My home energy report comes back

Received my ‘free home energy report’ from the Energy Saving Advice Centre. A pretty crude analysis saying I could improve my rating from an E to a D and save £479 per year if I fitted more loft insulation, more controls to my heating system, (although I had most of these already) solid wall insulation (extremely difficult in a property like this) and double glazing (ditto).

Home Energy Check - advice from others

Sent in my home energy check questionnaire to the Energy Saving Trust’s Energy Saving Scotland advice centre in Edinburgh.

Light bulbs - the halogen problem

I’m stuck on the following – the halogen tracks I have in the kitchen (150W) and a study (100W), - these lights are on a lot but I know I cannot replace with LED’s without replacing the whole track and transformer. This will have to wait. We have a dimmable uplighter with a 200W halogen bulb in our living room that is used a lot which we repaired recently – I should cost replacing this with an LED uplighter. There are also two cupboard lights that use little 60W tungsten strips, but as these are only on for a minute or two every day I am not going to worry too much about them. Other than that there are a couple of desk lamps that have tiny halogen or tungsten fittings that are not used a lot which I will phase out in time.

Light bulbs

Carried out a light-bulb audit. This revealed that I had low energy bulbs fitted in only 7 ceiling pendant lights, leaving a total of 33 light-fittings with tungsten or halogen lamps that in theory ought to be replaced. The only other lights I could leave unchanged were the two worktop fluorescent strips in the kitchen (although each uses 75W), and one in an understairs cupboard. Not that easy to find SES fittings giving the right brightness for reading, or fittings for spots of ceiling downlighters that did not take 20 minutes to warm up, or fittings for dimmable lamps, but Asda and Homebase were selling the standard Philips Genie sticks and GE Spots for a good price and I sourced the more difficult ones on the web from Eco-Friendly Lightbulbs and Efficient Light, both of whom were good enough to take back lamps that did not perform as intended (usually related to taking too long to warm up, or not being compatible with dimmers). To date I have replaced 22 bulbs, at a total cost of £59.73, achieving a reduction in power usage from 1300W to 294W.

A plan of action

So with a bit of reading under my belt (which also included a PRISM book on Home Insulation - see image left - I found on my own shelves that I bought in 1981 when we moved into our previous house) I drew up a list of what I could tackle in my own home.

1 Attack draughts – from windows, doors, chimneys, cupolas
2 Re-consider the whole area of double or secondary glazing on those windows (we’d actually started on this a while ago – see below)
3 Increase the depth of insulation in the loft – and deal with the cupolas
4 Change as many light-bulbs as I could to low-energy bulbs
5 Monitor our energy use more closely and use this to reduce our daily energy usage
6 Look at whether we could generate any of our own energy or at least get the sun to produce hot water for us