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  • HPH321 : How do you make an existing home energy efficient? – with Paul Ciniglio

    HPH321 : How do you make an existing home energy efficient? – with Paul Ciniglio

    With price hikes being caused by the volatile energy sector, Paul Ciniglio from the National Energy Foundation explains what we can be doing to our homes to reduce our energy consumption and be better protected from rising bills.

    Interview with Paul Ciniglio

    Paul Ciniglio is refurbishment lead at the National Energy Foundation, where he spends much of his time being involved with their SuperHomes network. With a background in building surveying, he has over 30 years experience of working in the built environment sector, with a particular focus on sustainable development.

    Renewable energy plays a key part in the UK energy mix

    On some days England is able to produce over half its electricity needs from offshore wind turbines. As renewables are intermittent, however, an energy mix is necessary to keep the lights on. At a domestic level we could be making even more of a contribution with solar PV panels and heat pumps.

    Energy bill rebates would be better spent on improving energy efficiency

    Paul says that the UK government’s plans to issue rebates to households for their energy bills isn’t sustainable in the long term. The only way to bring our bills down to reasonable levels is to use that same money to improve the energy efficiency of our homes and cut out the waste. In order for us to achieve net zero carbon we are going to need to aspire to Passivhaus type approaches and super-insulating homes.

    NEF is an independent charity

    A common problem for people wanting to undertake a home retrofit is knowing where to start and who to trust. As an independent voice, NEF is able to bring that level of trust and support to those embarking on a retrofit.

    Start with a whole house retrofit plan

    NEF can arrange a whole house retrofit plan and this is carried out in accordance with the British Standard BS40104. It entails a survey of your property by a retrofit coordinator, who will then produce an options appraisal as to everything you could do to improve the energy efficiency of your home. It will show the benefits, so the predicted running costs and reduction in household emissions, as well as the estimated cost savings for each retrofit measure.

    There are also risks involved in taking on a retrofit project but these will be flagged up in the retrofit plan at the start, so they can be managed.

    By looking at the whole house view, it is possible to make decisions on what can be done now and what can be done in the future.

    Fabric performance should be the first consideration

    When using a whole house holistic view there is an energy design hierarchy, and the place to start is with the fabric performance of the home.

    • Cut out the heat losses through the fabric of the building, so the doors, windows, insulation in the roof, walls and floors
    • If making the house very airtight, it’s important to factor in the ventilation to prevent damp and poor indoor air quality
    • Look at efficient heating systems – it is likely that we will move towards electrification in the UK which really implies heat pumps
    • Then consider other renewables, such as solar pv to generate clean electricity

    By using a phased plan such as this it means that work is carried out in a logical order, and also that you don’t unwittingly do something that prevents you from adding another measure in your plan later on.

    The risks need to be managed

    This is to ensure that retrofit maintains a good name, is worth doing, and is not going to cause lots of problems.

    With the retrofit plan, each home is assigned a risk pathway, A, B or C (A being the lowest risk, and C perhaps being a historic building).

    A suitable ventilation strategy is absolutely key, as condensation and damp can lead to mould issues. When insulating it’s important to consider moisture, so that it doesn’t get trapped in the fabric of the building and cause bigger problems.

    To get rid of condensation you need three things:

    • insulation
    • heating
    • ventilation

    Without those you are likely to get black mould forming.

    NEF run a best practice retrofit network

    This paid membership is operated by SuperHomes, and gives you access to events and seminars around retrofit issues. You can also then be assigned a retrofit coordinator, who will be someone that is an accredited professional that has achieved a diploma through the Retrofit Academy. These typically are architects, surveyors, and energy managers who have all been through this training.

    The SuperHomes initiative also has a rating scheme, which is a benchmark for retrofit achievement.

    A lot of retrofit can be done with residents in situ

    Sometimes retrofit can be done on a room-by-room basis if it’s carefully managed, but it can be very disruptive. Generally it’s only for the deepest, most challenging projects that residents might need to temporarily move out, although all projects can be carried out more efficiently and easily without the residents living there.

    At House Planning Help, we have followed a deep retrofit in Oxford. Get access to our in-depth video case study in The Hub

    Look out for TrustMark and MCS certification

    Paul explains that there is a massive skills shortage to deliver the amount of retrofit that is needed. Traditional builders are already busy and the energy efficiency market needs to be made more appealing to them so they can upsell skills.

    The government’s TrustMark scheme shows that contractors have been vetted, with the idea being to put the public’s faith in the contracting sector. And if you’re having a heat pump or solar PV installed, then make sure your contractor is accredited to the Microgeneration Certification Scheme (MCS).

    Paul is re-retrofitting his own SuperHome!

