So the set up. Energy has gone up in price. We’ll accept, for the sake of it, the point that the only way to respond to a supply shock is to reduce demand. It isn’t, “only” is too strong but we’ll run with it.
So, yes, we probably would like more lagging of hot water tanks, loft insulation and so on. OK:
While no doubt well-intentioned, Rishi Sunak’s attempts to alleviate the cost of living – including through a £150 council tax rebate for most homes and a £200 loan towards energy bills – have been overly complicated and badly targeted.
And, as Helen Barnard of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has pointed out, the £2.4bn the Treasury lost cutting fuel duty would have covered the cost of insulating a third of all social housing in the country.
The consultancy E3G has calculated that new energy efficiency measures could reduce the heating bills for poorly insulated homes by an average of £500 and end the UK’s dependence on Russian gas (which is admittedly quite limited) within a year.
But the complaint now becomes that no one is doing anything about it.
Which is mad of course.
What is required is an incentive for people to get off their arses and get insulating, right? Could be a grant, sure. A law that insists you must even. A government programme. Any of those might even be necessary to provide the incentive if prices had remained static.
But prices haven’t remained static, have they? They’ve just doubled, or tripled. So all the incentive anyone needs is already right there, in their energy bill. No one needs to do anything more than only that to produce the incentive to get on with the insulating, do they?
Prices do carry information, folk know that, don’t they?
I’d naturally argue that all the taxes wasted supporting the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the consultancy E3G should be left in the pockets of the taxpayers. This’d enable them to pay their extra costs.
Wasn’t this idea the precursor to Grenfell? What could possibly go wrong?
+100% decnine!!!
I don’t know where this idea that UK houses aren’t insulated comes from. All new houses for 30 years have had to have insulation. There’s been government schemes promoting it for existing houses for decades. I still get phone calls from cold callers asking if I want to avail myself of grants for it. My parents own some rental properties (old Victorian cottages) they had grants to insulate them decades ago. Not that it did any good IMO, they just filled the air gap with some sort of flocking material, I’m convinced it caused damp, the air gap was there for a reason. I’ll bet the number of houses left in the Uk with no insulation whatsoever is minimal, and most of those will be un-insulatable for various reasons (listed buildings, or the construction method used in old ones).
Where does all this insulation go? We have been building houses with cavity wall insulation for the last 50 years and walls still account for the biggest heat loss. For most houses if you want to substantially increase the insulation it has to go either inside or outside the walls. Unfortunately room size is typically small so if it goes on the inside there is no longer room for things like beds, sofas and baths. If it goes on the outside you end up like decnine says with a Grenfell cladding situation.
Insulation is just a distraction to conceal the gaping hole in “green” energy policy.
Jim, you’re right. There are very few un-insulated houses and they are mostly very old ones without cavity walls. In some areas if you insulate you won’t get insurance or a mortgage, this is due to some damp issues. In the 60’s there was a fad to pump that foamy stuff into the cavities. Are there really any lofts left in the UK without insulation? Perhaps a few. Lack of insulation is not a huge proble, this is not Siberia.
I don’t know what people are moaning about. It’s only two million homes after all: https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-10390579/Botched-cavity-wall-insulation-ruining-homes-causing-damp-mould.html
Net Zero – we’re all in this together…..
As per the the three comments above, I doubt, before the recent energy price hike, there was much economic insulation in the UK worth doing. And economic is the important word. Everybody’s known for decades that insulation reduces energy costs. But there has to be a net benefit to make it worthwhile. There’s quick, easy, cheap solutions like loft insulation will reduce a great deal of heat loss & make sense. But insulation’s incremental. Reducing by 20% can be cheap. The next 10% can cost twice that. The 10% after that, 4 times the amount. The next 5% 8 times. It may be worth going for full double glazing if your windows need replacing anyway. But not spending £12k to save 200 quid a year on heating bills. But true, the recent hike in energy prices – if they continue – will recalculate all that & make some further insulation worthwhile.
