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.