    Paul lives in a 1989 mid-terrace cottage, which he retrofitted and became a SuperHome back in 2009. He upgraded the insulation, including putting it in cavity walls where builders were supposed to have put it when it was first built, but hadn’t. He also upgraded the loft insulation, installed an air source heat pump, solar pv, solar thermal, and new windows.

    “My comfort has gone up and I’ve got my own energy security protecting me to a certain extent with these price increases.”

    At the time there were some things he wasn’t able to do, so now he’s taking on a further retrofit, including putting in ground floor insulation. He has also stripped out the solar hot water panels. They worked okay for the first seven years, then only intermittently until eventually being decommissioned. A preferred option now is solar pv that diverts the solar electric into an immersion cylinder to provide the hot water.

    The reason Paul’s solar thermal didn’t work very well he says was because it was too efficient for the size of cylinder he had. By 10am it would be up to temperature and if water wasn’t being drawn off or he was away on holiday, it would stagnate and get really hot, causing damage to the valves.

    The Energy Performance Certificate isn’t up to scratch

    In the wake of the energy crisis, it seems natural that when people are looking for a new home they will be asking how much it costs to run, and this is something the EPC isn’t very good at. NEF is doing some research working with a team of chartered valuation surveyors to carry out property valuations pre and post retrofit. It makes sense that a more energy-efficient home should command a higher price, and Paul says there is emerging evidence that this does seem to be the case.

    Once a SuperHomes retrofit has been completed, they install monitoring equipment for 12 months to gather and evaluate data about household emissions to see how well the property is performing. It’s on that basis that they certify the SuperHome and what level it has achieved. The metrics they use for this are the space heating demands (which are a proxy for the fabric performance and tell you how well insulated your home is), temperature (including checking for overheating in the summer and making sure it doesn’t get too cold in the winter) and humidity and indoor air quality levels.

    Know where you’re going to “get the biggest bang for your buck”

    Having a whole house retrofit plan will mean that you know what improvements are going to make the biggest difference and save you the most amount of money. It’s important to note however that you don’t always get a payback with every retrofit measure, just as you wouldn’t with a new kitchen, car or conservatory.

    Insulation is the most cost-effective way to retrofit, and is simple for lofts and cavity walls. It’s much more of a challenge for the 7 million homes which have solid walls.

    But where funds are limited, Paul explains there are government grants to help private homeowners insulate their homes. There was a local authority delivery grant program administered through regional energy hubs that can help households with incomes of less than £30,000. There is also a new Energy Company Obligation (ECO4) which is another source of funding. Sometimes there are local grants available too.

    Find out more

    Visit the SuperHomes website

    Follow National Energy Foundation on Twitter

    Check out the Tape Notes podcast

    Transcript

    Download a transcript of the interview with Paul Ciniglio

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  • HPH287 : A beginner’s guide to retrofit – with Russell Smith

    HPH287 : A beginner’s guide to retrofit – with Russell Smith

    Russell Smith of Parity Projects explains why a whole house plan is the best way forward for tackling a renovation.

    Interview with Russell Smith

    Russell is a chartered civil engineer whose interest in renovation began after a secondment with the charity Forum for the Future. He began to understand the gravity of climate change and learn about the impact of energy and carbon emissions attributed to the housing stock. This led him to tackle his own housing renovation project, around 16 years ago, at a time when most of the talk was about new builds.

    The renovation of his Victorian property managed to get his heating bills down to around £50 per year. He opened his house up to around 3,000 visitors during the three years he worked on it and was honest with them about what he had discovered, how hard it was and how much it cost.

    Russell realised there was a business opportunity in it and started his own company, Parity Projects.

    A ‘whole house retrofit’ is something of a misnomer

    Russell describes retrofit as being the bits and pieces that are retrospectively fitted. A whole house retrofit is actually a deep refurbishment where everything is done at once.

    “Provided you’ve got a game plan right at the start knowing how everything should fit together in the long-term then your retrofits should add up to a whole house refurbishment in the long-term.”

    Too much information can scare off new customers

    Providing full and detailed calculations and drawings at the outset is likely to overwhelm the majority of people, as they wouldn’t be aware that quite so much was needed.

    Instead, Russell starts by using just enough data to help a customer understand the size of the problem and the opportunity of what is possible with the house. By displaying what the priorities are, they can agree on an appropriate package of measures before moving to the next phase. This would involve much deeper analysis and calculations for every element of the building.

    Phasing a renovation over time takes extra consideration

    Russell explains it can be particularly difficult to get all the elements to fit together if they’re not carried out together in one plan.

    “If you’re only installing some of the measures or you’re only tackling some of the things that you would want to do upfront, really you want to make sure that those things don’t have to be undone to do the next things later on.”

    So ideally it makes the most sense to carry it out in one go if possible. It’s the least costly way of doing it, materials can be bought in bulk, it can all be carried out while no one is living there, it doesn’t have to be tidied away completely at the end of each day, and the airtightness layer and ventilation can be considered for the whole building rather than just room by room.