Although you do have to factor in how people actually live. Which isn’t sealed up in an insulated house. They open doors & windows. So you’re never actually going to get the theoretical reductions in heating costs.
On the social housing front, I haven’t been UK side for years, but when I left they were still building social housing without double-glazing. Because the housing associations aren’t the one’s paying the gas bills. Sure you could throw money at the social housing sector. But how much useful insulation would get done’s another matter. I can some friends of somebody’s friends making a lot of money.
I live in an old house that is nearly impossible to insulate. A new efficient boiler and better thought out radiators along with draft elimination solved the cold problem.
I can see some…
“… along with draft elimination solved the cold problem.”
Worth remembering, those draughts actually served a purpose. They ventilated the house. Average person puts out about two pints of water a day in respiration etc. Then there’s cooking. Much of the UK’s housing stock wasn’t built with ventilation apart from those draughty windows. All that Victorian & Edwardian terraced shit people are so fond of are full of cold traps it condenses until they’re wringing wet.
But UK housing policy. Instead of pulling all the crap down & building decent buildings – like other countries have done – you’ve inflated your house prices & made them into “investments”.
@BiS,
So we were wrong to stop the Luftwaffe, eh? All those Spitfires and Hurricanes, Douglas Bader, Polish pilots, and all the Battle of Britain stuff stopping slum clearance led to plebs in wet houses? (Instead of them living in comfortable, warm, dry modern homes?) Who’d have thought it?
Oops, you forgot the 1960s and British Architects of the time, for whom the collective noun is
a ‘fuckwittery’ …
What Jim said.
Insulate Britain seems to be living in a parallel reality where it’s still the early 1970’s or something. British homes are insulated, unless you live in a Grade I listed building and are called Fitzwilliam Darcy. We could always insulate more, and live in bouncy castles made of nothing but insulation, but these people don’t seem to understand (or don’t want to understand) diminishing returns.
As BiS says, houses need to be able to exchange air, which means losing heat, with the outdoors. Otherwise you get mold, rot, fungi and all sorts of other unpleasantness.
We don’t have an energy conservation problem, we have an energy supply problem.
How fucked is the British electricity market right now? Here’s a small example:
You know all those electric vehicles people are driving now? Every major energy supplier, except two, has now cancelled EV tariffs or closed them to new customers. Of the two currently remaining, one is only available if you spend £600 on a special type of proprietary smart charger 99% of EV drivers don’t have.
So on one hand government spent umpteen billions to subsidise people (reasonably well remunerated twats such as myself who don’t actually need subsidies) into electric cars. On the other hand government is making it increasingly difficult to actually charge the bloody thing without taking out a second mortgage on your insulated home.
Lions. Lions driving diesel SUV’s with big fuck-off bull bars and the skulls of politicians as hood ornaments.
So, let’s imagine that the Gyrotron drilling plan for geothermal or the Mr. Fusion or any other innovation which solved the energy supply problem without CO2 emissions became available without too much expense. Would we be allowed to have it? A device the size of a toaster which would be installed in you own house making you independent of state and corporate interests? Would we be allowed to have it?
I was a local councillor on the Housing Committee TWENTY-TWO YEARS AGO and we were spending government money hand over fist insulating all our properties. I was *also* on the board of a local housing association, and we were doing exactly the same. Where the hell are the uninsulated properties? The 220-year-old flat I live in is insulated.
Prices are information. Definitely.
You’re thinking of renting a house – you ask the Landlord what the energy cost is – you baulk and walk away. Landlord can insulate before marketing to attract a new tenant or drop the rent. Prices tell you which to do.
Landlords shouldn’t have to pay CGT and stamp duty though. No-one should. Affects the pricing decision.
