Colin Gets Down and Dirty
Friday, 18 December 2009 17:09
Property Type: Detached House
Ownership Status: Owner - Freehold
What eco-improvements did you make to your property?
We moved into our 1930s detached house in Surrey about two and a half years ago. The house had huge floor cavities making it very draughty, so we insulated under the floor, filling the cavities. Doing the under-floor improvements was easy – the house needed re-wiring and plumbing, so we needed to rip up the floorboards anyway. We filled the loft with sheep’s wool, which is better for your health and for the environment as it is sustainable and doesn’t contain petro-chemicals. Knowing about all the bad stuff that can be found in materials, I wanted everything we put in the house to be toxic-free.
On a cold day, our under-floor heating heats up our clay tiles and they retain heat throughout the day. For extra heating we have a wood-burning stove in the lounge which burns wood from a local coppice. This is a big metal stove which heats up and acts like a radiator, mainly heating the downstairs but because the house now has such good insulation the upstairs heats well too.
Our water is heated with a solar thermal system – fluid is pumped through big glass tubes on the roof and travels to the hot water tank, heats the water, travels back up, and this process continues until we have a tank of hot water. There are also efficient radiators in each room but these don’t get used unless it’s really cold.
We built an extension at the back of the house for a dining room and play area – with very thick glass which catches the sun all morning and warms up the clay tiles. The FSC-sourced (Forest Stewardship Council) sliding doors open onto FSC decking. Our kitchen is also FSC-sourced and the paints are all natural paints – we used Earthborn paints which I’d really recommend.
What positive and negative experiences did you have?
On the negative side: because we were rewiring and re-plumbing, there was a high cost and a lot of effort involved, and because it is an old house which hadn’t been done up for decades, we found other problems which needed dealing with as we went. Also, trying to get funding from the Low Carbon Building Programme was difficult and over-complicated, although we did get some in the end – around five hundred pounds for the solar hot water.
But there are lots of positives: the decorators were really surprised at how much nicer it was working with toxic-free paints, saying they usually felt light-headed after a day’s decorating but not with Earthborn paints we used. It was the same with the builders working on the extension – they were surprised by how inexpensive and pleasant to use the materials were. Turning the front garden into a vegetable patch has been a real positive as we love growing our own veggies now. The solar thermal has been the biggest surprise for me – it works much better than I expected, heating a whole tank of water on a sunny day.
What are the benefits to your home and lifestyle?
See above. We’re not sure yet what difference it’s made to our bills but I do know that we rarely use the main heating and it feels really warm!
What advice would you give to others considering similar improvements?
My main advice to other people is to insulate first! And use natural paints – they look just as good and are not much more expensive. Also, we did our whole house in one go and it was pretty exhausting so you might want to do it in stages.
