by Lawrence Buckley
Here at Home Zero Home we like to practice what we believe so this year I will be turning the small 1930’s two bedroom flat I bought with my wife in Stockwell south London into a zero carbon (or as close as possible) home. It’s a process I’m really looking forward to. My wife and I have already lined every available wall space with books (excellent insulation) and shunned the use of the kitchen for the restaurants and bars of our fair city.
Our plans are quite ambitious and I’m interested to see how difficult they will be to implement. I was going to begin by explaining what these were and how we shall calculate our home’s footprint, but the Government’s new boiler scrappage scheme presents quite a good example of the opportunities and difficulties that lay ahead.
With snow covering all of the UK, everyone – including the kids – at home, the heating on max 24 hour a day and gas supplies reportedly running out the government’s announcement of £400 cashback to replace old boilers with more efficient ‘A’ rated ones seems well timed. 60% of housing emmissions come from gas fired boilers.
The scheme, set to launch on January 18th, will be too late to lower the worst of this winters bills but the need for energy efficiency savings could hardly be clearer. Furthermore British Gas and N Power are offering an additional £400 to those replacing their boilers taking the total savings up to £800.
The problem is the scheme probably doesn’t apply to you. There are two reasons for this. Firstly your boiler probably isn’t the least efficient type; the scheme only covers G rated ones that are likely to be at least ten years old. Secondly there are 125,000 vouchers available. The government estimates that there are 3.5 million G rated boilers in England.
So, how can you work out if you qualify and what to do if you don’t?
To start with you can check the energy efficiency rating of your boiler here: www.sedbuk.com.
A new boiler for a ‘typical’ home with installation will cost between £1,200 and £2,500 depending on its size and manufacturer. If your boiler is G rated the general estimate is that you will be able to save around £235 a year on your bills. Using the full £800 available to you this would put the payback period – the time it took for the monthly bill savings to match the initial investment – at between one and seven and a quarter years. Over this period you would also save between 1.3 and 9.4 tonnes of CO2 from entering the atmosphere.
All well and good. But what if your boiler is not a G rated one? Well I looked up my Potterton Suprima 30 (very fancy name for a small and rather tatty looking little thing – has yet to kill us all with carbon monoxide on the plus side) and found it to be an E rated boiler. This is not great. A G rated boiler has an efficiency range below 70%. An E rated boiler has an efficiency range of between 74% and 78%. My particular boiler rates at 76.6%. A rated boilers are 90% efficient and above.
To replace it would cost about £1,500. The annual saving would be around £110, meaning that the payback period would be over 13 years and six months. The annual carbon saving would be half a tonne.
Is this the best use of my limited funds? I highly doubt it.
Thus while the scrappage scheme is a good way to take a small proportion of the worst boilers out of England’s homes it is obvious that other more wide ranging solutions are necessary before mass change can occur.
This is where Home Zero Home comes in. Over the coming weeks and months we will be looking at ways to answer the questions that this short of story throws up.
What are the best ways to improve the energy efficiency of our homes?
What are the best ways for government to get involved and promote change?
How can the private sector help?
We don’t have all the answers and we hope you will get involved in helping us find some interesting solutions. We’re interested in the results – we have to adapt the way we are living and fast – but we are also interested in the story; what it takes to change.
It’s going to be an interesting journey.
Yes, there is no escaping the need to ‘invest’ in ‘zero-ing’ your home. And let’s be clear, we absolutely have to face up to that worthwhile truth. But, once completed, there is a potential return on investment. For example, householders who invest in energy generation technology such as solar panels, wind turbines or ground heat extraction solutions, will be able to ‘sell’ surplus energy back to the National Grid thanks to a special feed-in tariff that will come into play across the UK energy utility landscape from April 2010.