BiS
There are limits to “good ventilation”. As the blessed Spike had it
Through every nook and every cranny
The wind blew in on poor old Granny
Around her knees, into each ear
(And up nose as well, I fear)
We insulated our attic yonks ago, courtesy of a large subsidy from the ratepayers. Since then we’ve added to the insulation by letting the attic fill up with all the sorts of stuff that the offspring will eventually have to send to the tip.
We did double-glaze the one new window we put in. We’ve considered a double-glazed back door for the kitchen now that we no longer need a cat-flap. (Sob!) All I have to do is persuade Mrs D that perhaps this would be the year to do it.
I’d love to install double glazing. But the spec demanded by the heritage officer and the spec demanded by the Department of Green Bollocks are mutually incompatible. So here we sit, nearly 3 years on, burning gas to save the planet. Tempted to just get on with it. It’s not like anyone will see it as they are still hiding from the plague. Neither will visit site or even go to their own office and neither can be contacted by phone as they are “working from home” Arseholes, the lot of them.
@Gus: assuming you live in a listed building, there was mention in the Boris splurge on electricity policy the other day that mentioned that planning rules would be changed to allow double glazing in listed buildings.
Ventilation is not exactly the same thing as draughts. Air has little latent heat so can be exchanged with the outside air without too much loss of heat. The temperature of your house mostly depends on the heat stored in the solid stuff, like walls and furniture. That’s why when you return from a week away it takes a long time to get comfortable even with the boiler going gang busters.
In the 2003 heat wave in France I was staying in a house with 18 inch solid walls. It took two months for the inside to get as hot as the outside.
BiS,
“As per the the three comments above, I doubt, before the recent energy price hike, there was much economic insulation in the UK worth doing.”
There was a report, produced while Cameron was still PM that basically said that insulation was done. Not 100%, but close enough that it wasn’t worth the trouble. Yes, maybe people don’t have the recommended amount, but as you point out, it’s a logarithmic improvement. If you have half the recommended amount, it probably isn’t worth the time and trouble topping it up.
The main problem with insulation is homes that can’t have it. Like old places without cavity walls. There’s a solution but it costs thousands so will never pay for itself.ng
“Oops, you forgot the 1960s and British Architects of the time, for whom the collective noun is
a ‘fuckwittery’ …”
Contrary to popular belief, most of the housing built in the 50s & sixties was very good quality building for the time. A great deal better than was put up in the building boom around the turn of the century. Think about it, for a moment. All those Vicky/Edwardian terraces that ring the centres of UK cities. Where’d they find the skilled craftsmen to do all that so quickly. Answer was they didn’t, they were thrown together. Just the bits you can see look good. I’ve worked on them. Rubbish bricks laid on mortar that’s mostly sand. You can take one to pieces with your bare hands. The timber floor joists are let straight into the walls without any thought to damp & rot. Almost every one I’ve seen has dry rot. I’ve acrowed through from basement to roof with a house being little more than a shell to replace them all. Why? To turn them into pricey flats the size of dog kennels because that’s what the punters want. Personally, I think the entirety of the UK home buying public is barking mad.
About those 50s & 60s buildings. Sure the tower blocks have been problematic. Blame the architects. They were lousy designs. But in reality, there weren’t that many of them. Most blocks of flats built in that period were 3 & 4 storey. They’re as solid as a rock with good sized rooms. Ok, the steel frame windows were never the best things to live with. But they have lasted 60 years. They didn’t have the modern options & the wood that was available at the time would have rotted out years ago.
The 1890s/1900s houses that you want to find are the freehold building society ones. They were built by groups of craftsmen for themselves and their mates to live in, they were built properly and solidy, ‘cos they wanted something decent to live in. As you say, it’s the stuff chucked up for the plebs that is crap. My Dad lives on a little plot of 1930s build in the house the builder built for himself. So it had the double benefit of being a tad betterer than all the others (corner plot, huge garden), and all the others were decent spec because the new owners could come round and bang on his door to complain.
during lockdown I lost count of the number of firms knocking on the door wanting to put in insulation. All paid for by the government. It didn’t make much difference to energy bills though!