UK 'must insulate 25 million homes'

[daiking]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-39107973

 

"

More than one home every minute will need to be refurbished in the UK between now and 2050, experts say.

A report to Parliament says 25 million existing homes will not meet the insulation standards required by mid-century.

The UK needs to cut carbon emissions by 80% by then - and a third of those emissions come from heating draughty buildings.

The government said it would devise policies as soon as possible."

 

Time for my favourite phrase at the moment, 'Good luck with that!'

Edited February 28, 2017 by daiking

[Jeremy Harris]

This is the report I'm being interviewed about in an hours tine see this thread:

 

Be useful if anyone has anything factual I can use in the interview.

[ProDave]

I wonder if this will finally change buyers behavior?  i.e. when choosing a home will people actually start to look at only houses with a decent EPC or will they carry on as now not bothering to take note?  Surely it is about time the market price of poorly insulated homes was lower to reflect the work they need to bring them up to standard.  An awful lot of the old cottages up here get an EPC of E or F, which is now too low to be used as a rental property for instance.

 

Look forward to the "government scheme to insulate your home...." junk phone calls any time soon.

 

It makes me very glad indeed that our new house will be do well insulated.

 

Like all good journalism (sic) it gives no hint as to what the target EPC (or some other measure) of these "refurbished" homes will be.  If they are aiming for all hiomes to have an EPC of A then best of luck with a Victorian or earlier property.

 

[MikeSharp01]

I suspect that part of the problem with people ignoring the energy consumption is that it's probably the 3rd or 4th cost of running a home. So rent / mortgage, council tax and perhaps insurance come above it and for some people things like the family enterainment package might even eclipse it. Not to mention the family car. Sadly we won't get the person on the Clapham omnibus to focus until energy gets expensive enough to be worth saving sad really.

[Dudda]

I agree with Mike. A tipping point will happen when energy gets expensive enough to make people react. When no one knows. Until that tipping point happens it's business as usual.

Edited February 28, 2017 by Dudda

[Jeremy Harris]

Cheap energy is the real key, as at the moment, kitchen and bathroom bling is far more important to house buyers than energy efficiency.  The chap that came around to value our old house (which we're selling) wasn't the slightest bit interested in the EPC I'd done, his view was no one ever asks to see them when they are looking to buy a house, they were just something the government insisted they include in the sales brochure.

[Declan52]

Unless they link it to your council tax/rates then nothing will happen. There was a scheme here about 7 years ago where if you built a low carbon home you got 2 years with no rates. If it was a zero carbon build it was extended to 5 years. 

If by improving your epc rating you got a percentage of your bill then more people would take the steps needed.

[Jeremy Harris]

14 minutes ago, Declan52 said:

Unless they link it to your council tax/rates then nothing will happen. There was a scheme here about 7 years ago where if you built a low carbon home you got 2 years with no rates. If it was a zero carbon build it was extended to 5 years. 

If by improving your epc rating you got a percentage of your bill then more people would take the steps needed.

 

That's a pretty good idea as way of motivating those looking to buy a house.  I think the snag is that the local authorities would try their damnedest to block it, as they'd lose revenue. 

 

Our local authority was pretty OTT about trying to get us to pay Council Tax long before the new house was completed; they employ snoopers to drive around in the evenings, "breaking in" to building sites to check on the state of houses.   I caught the woman who climbed over the fencing to peer into the windows of our place on CCTV.  No PPE, not even decent footwear, and she just climbed over piles of rubble, scaffold boards etc and ignored all the "Keep Out" signs, just to see if the inside of the house looked finished enough for them to start billing us...................

 

If the local authorities got a government grant to cover the loss in revenue it might work well, though.

Edited February 28, 2017 by JSHarris

[Declan52]

The only things that generally motivate people is the carrot or the stick. So you will either give those who improve there epc a cut or those who don't a penalty. Could give a set period of 5 years to take advantage of whatever scheme the government propose, loft insulation, cavity wall insulation, new more efficient boilers, new windows. After the 5 years you get re-evaluated and if you improve you get a cut. My mum got her loft topped up plus got her 14 year old oil burner replaced. The cost to do this countrywide would be astronomical but what is the cost if nothing is done.

The only problem is how do you stop the cowboys from ripping people off. 

[Jeremy Harris]

The problem of cowboys ripping people off always seem to arise as soon as there is any sort of government incentive or subsidy, and I've no idea how it could be stopped.  The creation of the MCS was partially successful in controlling renewable energy retrofits, but the high premium associated with MCS accreditation added to the cost, making that itself a disincentive.

