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The benefits of insulation
There are loads of ways to improve the energy efficiency of your home. As well as replacing your old energy guzzling boiler, properly insulating your house can save hundreds on your energy bills and cut your CO2.
According to the Energy Saving Trust (EST), around half the heat in a typical home is lost through the walls and loft - and then there’s draughts around windows and doors, and pipe lagging to consider too - so it’s definitely worth investing in insulation.
Cavity wall insulation
Between 2002 and 2005 its estimated that around 800,000 homes installed cavity wall insulation, saving nearly 400,000 tonnes of CO2 (EST, 2007).
The majority of post-1920s homes have been built with cavity walls - two layers of brick, with a cavity in the middle. This is normally just a gap with air in the middle, which accounts for as much as 33 per cent of heat loss in some homes. But having it filled is one of the quickest and easiest ways to save on your energy bills year after year.
A technician will visit your home and “inject” the material into your walls from the outside. It will take between two and three hours for a three-bedroom semi-detached, and leaves no mess or damage to your house or garden.
As well as keeping heat in your home in the cold winter months, cavity wall insulation will create a more even temperature throughout your home, prevent condensation and even help to keep you cool during hot spells.
It costs around £500 to have installed but with average savings of at least £90 a year, this will pay for itself in five years.
Click here to visit the EST website and check if you’re entitled to a grant to cover the cost of your cavity wall insulation.
Loft insulation
Insulating your loft won’t save as much energy as having your cavity walls done but heat lost in this way still accounts for up to 15 per cent of heating costs. Also, you can install loft insulation yourself, cutting the cost by half.
The ideal thickness of the insulating material is 270mm, which once installed, can save you £110 a year. And lagging pipes at the same time can add even more to your savings.
The cost of having this installed by a trained technician is around £500 but you could do it yourself for around half of this. However, if you do decide to go DIY, make sure that you wear protective gloves and a mask, properly following guidelines and instructions.
It is simple to do though. The insulation is simply laid over the lost floor, between and then over any visible joists. If you have a cold water tank in the loft, make sure that you don’t insulate it, or push insulation down into tight corners. Walk boards can also be laid over joists to provide access from the loft hatch to any water tanks or pipes.
If you have any queries on how to do this, or for more advice, you can call the Energy Saving Trust free on 0800 512 012, and they’ll also be able to advice you of any grants you might be eligible for.
Floor insulation
All forms of insulation will help to cut your heating costs and your carbon footprint, but not all forms of insulation need to be carried out by a professional or cost hundreds of pounds.
Gaps around skirting boards, doors and between floorboards create cold drafts that lose heat - especially on the ground floor, which won’t benefit from heat rising from the rooms below.
If you have wooden floorboards you can insulate them yourself by carrying out a little DIY. Lifting the boards on the ground floor and laying mineral wool insulation, supported by netting between the joists, will cost around £90 and save you approximately £45 a year afterwards.
Even cheaper and easier is using a sealant to fill gaps along skirting boards and between floorboards, which costs around £20 for the sealant and will save you around £15 a year on your heating bills. However, the EST warns not to block under-floor airbricks in your outside walls since your floorboards will rot without adequate ventilation.
Draught proofing
Fitting draught proofing to doors, windows and letterboxes is very easy, since many draught excluding strips are self-adhesive and fitting brushes to doors and letterboxes requires only basic DIY skills.
Even small changes like this around your home can shave around £20 a year off your heating bill.
Tanks and pipes
Any hot water tank in your home should be fitted with a British Standard “jacket” which will cut heat loss by up to 75 per cent. They cost only around £12 but will save you almost double that in the first year alone and don’t need a technician to fit them.
Similarly, lagging visible hot water pipes costs only about £10 for the insulation, and doing so will save you the same amount each year.
Glazing
For those who can afford it, replacing standard windows with double glazing can save between £80 and £100 a year on heating bills, however, it is expensive.
By replacing single panes of glass with double panes and a cavity of trapped air in between, the heat lost through your windows can be cut by half (EST).
This is a professional job that can only be carried out by trained technicians, which is why it costs so much. If you can’t afford to have all of your windows done, the EST recommends that you just have those replaced in the rooms that cost the most to heat, or where you spend most of your time.
Alternatively, secondary glazing costs a lot less and is still effective in cutting heat loss, as well as noise.
Costs
If you want to save on your heating bills and cut your carbon emissions, but find the cost of installing insulation in your home daunting, make sure that you check the EST grant checker (see useful links) and your local authority for home efficiency grants or click here to read more about funding a new boiler and other energy saving changes.
Warm Front (see useful links) awards grants for improving the efficiency of heating systems too, so it’s also worth seeing if you qualify with them before forking out hundreds on a new boiler or heating system.
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