Reducing Heat Loss at home
As the pyramid shows, the first stage is to Reduce energy use – from simple tips like improving the controls on your heating to eliminating draughts. Click here for an in-depth article about how to reduce your energy Bills. It makes sense to reduce your heat losses as much as possible before you install new heating systems - but in some homes that is difficult. You home does not have to be perfectly insulted to install a heat pump, say.
Insulating your home
- > The Energy Trust has lots of advice for internal or external insulation, loft and cavity walls, as does the Centre for Sustainable Energy
- > You may get some ideas from the Retrofit webinar that DCAN ran in 2023 – see this link.
- > Energy Saving Devon have produced a great Retrofit Guide which covers all aspects of eco-improvement of your home - downloadable for free.
- > LEAP (Local Energy Advice Partnership) is sponsored by Dorset Council through Ridgewater energy. Anyone can get advice from them, and a wide range of eligibility criteria will get you a full visit to your home free.
More efficient Heating
The Energy Trust again lays out the alternatives. NB the Gas industry and the Hydrogen lobby have published a lot if disinformation about the cost and efficiency of heat pumps. Talk to someone who has installed one their home, for more impartial advice. You don’t need prefect insulation, they are generally not noisy, and they work in British winters ( 2/3 of Norwegian homes have heat pumps).
Nesta and MCS have produced a really useful website to help you decide on Heat pumps
Other green alternatives are a modern storage heater, eg this one, or an air-to-air heat pump.
Technology roundup:
- Robert Llewelyn’s Fully Charged Home Energy series reviews heat pumps, boilers, PVs and batteries in 6 short videos.
- DCAN’s webinar on home Battery storage discusses why you might install a battery, even if you don’t yet have PV panels.
Finding an Installer
Finding someone you can trust to give you good advice, and who will do a great job, is tricky. We cannot endorse one company as against another. So we asked our open home hosts who they had employed, and were they happy with the results? Here are their recommendations. If you want to add to ( or amend) this list please get in touch.
Grants
A wide range of grants are available – HUGS, ECO4, ECO+ etc, each with its own eligibility criterion. You can get information from Ridgewater Energy, which administers grants for Dorset Council and the government, or the Citizens Advice Bureau.
Other Useful links
- Association for Environment Conscious Building. aecb.net
- Installers & Eco-Retrofitters in Dorset. We asked our Greener Open Homes Hosts who did their work for them. Here is a list of their recommendations.
- Green register This puts you in touch with builders and installers who specialise in greening your home
- Trustmark are Energy improvement companies with good reviews.
- Centre for Sustainable Energy (CSE) have some really useful fact sheets on a number of energy and home improvement topics.
- Sustainable traditional buildings alliance A wealth of resources for tackling traditional buildings