Installed Measures:
Personal story:
My wife Lucy and I are passionate about living sustainably, and have made a number of life choices to enable us to do so, including not flying, running 2 used Electric Vehicles, increasing local biodiversity via additional pollinator friendly plants and buying used/sustainable clothing and furnishings. Our last house was a Victorian terrace that we managed to bring up to an EPC rating of C with combined energy bills of under £600 per year. I want to use this retrofit to show what is possible using techniques and technologies that are available to the masses, whilst ensuring I make the environmentally sound choice for materials and decoration.
Motivations:
My motivations to reduce energy use and live sustainably are that we obviously have one planet available to live on, and that Humans are having an increasingly negative impact on the world around them. I do whatever I can to reduce the environmental impact of myself my family and my friends, and believe that the first step towards sustainability is made at home.
Property Background
The property is a 1960’s detached house of cavity construction, with a single storey rear extension. It had been in the same ownership since the 1970’s and has already had limited energy efficiency upgrading, including 100mm loft insulation, aluminium framed double glazing and cavity wall insulation in 1982.
Key changes made so far are:
Benefits of work carried out
The most significant improvement in thermal comfort we have seen so far are the external wall insulation and triple Glazing and draughtproofing/replacement of all exterior doors, This has improved the thermal comfort of both the upstairs bedrooms (allowing us to significantly reduce the TRV settings) and also of our kitchen and downstairs family room. Our East-West PV arrays are also incredible, generating usable energy from 5am until 9pm in the summer.
Favourite feature
Has to be the Solar PV with iBoost! I have wanted PV for years and, although the site isn’t ideal, the East-West facing array deals with our morning and evening electrical loads, and puts any surplus energy into the Hot water cylinder, giving us renewably heated water for washing and showers.
