Mid-Terrace to Mid-Terrific!
Recently we were asked to be part of the York Green open homes! This has caused me to reflect a little on our initial goals and how we have fared. As we spoke about in our first blog/“about” section, we are extremely frustrated by the how inefficient the homes we have lived in are and what is classed as affordable housing these days.
Essentially our goals were to make a home nicer to live in, making it more energy efficient and more sustainable at the same time. Quantitatively, we aimed to do this via spending ~10% of the value of the house on energy saving and producing measures that would allow us to meet the “A” grade EPC standard. As we’re doing Green open homes, i’m going to try and briefly highlight the rough interim energy and finical costs of the project.
As an attempt to preempt what i expect will be the biggest FAQ, i’m going to try and outline the money side on the project. To be 100% clear this is rough estimate. Although we can talk about the money and carbon case generally, honing down more figures is challenging as we don’t really have a good handle on the house’s prior performance. This is because we started doing our retrofit slowly from day one, we don’t have any data before we moved in, and then had an some alteration re-done by an insuracne company. This is a broad (very) rough attempt at approximating what we’ve achieved so far. In a year or so i will have enough data to do this more robust, but is i suspect the money side of things is a big questions for people so here it goes…
So we bought the terrace for £121k, this was the bottom of the market for houses close to central York. There were some issues, like a leaky roof and a damp problem, which is relatively common for a house of this age and type. Following our eco-renovation, the house was recently re-evaluated to be worth £145k, an increase of £24k (20%). This far outweighs the cost of all of the energy improvements (~£12k). The attribution of the increase in value is challenging as the housing market has increased the price as as-well as the renovation, but as zoopla tells me this is 10% it is fair to say the eco-renovation played a part although the percent due to the “eco” and “renovation” part of the eco-renovation is unknown. However, it is important to caveat this with the obvious fact that until we sell the house (which we currently have no intent to do!), we cannot know for sure that this increase is real.
The real savings that will payback the cost of doing all the work are seen through the bills (assumed at £26/month, 50% usage at house). For the first year after installing the panels our bills total of ~£37/month for electricity and gas, which is paid for in excess by income from the PVs (~£60/month, albeit offset as one payment is quarterly and the other is monthly). These bills are low, for a house our type i would estimated expected bills to be £700-900. I predict these to increase after next winter as we essentially had just electric heaters this winter due some issues with the boiler, although with that said the electric heaters are more expensive per kWh, but regardless it is low.Getting the money to do these kind of work and the upfront nature of the costs often deters people. We paid for the work using a mixture loans, savings and income https://pharmaciepourhomme.fr. With current interest rates low borrow money if someone is willing to lend it currently. So this shifts paying back for the cosy/cheap to run house to over the payback period. The government “Green Deal” scheme could be an option for many and it has been extensively discussed on the internet, including on MoneySavingExpert with some great worked examples, energy saving trust, and YouGen. The point needs to be made though that a lot of improvements that have a large impact are cheap like managing drafts or made very simply subsidised/free by the government such as installing loft insulation.
#PV production firmly in the high region (Mar-Sept). A battery (~10kWh) would easily pull us of grid these months. pic.twitter.com/h7bTsCzOaM
— Little Eco Blog (@LittleEcoT) May 8, 2015
Financially the payback can only come from savings. Considering our gas bill is currently ~£10 a month (although, i expect this to rise to £15 a month), this is basically impossible. This is low as our shower is an electric one, we may not keep our house as hot as some do, and hopefully some credit to all of our eco-renovation efforts! I estimate the payback period for the boiler to be greater than the current UK life expectancy. The last boiler was only 5 years old (Chaffoteaux et Maury, Minima Mk2 30 FF), and although we’ve got for a more reliable model with 10 years warrant (Worcester, Greenstar 28) i won’t be holding my breath.
Any lingering thoughts, Would you do this action again to another house?
I’ve just tried to outline the broad money side of our project with a few examples. But i can’t personally do this without pointing out that “Externalities” (e.g. costs of air quality) of conventional heating/Electricity options are thought to be huge. Although we pay for these via our taxes etc, it is important to bare that in mind ( a back of the envelope calculation gives air-quality costs as £250-850 per person per year, which is from £16–54 bn in costs and ~64.1m people ). Trying to look at more of the picture (but by no means all!) rather changes the way we can see the economics of energy pricing.
Its is challeneging to express quite what a improvement it is to live in a warm cosy house without huge cost ( energetic or financial ). It will be possible to quantify this in the near future, and there are some great examples of projects that have managed this ( like a carbon coop project with @zapaman in Manchester ). Here’s to cosy, more sustainable and cheaper living!
- Some Financing Examples…
- House improvement loans from nationwide – the co-operative bank offered these as extensions to mortgages too whilst we were doing our renovation, but currently just standard loans are available
- Ecology building society – who no only offer mortgages, but the financing for home improvement atop of this
- Green Deal
- Government details on the scheme
- worked examples from MoneySavingExpert worked
- Detail on the Green deal and energy obligation certificates (ECO) from the Energy Saving Trust (EST)
- Is the Green Deal right for me?? on YouGen
Great information. Lucky me I ran across your website by
accident (stumbleupon). I have book marked it for later!