New boilers & insulation make little difference?

macman

CWI £1K to £1,5K?! How big is the property? It's usually less than a day to install.

missprice

macman wrote: »

CWI £1K to £1,5K?! How big is the property? It's usually less than a day to install.

Cheers it a 3 bed semi, not massive. And so much for my powers of deduction, its a 30s built house.

And I don't know how they came to that cost for CWI either.or even if there is a cavity.off soon to have a looksie.

malc_b

According to this cut off date is 1920-1930, pre 1920 no cavity, post 1930 with cavity. Useful suggestion is the measure the wall depth say at a window. A solid wall is 9in thick (say 10in with plaster), a cavity wall would be 12in (13in with plaster).

I hope you didn't pay for this report as it sounds total rubbish. It seems to be recommending all the stupid things like wind turbines and not the sensible things like better insulation. Your wall without cavity insulation are about 1.8 U value, with insulation that drops to 0.4 U. That is significant. If your walls account for say 35% of heatloss then you would be saving 8%. At that rate you'd need a heating bill of 240 pa for £19 to be accurate.

Best bet is to find a heatloss calculator program on the net, plug in the house measurements and work it out for yourself.

missprice

malc_b wrote: »

According to this cut off date is 1920-1930, pre 1920 no cavity, post 1930 with cavity. Useful suggestion is the measure the wall depth say at a window. A solid wall is 9in thick (say 10in with plaster), a cavity wall would be 12in (13in with plaster).

I hope you didn't pay for this report as it sounds total rubbish. It seems to be recommending all the stupid things like wind turbines and not the sensible things like better insulation. Your wall without cavity insulation are about 1.8 U value, with insulation that drops to 0.4 U. That is significant. If your walls account for say 35% of heatloss then you would be saving 8%. At that rate you'd need a heating bill of 240 pa for £19 to be accurate.

Best bet is to find a heatloss calculator program on the net, plug in the house measurements and work it out for yourself.

Did not read this before I went for looksie, but I reckon it has a cavity and that can be checked later before I buy it, if I buy it.

Nope I didn't pay for report, this house up for auction and I was reading the legal pack when I found the EPC. Its a useless bit of paper really considering the author can't have looked in the loft. As the loft hatch too small to get anyone through.


I still want my wind turbine though :rotfl:

Cardew

malc_b wrote: »

I hope you didn't pay for this report as it sounds total rubbish. It seems to be recommending all the stupid things like wind turbines and not the sensible things like better insulation.

Indeed as are so many of these reports!

I wrote this a couple of years ago:


We get lots of self proclaimed 'energy experts' on MSE who having done a 2 day course feel qualified to give advice - often poor advice.


Domestic Energy Assessor
2 days course • Level 3 diploma
Limited time
special offer £995 + VAT

In my case it was merely a polite enquiry to see if the OP was in that category - or if not, what qualifications were required to be an 'energy expert'.

Incidentally my daughter did the 5 day course(she didn't pay) after graduating and before moving on to another degree course. Immediately she finished the course she became an instructor at the same establishment.

Clever girl as she might be, she didn't have, and still doesn't, any idea of the most rudimentary electrical theory, or insulation etc. However the reports she wrote were highly impressive - but meaningless, all the buzzwords and jargon were on the template!!

pstuart

As we speak I'm just having a Fellori ? condensing boiler replaced at 8 years by a Valliant, this boiler cost me £650 and it took them 2.5 hours to fit as its a direct replacement.
Having said that we now have an electrician on site who is messing about with the thermostat.
The original boiler and fitting cost a fortune to fit 8 years ago and I rue the day that I decided to replace the old one.
A relative has a 28 year old boiler and has had it seen to twice, each time costing less than £100 inc. parts.

Hindsight is wonderful thing!

ilikecookies

As someone who has taken all the standard insulation measures (CWI, extra loft insulation, draft proofing, etc) I'm pretty skeptical about the cost savings!

As has been pointed out the savings are usually based on the worst case scenario making them appear greater than they really are. That said I'm not even sure that in these worst case scenarios the savings will be as great as they claim. I think this because surely insulation measures alone can only do so much and ultimately you cannot change the actual design of an old house which will be "leaky" compared to current building regs and the latest building techniques to erradicate thermal bridges, etc.

ed110220

All very unscientific in my opinion.

For example, were the savings on bills or energy consumption? If gas went up by 10% you'd need to save 10% of your gas consumption just to keep the bill the same. That's why it's best to compare consumption in kWh not bills.

What about house temperature? Having installed insulation, did people keep their homes at the same temperature for the same length of time and thereby save energy, or did they just heat them longer or to higher temperatures because they could afford to with the improved insulation?

We need hard figures on U-vales, not airy-fairy talk of bills which depend entirely on how much and how long you heat your home for... after all, even the worst insulated home could have low bills if you have the heating on seldom enough. But then journalists don't like hard physics ;-)

Johnandabby

But you don't do insulation/draught proofing upgrades just to save money, but also to feel more comfortable. And in my case, when we upgraded our insulation we did turn the heating down but left it running longer to provide a more consistent temperature - our gas bills haven't gone up or down, but it's much more comfortable.

The danger with taking this article out of context is that everything becomes focused on cost and comfort/health issues are ignored. The biggest cost savings are for the most vulnerable people, such as disabled and elderly who spend the most time at home, and they also need the better comfort conditions.

I definitely agree with the article about air leakage - I'm getting a friend with air testing fan and gear to do a test at my house in order to find as many air paths as possible.

worried_jim

Just had some work done on my Vokera boiler today and the chap told me to budget for approx £2.5k to put a new one in. This one needs to last another 15 years!