    Russell does acknowledge that this won’t always be possible as people might not have somewhere else to stay or the finances available all at once.

    Ultimately we want to reduce our demand for heat

    The first step therefore is looking at where heat is being lost. Using the example of a three-bedroom semi-detached property, he explains the different areas:

    Solid walls

    The biggest proportion of heat loss will be through the walls, and without a cavity the insulation will need to either go on the outside or the inside of the building. Careful consideration needs to be given into the way the building was designed to behave, and whether there is already moisture in the brickwork that needs to dry out before any work can start. External wall insulation can be relatively straightforward provided it’s designed properly.

    Windows and doors

    This involves heat loss both through the windows and doors themselves, as well as infiltration around the outsides where they have been installed. If they’re not going to be replaced then the gaps around the structures need to be dealt with very well.

    Under-floor

    Russell says typically around 15% of the heat loss can be through the floor so it’s important to address it early on.

    Roof

    The roof makes up a large part of the surface area of the house and there are plenty of elements which make each unique, such as the different type, orientation, and rainfall.

    Ventilation

    Once the building has been made more airtight and insulated, you need to ensure a good level of ventilation so that the air quality for the occupants is of a high standard.

    “Once you’ve got all of those things dealt with in combination, you’ve resulted in a much lower energy demand than you would have done in the first place. And that’s the point to start considering your heating system and how you would put some heat into the building.”

    The Passivhaus standard deals with these elements

    It is important to ensure that you are ventilating and insulating in combination to get to such low levels of heat demand where a heating system can be virtually unnecessary. But while that’s an aim for every property, the restrictions of budget, priorities and logistics will mean that not every building will be able to reach that.

    There needs to be government backing

    Russell believes there needs to be a government campaign to make people understand the potential of their property and where it can get to provided that strong decisions for a whole house plan are made.

    “It’s got to happen. We’ve got no choice. That is going to happen so that when they are planning their shiny new kitchen, the new bedroom or they’re just redecorating, they can incorporate those things into their thinking.”

    There also need to be low-interest finance options to enable people to move forward.

    Quality depends on good communication

    Quality starts with the design, putting the right list of things together and communicating it properly to the contractor.

    “I think people tend to bash contractors in the first instance for poor quality but the bottom line is, if the contractor’s not been told what to do very well then it’s never going to work.”

    Something Russell has been working on for the last seven years with a cooperative he set up called RetrofitWorks, is bringing those disparate parts of the industry together as part of one organisation. The aim is to give everyone tools at their disposal to do the design, communicate with each other and implement the work so that they can all check anything at every step of the way.

    Cosy Homes Oxfordshire is a manifestation of the key partners they have built up in that area. With some central government funding buying into the model they have been able to define the marketing, clearly describe the approach they think their customers want, design their processes as a cooperative, push forward with the advice, the whole house plans, the detailed design and putting a tender process in place so the right contractors are selected and they can make sure their work is done well.

    Charlie Luxton visits a deep retrofit in central Oxford

    Charlie Luxton visits a refurbishment of a listed barn

    Charlie Luxton checks out a retrofit of a semi-detached property

    They have also used their established supply chains with the creation of the Warmer Sussex scheme, and Ecofurb which will be launching in London soon.

    There aren’t enough skilled workers to meet government targets

    Parity Projects have used modelling tools to identify that the current workforce of around 160,000 in the sector would need to be virtually tripled in order to achieve the government’s target of every house in the UK hitting a minimum EPC score of C by 2030.

    Russell sees this time as a massive opportunity to be training people up from other industries for working in managerial roles as well as the labourers. He thinks that all students in the building sector should complete the same one year course before branching out into their specialities. That way there might be more respect and understanding on site.

    Select a team that is willing to learn

    Russell’s advice to a homeowner considering a renovation project would be to contact a local retrofit coordinator. They will be able to give you advice and technical knowledge to put a plan in place for your property.

    He stresses that if you’re going to do your home up you will probably need to accept that some people working on it might need to learn something new, so ensure that you team up with people that have the right attitude, a genuine interest and are keen to help. Even if they don’t necessarily know it, they will learn and find out.

    There are also free resources available on the AECB website in their Knowledgebase section, and from the Centre for Sustainable Energy.

    Find out more

    Visit the website of Parity Projects

    Learn more about RetrofitWorks

    Follow Russell Smith on Twitter

    Check out our previous episodes with Parity Projects, about what to expect from a detailed energy assessment, and how an assessment can inform retrofit measures.

    Parity Projects carry out an energy assessment at Ben’s parents’ house

    Transcript

    Download a transcript of the interview with Russell Smith.

    Please connect with me

    Subscribe, rate and review the podcast in iTunes

    Rate and review the podcast on Stitcher

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