From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
h/t Ray Sanders
An unusually frank piece from the Guardian!!
Conservatories and house extensions could be helping to wipe out the reductions in gas use secured by insulating homes, according to a study that found insulation only provides a short-term fall in energy consumption.
In a surprise finding, the study into the long-term effect of loft and cavity wall insulation in England and Wales showed that the fall in gas consumption for each household was small, with all energy savings disappearing by the fourth year after it had been fitted.
Policy experts at the University of Cambridge said the findings suggested a “rebound effect” in energy use, where changing behaviour cancelled out the reductions in gas use. They also suggested that fitting insulation often happened alongside the building of house extensions, which use extra energy. For households with conservatories, any gains in energy efficiency disappeared after the first year.
The government and opposition parties have championed the retrofitting of homes with insulation as a way of dealing with the energy crisis. Ministers have announced insulation retrofits as a leading part of a programme to reduce the energy consumption of buildings and industry by 15% over the next eight years. Labour has said insulating homes should be a “national mission” that could save people £11bn in three years.
However, researchers said that while insulation was vital for fighting fuel poverty, it was not a “magic bullet” for reducing energy use and should come alongside advice to conserve energy and programmes to install heat pumps in homes.
Researchers said it was hard to identify the exact causes of the rebound effect. However, they stated that turning up the heating, opening windows in stuffy rooms or building extensions could all contribute. They made clear that in circumstances such as the current cost of living crisis, it was possible that energy savings from insulation could be more significant and longer lasting.
This has actually all been very obvious for a long while, and did not really need an expensive study to prove it.
Energy efficiency is not something new dreamt up by the climate lobby. It is a natural process whereby technology continuously improves the products we buy and the way we live. Cars, for example, are twice as efficient as they were even twenty or thirty years ago; they did not need government mandates to make it happen.
But as energy efficiency improves, along with the cost of things we buy, we have more money to spend in other ways. In terms of energy, most people, I suspect, would use better insulation to enjoy warmer homes, not reduce bills.
Equally they will tend to buy conservatories etc, which will increase energy consumption. And, yes, people will open windows to let fresh air in – we have our bedroom windows open at night even in mid-winter.(No doubt the Guardian would be horrified!)
If people want insulation, fine – let them pay for it. But it should be a “national mission”, paid for by taxpayers, as the Labour Party want. And it certainly will not save the planet!
Save energy costs in winter by insulating your home and turning the heating down. Solve the ensuing problem of damp, black mould by opening the windows and turning the heating up….simple.
Science: Change one variable, hold the others constant.
Policy Experts at the University of Cambridge: Change one variable and ignore the others.
Science!
“Cars, for example, are twice as efficient as they were even twenty or thirty years ago;” Tell that to anyone still driving a 1990’s Geo Metro and they’ll laugh in your face.
Cars could and would be much more efficient if manufacture and buying was left to free market incentives rather than poorly thought out government intervention in the market.
wtf? must be crappy products
rockwool in the roof dropped my heat in summer by 10c at least and kept that or more IN in winter for a few hundred dollars worth every cent.
britains damp soils and cellars would pose a real problem to keep anything insulated without mould/rot I guess
I’ve owned 2 older homes with insulation installation after a period of original insulation.
Don’t know about newer homes, but older homes are mighty drafty. In our first home, the walls were plaster, and it was a great insulator. There were some drafts, but, overall, the solid construction of a 1880’s home kept our energy use to reasonable levels.
Our second home was built in the 1950’s, and updated in the late 1970s (yes, with that awful color scheme!). Little insulation to speak of. The add-on foam insulation cut our heating bills almost in half.
We didn’t bother with the next home, as it was located in sunny SC. We did buy a new heat pump, which saved on heating bills (and, more importantly, cooling bills).
The most recent home, a turn of the century model, just had the insulation installed on 1/30/22. It has a sunroom, usual LR, DR, and kitchen, and 3 bedrooms and 2 baths on the first floor. The attic had been remodeled by the previous owner to include another bath and bedroom. The attic was NOT insulated at all.
They installed the sheets of insulation batting in the attic, and injected foam in the floors (the ceiling of the first floor). They also added insulation to all the exterior walls, including in the sunroom.
What a difference it made, almost immediately! We could feel the reduction of drafts. We turned down the thermostat, and were still quite comfortable.
Like most Ohioans, we have a basement, with glass block windows. It does help keep the temp swings down.
We’re setting aside money to replace the 1st floor windows (particularly in the sunroom) with double-layered windows. That should keep the sunroom usable for most of the year.
Sensible use of measures to control energy use don’t have to cost much. I use insulated drapes in the sunroom, opened during the day (except when a snowstorm is raging) to take advantage of the sun, closed at night. I close off rooms not currently in use (a nice feature of the turn of the century homes – they are NOT open all around, and generally do not have cathedral ceilings). I also have installed some strips at the bottom edges of doors to stop the drafts.
