Getting started – some reading and inspiration

In November last year I went to a conference put on by Changeworks and Edinburgh World Heritage on how old buildings could be adapted to use less energy. Howard Liddell of Gaia Architects gave a searing talk and promoted his book ‘Eco-minimalism’ as well as David MacKay’s book ‘Sustainable Energy, without the hot air’ (available free at his site). They are both good reading – David’s being exhaustive and authoritative but, as the title implies, straight talking also. Both Howard and David (who recounts some of his own experience with his own house in Oxfordshire) push three messages very hard – one, that there is quite a lot we can do as individuals to consume less, two that our own houses do matter, as housing produces a large proportion of carbon emissions and three that it is the simple things like stopping draughts and heat-loss, rather than the expensive gadgets that Howard calls eco-bling that can make the most difference.

What we had already done in the house

Since buying the house in 1998 we hadn’t been completely inactive.

The windows – secondary glazing and draught-proofing. When we bought the house 10 of the windows already had secondary glazing fitted (Everest, aluminium sliding in brush-fitted track, no date). Finding much of this clunky, ill-fitting and difficult to clean in 2005 we removed this from 4 of these windows, and had these fitted with ‘Sealglide’ brush draught-proofing, serviced, and put back. We were pretty pleased with this work – the windows looked better, let in less draughts, also less noise, and the removal of the secondary glazing caused no appreciable loss of heat. Other windows received moderate ‘servicing’ to fit more tightly when closed but we could not afford to give them all the full draught-proofing treatment. Some of the windows (in many cases the upper window of the sliding sash) had no provision for opening at all and we firmly sealed them to again minimise draughts.

The windows – curtains, blinds and shutters. In the living room we are lucky enough to have the original wooden shutters over both windows – they are not the tightest fit but mean we don’t have to have curtains hanging over the radiators that are under these windows. Two downstairs rooms also have shutters and all other windows have curtains and/or fabric blinds on them, in some cases both.

The boiler. In January 2009 a major part failed in the gas boiler that we inherited with the house (precise age not known): this heats our water and provides central heating to radiators in 12 rooms, (in summer we turn off the boiler and use an immersion to heat the water). We made a snap decision to replace it with a new condenser boiler (Greenstar 30 CDi Conventional). It is a SEDBUK A-rated appliance, and although in retrospect it might have been nice to have had the time to lok into a fuller range of options including air-source heat pumps, (a) I didn’t know about these then and (b) it was damn cold at the time.

The house

It’s a good stone-built Edinburgh house, at the western end of a terrace of four built around 1880. Being end of terrace (the story goes that the architect who built the terrace kept this one for himself) we have windows at front (NW), side (SW) and back (SE) - great for gaining light, but great also for losing heat. Two cupolas also bring light and let out heat through the top of the house. One lights the stairs that lead from ground to first floors; the other brings light into the bathroom on the first floor. Both in fact ‘borrow’ light from the roof space above the first floor, to where it is fed through two sloping glass skylights in the flat roof above. We’ll talk about the roof space later.

The Windows
There are fourteen of these, and the inner front door is also mostly glass (there’s a timber outer ‘storm door’ as well). Two of the windows are bay windows each with three separate sash windows, and three are double sashes also divided by stone mullions, so in terms of sash windows we have a total of 21 of these. And they are not small – on the ground floor each bay window has a total glass area of over 4 square meters, and each individual sash window on the first floor has a glass area of nearly 1.6 metres.

These 21 windows light a total of 12 rooms, the five on the first floor being bedrooms plus one study (plus the bathroom), the four on the ground floor living rooms, plus another study, and the rooms in the basement a further bedroom and bathroom plus a workroom and utility cupboard.