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Green Building Bible, Fourth Edition
Green Building Bible, fourth edition (both books)
These two books are the perfect starting place to help you get to grips with one of the most vitally important aspects of our society - our homes and living environment.

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    • CommentAuthorminisaurus
    • CommentTimeJan 6th 2024 edited
     
    Hi, I've done some heat loss calcs for our house - see attached.

    We have a Swedish wood-frame & panel house, from 1985, with half the ground floor under ground level and with concrete walls. 115m2 over 2 stories, a 6 year-old Bosch exhaust air heat pump 2kW, 20cm insulation in the loft, maybe 10-12cm in the wall.

    I've calculated we use approx 3885 kWh/year for heating, for which we currently pay approx. 11p/kWh flat-rate, so circa £427/year for heating. Our electricity is (almost) 100% fossil free.

    I've considered externally insulating the wooden walls, topping up loft insulation, even removing some of the windows, building porches round the three doors. I considered MVHR, but then I'd have to buy both MVHR and a different heat pump, so probably over £25k investment in this part of the world. But my conclusion is that none of these are economically viable, or CO2 helpfull.

    Our electricity deal expires in a couple of years, and we almost certainly won't get 11p/kWh flat-rate, but even so I don't see any point in doing any upgrades.

    I'm interested to know if others agree with my thinking, or maybe I've completely missed something?
      Screenshot from 2024-01-06 14-41-12.png
    •  
      CommentAuthordjh
    • CommentTimeJan 6th 2024
     
    Improving loft insulation is generally the easiest and least expensive thing to do, so it might be worth doing that even if it doesn't make that much difference.

    Your windows appear to be the biggest heat loss, although replacing with improved ones may not be cost effective. Perhaps consider secondary glazing inside, or thermal curtains, blinds or shutters.

    Your doors seem to have the worst performance of any component, so looking at improving those might be worthwhile. When I built I considered using a conventional outside door for weather resistance and then making a separate insulated door inside it. But in the end I just went with 'normal' PH doors (too lazy).

    Do your heat loss calcs match your bills (or electricity logging)?
  1.  
    Thanks for your input @djh; I forgot to mention the windows are triple glazed and seem to be holding up well.

    I think I may have messed up with the doors - I've allocated a U-value of 1.5 and 1.0 to the windows - I used rule-of-thumb figures from over here, hmm.

    The calcs came out higher than our electricty usage over a year; I don't know how to adjust for the COP savings, if it's even possible, but the calcs corresponded roughly with a 1:3 COP I think ...
    • CommentAuthortony
    • CommentTimeJan 6th 2024
     
    I would top up loft insulation to 500mm , at least to 400mm

    Draughtproofing on the doors should be cost effective too.
  2.  
    Forgot to mention - the loft is mostly boarded out at about 250mm height, a large part of which is also a storage room. So I'm not sure I'd gain much, or even if it's a good idea to have differing heights of insulation - I worry about condensation points and then dry rot starting ...
  3.  
    A few thoughts, having skimmed the above:

    - losses thru the floors aren't shown
    - looks like you've assumed -15oC externally for the calcs condition, giving a heat power input of around 3.5kW, let's say 4kW when floor slab added in (just very round numbers, as it's all assumptions anyway)
    - if you improved the loft insulation to say 0.1W/m2K, with say another 200mm of insulation, you'd reduce the heat loss (power) by say 150W, so roughly 4% of your heating bill, say £20/year, even £40/year when your new elect tarrif comes in to play. Is that worth doing, for a £40/year saving? I'll let you determine that. Personally I probably would, but that's what I do for a living.
    - concrete walls are an obvious one to tackle, based on the Uvalues, but you're unlikey to trim even 50W power losses, so payback would be ridiculous, for stripping walls and over-insulating
    - if you particularly want a porch, then build it, as it can be a usefull addition, somewhere to stamp off snow, stop the inrush of cold air, but financial viability of several £k's versus minimal savings?

    I would hire a thermal imaging camera, and look for draughts, thermal bridging, weak spots, as these "could" be simple fixes, with actually quite a good improvement proportional to the effort, and can be sources of condensation generation, and pretty much ignore the large main elements listed above.

    Shutters/thermal curtains for the glazed elements (per DJH) are an easy win (ie. not disruptive) but the costs of these can be huge. Consider the carbon footprint of additional materials and human effort/transport, versus the almost zero carbon of your elect supply.
    • CommentAuthorminisaurus
    • CommentTimeJan 14th 2024
     
    Thanks for your input GreenPaddy.
    - I factored in the the floor, but didn't show it, as I don't think there's anything I could realistically do there, plus it's probably pretty good - concrete slab on unknown thickness (20cm?) layer of polystyrene blocks (don't know what they're called in uk).
    - yes -15/-16 degrees is the minimum buildings here are dimensioned for
    - as mentioned, I might do the loft thing, hmm, I guess I could lift the boarded area 20cm, but not the actual "room" bit ...
    - I have a thermal camera! A bosch, it's fantastic, so yes, I've done that work already, that made a big difference in the bathroom where a slapdash contractor had gone through the "plastic bag" when they put in spots.
    - yes, thermal curtains might be worth it, when we're changing out those.
    Thanks again
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