 

I think the only reliable way to make incentive schemes work is to force the inclusion of performance monitoring.  It's pretty cheap to do a thermal imaging survey, as it only takes ten minutes or so, and a "before and after" survey might be a way to show that the work had been done.

 

I've no idea who would drive such a scheme, though.  The council are already squeezed and have no cash, so that just leaves a handful of voluntary or charitable associations, who almost certainly aren't well enough organise to push something like this through.

[Dudda]

In a high sought after area in Dublin the Dún Laoghaire Rathdown local authority is making it mandatory for all new houses to be Passive House. Generally house prices are expensive here so it's not a huge additional burden in the overall price. Will be interesting to watch as it could be rolled out more if it's a success. The wording from the development plan is as follows:

 

All new buildings will be required to meet the passive house standard or equivalent, where reasonably practicable.

By equivalent we mean approaches supported by robust evidence (such as monitoring studies) to demonstrate their efficacy, with particular regard to indoor air quality, energy performance, comfort, and the prevention of surface/interstitial condensation. Buildings specifically exempted from BER* ratings as set out in S.I. No. 666 of 2006 are also exempted from the requirements of Policy CC7.

These requirements are in addition to the statutory requirement to comply fully with Parts A-M of Building Regulations

 

*BER is Building Energy Rating and UK equivalent is EPC I think.

Edited February 28, 2017 by Dudda

[Jeremy Harris]

I remember reading about this in Passive House magazine and thinking it was a good bit of forward thinking.  But then the Irish Government has more need to worry about energy imports that many, with the EU rules gradually closing down the use of peat-burning power stations, I believe.  Irish building regs are also tighter than UK building regs, from the little time I've spent looking a them,  but that may well have been a reaction to all the crap houses that were being built in the big building boom a few years ago as much as anything else.

 

[Triassic]

The problem with much of the retrofit Insulation is that there is no guarantee, often all the customer gets is a nice looking piece of paper that might say 'guarantee' on it, but if there's a problem down the line it's often worthless.

 

Two recent examples -

 

A friends elderly parents had a damp problem, so he lectured them about good ventilation and he bought them a dehumidifier. Months later the problem still persists. On investigation he finds that the problem started after cavity wall Insulation was fitted. An intrusive survey ( removing bricks) was found that the Insulation fibre was bridging the damp course and wicking moisture up the walls. On trying to contact the Insulation company name on the guarantee, he found they'd conveniently gone bust. He's now having to pay to have the Insulation removed.

 

in the second case a disabled friend moved into a nice bungalow, during the legals she was told the property had been fully insulated and on completion she got a number of certificates, including the Insulation guarantee. The certificate clearly states that cavity  wall  and loft Insulation had been fitted. During the last few months she's complained the house feels cold. S I go round with a set of step ladders and a screw driver, the loft hatch having been screwed shut, to find there is no loft nsulation, just the odd pile of fibre which appears to have blown out of the tops of the cavity walls. So she tries the phone number on the certificate and finds the numbers no longer in use!

 

Maybe what's required is a mandatory guarantee scheme to cover such eventualities. 

 

[Jeremy Harris]

The insulation grants were, and perhaps still are, a golden opportunity for scammers.  We had bonded EPS bead cavity wall insulation installed a few years ago in our old house and I was more interested in getting a decent job done than taking advantage of any grant.  All the suppliers, without exception, insisted on the grant paperwork, just because it gave them £300 of extra profit. 

 

I ended up using a company that did a pretty good job, not only because I watched them do it, but because a couple of weeks later a chap from their guarantee provider came around and asked if he could do a full quality audit on our installation, which involved drilling a few holes and poking an endoscope in, then neatly filling them in again.  Apparently the warranty provide sampled random installations like this, to check that the work had been done properly.  Then again, the company I used was pretty big and very well known in the South of England, so they were probably as concerned as the warranty provider about maintaining their reputation.

 

It didn't stop them ripping me off, though!  I paid them what I later found out was the full price of the installation, and they got an additional £300 from the grant................

Edited February 28, 2017 by JSHarris

[AliG]

As said before, it is the same with petrol prices. Much as people grumble energy prices aren't high enough or people would do something about it. Indeed household energy is subsidised on a relative basis by having only 5% VAT.

