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Sustainability stories - Coventry LM

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Pam Lunn, Coventry LM

I live in a 1960s small terraced house that had, when I bought it (in 1976), cavity walls not insulated, one inch of insulation in the loft, single-glazed badly-fitting metal-frame windows, and a copper water tank with an electric immersion heater. The tank did have an insulating jacket. The space heating was ducted warm air, so not interfacing with the hot water at all.

Clearly a lot needed doing – for comfort and lower bills, even before I thought environmentally about these things. But the work was, for various reasons, either not entirely straightforward, or costly. For many years, all I could afford was paying the mortgage, and I waited for my endowment lump sum.

So, starting in 2001, I had the windows and cladding replaced – double glazed windows and insulated cladding; I had the cavity walls insulated; I upped the loft insulation to about 15 inches; and I replaced my central heating unit with a more modern and efficient one (still warm air). Taken all together, this halved my gas consumption, even without turning down the thermostat. And of course, I changed all my light bulbs when the low-energy compacts became available.

Then, in 2008, my mother died, leaving me half of her estate, so I had capital I could spend. I had the means to ‘do something green’. So I invested it in solar hot water and solar electricity panels. Because my house faces E-W both the equipment and installation costs were greater than would be the case for a south-facing roof. But it’s worth it. My house is now, averaged over the year, roughly electricity-neutral. I didn’t need to heat my hot water from the beginning of March to the end of October in 2010. I get both the feed-in tariff and a ROC payment for my solar hot water from my energy provider, Good Energy. It’s carbon-efficient and financially reasonable – a much better return on my investment than a savings account! I don’t know how the financial equation would have worked if I’d been borrowing the money.

My next plan is to have the bathroom re-done to install a shower. My new hot water tank (fitted to work with the panels) is a pressurised steel tank, producing hot water at mains pressure, so I can run a shower off it.

 

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