Personal story:

We are Nick, Carol and our daughter, Matilda.  We are two self-employed adults working from home and one home-educated girl, so we all spend a lot of time in our house.  We love our home and we love Stroud and the community where we live.  We also love this beautiful planet and wanted to ‘do our bit’ to try and live sustainably.

Motivations:

Carol went on a carbon-reduction course a few years ago.  By measuring the carbon footprint of our lifestyle and our home, she realised that our biggest waste of CO2 was via our domestic heating. We decided to invest in our home for the future (beyond our lifetime) to develop a home suitable for a carbon-reduced future. We chose a wood-based insulation because we wanted to use naturally degradable materials to reduce the footprint that we leave on the local area after the technology is defunct. We also wanted to take advantage of our sunny, south-facing roof. With all the improvements to our home we have tried to keep the systems simple, easily mended and using resources that are easily available locally (e.g. wood for woodstove).

Property background:

We purchased this Victorian semi-detached solid brick house in September 2000.

Key changes made:

External wall insulation & solar PV panels info sheet
What we learned when externally insulating our house

Measures installed in detail:

• All windows double glazed with super lowE glass and argon filled
• External insulation on solid brick walls.  Insulation = 100mm diffutherm + silicate render
• 145mm rockwool loft insulation added
• A++ chest freezer installed
• Low energy lighting throughout
• Underdrawn sloping ceiling internal insulation under the roof
• Solar PV
• Passive solar water heating
• Wood burning stove with back boiler installed and gas boiler disconnected
• Collect all rainwater – use some to flush downstairs toilet.  Plumbed in water filter so that waste water used to fill hot water header tank

Benefits of work carried out:

We have not used our gas central heating at all since the house was insulated so we are now spending an average of less than £3 per month on our gas bill (630kWH/year).

Our electricity usage has also changed since the insulation was installed.  The first winter we increased our usage, as we were heating all our water with electricity.  Since September 2009, we have had a wood stove to heat our water in the winter and our electricity usage has dropped as well. We are now using an average of less than £19 per month on our electricity bill (1300kWH/year).

Since May 2010, we have had PV panels installed on the roof which are generating a little more than the electricity that we use, on average over the whole year (latest figure = 1633 kWh/year).  This means that the FIT payments for the electricity generated pay for all our electricity bills as well as the repayments for the PAYS loan that we got for the installation, and provides a net income of about £180/year.

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