should last tens of thousands of hours, they do pay for themselves many times over in energy savings and replacement costs over their lifetime.

    I’ll go into more detail on LED lamps in a future post, but briefly, the technology has moved on a lot in the last few years and you can now buy really good quality lamps.

    Prices will come down in the next few years so it might be worth holding off for a little while, but if you are going to be redoing the interior of your house and you currently have halogens, it’s probably a good time to consider this technology.

    Useful tip: if you are considering investing in these more expensive halogen replacement options, then the best tactic is to replace the bulbs that have the highest use first. By replacing these bulbs you will see the biggest drop in your electricity consumption and they will pay for themselves in the shortest time.

    * A lamp is what is more commonly referred to by people outside the industry as a bulb. What we normally call a lamp would be called a luminaire in the industry.

  • First Stoke Newington Draught Busting Saturday

    This weekend we had our first Draught Busting Saturday in Stoke Newington. This hands-on workshop was pioneered by Hyde Farm CAN and has been picked up by Peckham Power and Transition Belsize amongst others and we thought it was about time we gave it a go.

    Draught Busting workshops are held in a local house in need of improvement. Stoke Newington resident Cath very kindly let us loose with hammers in her home and expertly facilitated the group as we got stuck in to  the job.

    The session focused on fitting draught stripping around the lower half of the sash windows and around doors but we also touched on blocking up chimneys (Cath had gone for a DIY solution of a plastic bag stuffed with material), radiator panels (which are fixed behind radiators mounted on external, heat loss walls), and ensuring that loft hatches are well draught proofed to stop warm air rising up into the loft space.

    Draught proofing the upper half of a sash window requires a ladder so that you can get up to the outside of the window frame (you can’t do the upper half of a window from the inside as you wouldn’t be able to open the window).

    Just doing the lower half of the window will cut out a substantial amount of the air passing through and cutting out those lower level cold draughts will have a noticeable effect on your comfort. The upper half of the windows can be a project for the future – perhaps we could secure a ladder for a weekend and go round all of the houses that have done the work to the inside in one go.

    Draught proofing is a very easy skill to pick up but there isn’t a great deal of practical information out there about the materials and techniques and so it can seem daunting – until you’re shown how easy it is to do, that is. The people who attended the session will now be in a position to share the knowledge with family and friends.

    After the success of the first session, we’ll be looking to roll this out on a larger scale in time for the next heating season, around September and October.

    If you’re interested in participating then please drop us a line. In particular we are after people living in homes in need of draught proofing who would be willing to host a session in Autumn.

    We’ll also be placing a bulk purchase for draught proofing materials so as to make this measure as cheap as possible and so that it pays for itself as quickly as possible.

  • Draught Proofing Pt 3 – Easy Draught Proofing

    In part 1 we looked at the difference between ventilation (which we need) and draughts (which we definitely don’t need). Then we looked at the ways air can leak out of your home.  Now we can start looking at doing something about it.

    There are some obvious gaps to block in most homes. The keyhole and letterbox are prime contenders for your first hit. It’s quick and easy and cheap.

    Unused (or rarely used) chimneys should also be blocked as they’re big holes in your home which let the air out easily. You can buy chimney balloons but they’re on the expensive side.  Improvise and let me know what works.

    If you live on the ground floor and you have suspended timber floors, it’s likely that you have cold air from the cellar coming up the cracks between floorboards and around the top and bottom of the skirting boards. These gaps can be blocked using a silicone sealant (mastic) which you can get in different colours. This isn’t a quick job but you can do a bit at a time as and when you have a moment.

    Lastly (for the moment), check out any pipework that passes from the warm interior to a cold space whether it’s outside or to the cellar or loft.

    Your home will have an array of pipes which provide the services that you need (gas pipes, waste water, boiler flues, electricity cabling etc) passing through the structure. These often have holes bigger than the pipes that pass through them and air will leak in and out as a result. You can use either silicone sealant or you can get pipe collars (grommits) that attach to the wall and fit snugly around the pipe. Airtight adhesive tapes might also prove useful.

    So there are some starting points. If you want to read more, check out the Energy Saving Trust’s Improving Air Tightness in Dwellings and the Scottish Ecological Design Association’s Design and Detailing for Airtightness.

    More to come!

    http://www.seda2.org/dfa/dfa.pdfD

  • Draught Proofing Pt 1 – Ventilation Vs Draughts

    Air tightness is a very important part of an efficient, low carbon home. You can have the best insulation in the world, but if the warm air is blowing out through cracks and gaps in the fabric of the building, you’re not going to see those benefits.

    Equally, ventilation is a very important part of a fresh, comfortable home. Good ventilation allows stale air from in the home to be exchanged with fresh, clean air from the outside. It allows odours and gases such as carbon monoxide and volatile organic compounds to escape into the atmosphere and it removes moisture from the air. Moisture is created through normal household activities such as cooking, washing and drying and it is critical that it is removed from the home so as to avoid condensation and damp.

    The trick is to achieve the correct amount of controlled, desirable ventilation that allows the air in the home to be exchanged with fresh air from outside, while reducing the uncontrolled and undesirable draughts.

    You can measure the rate at which air leaks from a home by conducting an air permeability test. This involves blocking all of the vents up, closing windows and doors and generally sealing off all of the controlled ventilation routes. A screen fitted with a powerful fan is then placed over the door and the air pressure within the home is increased. By measuring how much power is required to maintain this pressure, you can calculate the air leakage rate.

    Knowing the rate at which the air escapes through gaps and cracks is all well and good, but really you want to know where it’s escaping so that you can do something about it. Often you can tell that there’s a draught in a room but it’s not possible to work out where. During the pressure test someone walks around the home with a smoke generator, checking likely areas to see if there is a draught – the smoke will follow the air through any crack and out of the home.

    Draughts can occur all over the home – gaps between suspended timber floorboards, around skirting boards and electrical fittings, at the join between walls and the join between floors and walls, around pipework penetrating the fabric, around loft hatches, up chimney, through letter boxes and keyholes and of course around doors and windows.

    The next post on draught proofing will cover the quick and easy measures you can take to start improving the air tightness of your home – it’s cheap, easy, DIY and well worth doing.

  • 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.