 

I have been looking at new cars. I would be cheaper buying a V8 that does 15MPG than a Tesla even taking into account petrol savings and the government subsidy. Indeed if you drive under 8000 miles a year fuel consumption is almost irrelevant relative to the depreciation on the car.

 

However buying high consumption cars is discouraged as fuel costs become a higher part of running costs as the car gets older and so they increase depreciation. A V8 would cost me £600 more a year in petrol, but £2000 more a year in depreciation so I would get a diesel. Of course they might change the rules on that so I will hold off doing anything.

 

This also allows me to bring up something I planned to post earlier -

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4265584/Andrew-Fergie-s-wedding-present-home-demolished.html

 

As the 30 year old house of Andrew and Fergie was knocked down you could see how it was built. I don't see a lot of insulation, although that was probably normal at the time.

[SteamyTea]

Did not matter at the time as they were always on a holiday abroad.

[Jeremy Harris]

Our old house was built around 1988.  When we moved in it had no cavity wall insulation, just 100mm of rock wool between the ceiling joists in the loft, timber windows and doors with very thin double glazing (and which were very draughty) and no insulation under the concrete floor.  What's worse, all the central heating pipes were cast into the slab right around the whole outside perimeter of the floor, causing so much heat loss that whenever it snows the snow melts for a couple of feet all around the house, just from the heat loss out through the surrounding ground.

 

I can't remember when energy reduction measures were added to building regs, but it was probably a decade or so after our house was built.

[ADLIan]

Re Andi & Fergie house. I worked for the manufacturer of the cavity wall insulation (pink colour) at the time this was built. Nothing special as I remember just basic Buildng Regs for the time.

 

Ian

 

[jack]

3 hours ago, JSHarris said:

Irish building regs are also tighter than UK building regs, from the little time I've spent looking a them,  but that may well have been a reaction to all the crap houses that were being built in the big building boom a few years ago as much as anything else.

 

From discussions with Irish builders and suppliers, it's exactly that.  The pendulum has now swung completely the other way, not just with higher standards, but with quite onerous requirements for certifying that the standards are met (something the UK could do with a bit of!)  

[Declan52]

During the boom there where some absolutely shocking builds threw up in Eire some of which had to get demolished so the government stepped in and tightened all the regs up to what they are now. The passive regs of that council are probably a tester that will get rolled out countrywide once they see how it performs.

[Jeremy Harris]

It wouldn't surprise me to find that the RoI decide to adopt the Passivhaus standard as their new Part L, as there's a lot more interest in building passive houses there than there is here, despite the dire economic situation (or perhaps because of it).  Passive House magazine is an RoI magazine, or was originally, and has only in the past year or so switched to publishing a UK edition, but even that is mainly full of RoI builds. 

 

I don't think it's an accident that companies like Munster Joinery and MBC are doing pretty well over here in the UK, either, as there aren't many UK suppliers offering passive house performance at prices that aren't much greater than conventional builds over here (given that build prices down in the South of England tend to be higher, anyway).

 

I've had some feedback from the radio bit this morning already, including a couple of builders that reckon our house would be "impossible to build"..................

Edited February 28, 2017 by JSHarris

[volcane]

short item on RTE television just now on a passive housing estate. Will be on the +1 service at 8 for anyone who can pick up rte.

[Triassic]

1 hour ago, JSHarris said:

I've had some feedback from the radio bit this morning already, including a couple of builders that reckon our house would be "impossible to build"..................

It's not 'traditional' enought, it's too new fangled, too much retraining required!

[PeterW]

I'm always amused when I see the sorts of articles like this where it's "xxxxx must do yyyy to save energy..."

 

The biggest loss on any house is the ventilation losses and yet we still insist on trickle vents and the ridiculous notion that air tightness is a novelty...! Air testing is borderline useless on developer builds as they test 1 in 10 and the rest get to take their chances. I mentioned air tightness tapes to the BCO on Friday and he was surprised in one way but said it was good to see someone trying to exceed the regs - as we have a part conversion  and part new build it makes lots of insulation a challenge. But reducing the losses from ventilation to 0.6 ACH by using MVHR means that the wall difference of 0.18 to 0.14 is lost in the noise. 

 

The big issue with new developer builds is they aim for the lowest bar possible and usually fail to hit that too ..!!  

[MikeSharp01]

 a couple of builders that reckon our house would be "impossible to build"..

 

Just shows you how unthinking the average builder is as they don't seem to understand that something that has been done, albeit not by them,  is by definition removed from the 'impossible' catagory.