We turn down the heat at night. It saves some energy, and promotes a more restful sleep. We have lowered the heat while we’re gone (we’re spending the next week in SC), and will be adding insulation of hot water pipes in the basement. Mostly, saving energy is knowing your home, and making the easy, cheap adjustments and improvements when you can. After living through last year’s winter in that house, I knew the upgrade was needed.
Wondering, second to last sentence of article: missing word “not” between should and be?
There’s almost a “we are all sinners” quality to this. I await a call for the God of Government to come and inject some rectitude into the fallen angels.
That would help explain its appeal to utility company messaging and regulators as a mostly meaningless gesture and another side trip to nowhere but with good feelings.
Add this to the other con job that suggests all glass commercial buildings are “green” and utilize “natural light” while hiding the true efficiency issues of the design. They ignore the much lower R value of glass and the emergent use of LED lighting to replace the need for open walls.
I built my home 14 years ago with ten inch walls with a vapor barrier and nine inches of insulation. I heat my home only with light bulbs and “waste” heat from cooking and computer monitors. I have no furnace of any kind and I do not use electric space heaters. I run ceiling fans constantly to prevent mold in the air. The outdoor temperature during Christmas was -8 F with twenty mph winds and the indoor temperature was 72 F. I open my windows frequently to control the temperature. During the Summer I run the air conditioner during the night to cool the house, and the house remains comfortable all through the day with the windows closed. Insulation is very efficient when used properly. Don’t confuse the stupidity of other people with science.
For homes, I want an answer in W/K for a given amount of money.
In the UK government schemes to insulate cavity walls were introduced in the early 2000s and effectively resulted in botched jobs and misery for millions of home owners. A remedial scheme was introduced which was just as bad and there are still something like 4 million legal cases ongoing.
The government is now planning a scheme to install 600,000 heat pumps a year from 2028 using people trained for a week or two to do the work. What could possibly go wrong?
I’m not sure what this study is trying to say. Stop adding home expansions? If the purpose is to study the effects of adding more home insulation, then it should restrict itself to homes where additional insulation was the only thing that changed.
The study is looking at overall energy use before and after. Energy use per square foot before and after might be a better measure.
Total energy use reduction was the goal of the insulation incentives, making overall enegy use the correct measurement for evaluating their success.
A good deal of the housing stock in the UK cannot be easily insulated. Those that could be insulated at reasonable cost probably have been.
Our house is over 500 years old, built with solid granite walls over 3 foot thick, and we have no loft space. To increase the insulation in the roof would mean stripping it off or dropping the ceilings. Both extremely costly. External cladding is expensive, would cover all the features of a lovely old house, and would probably lead to damp trapped between the cladding and stone. Internal cladding will cover architectural features, reduce the size of the rooms, require rewiring to extend switches, sockets and light fittings, and trap damp between stone and insulation, also very expensive and unattractive. So we accept the increased cost to heat our old home, I’d rather pay more than destroy the character of the house. And there are many thousands of old houses like ours where insulation is not an easy or cheap option.
“researchers said that while insulation was vital for fighting fuel poverty, it was not a “magic bullet” for reducing energy use“. It is really very very simple. The savings from insulation – and there are substantial savings – are spent on something else. Those people are then significantly better off, because they can now afford that ‘something else’ that they couldn’t afford before. Instead of blathering on about “reducing energy use”, the powers that be should be increasing the supply of cheap reliable energy as much as they possibly can. Energy is the foundation and principal driver of modern civilisation. Liz Truss got it right. Britain is immeasurably worse off from the elitist coup that replaced her with an unelected hypocrite (the person who supported fracking when trying to win the party vote, then banned it immediately on being installed in power).
It can’t be stated too often: Liz Truss was right.
That’ll be Rishi “Buying American fracked gas, compressing it and shipping it across the Atlantic is good, producing our own fracked gas is bad” Sunak. What a fracking idiot.
Having lived in the UK and owned old properties (My first home in the 80’s was 105 years old) I can confirm that under floor, wall cavity, ceiling, hot water heater insulation and double glassing do work. So the article is misleading IMO.
I live in a cold climate area and I cannot imagine life without good insulation.
Comparing my energy bills with others with less well insulated homes show a substantial difference in costs.
Over tight and heavily insulated homes can cause other problems but they are quite solvable. Moisture retention is one, but a heat recovery ventilator, or alternately a dehumidifier, covers that nicely. The moister air is much more comfortable in terms of breathing and problematic humidifiers on forced air furnaces are not necessary.
Insulation has the same type of value in reducing cooling needs in hot weather.
Of course,the aim is a comfortable home and energy savings are a side benefit. Much better than a home that is impossible to keep comfortable due to poor construction or economic concerns (cost of heating or cooling).
Insulation, however is not the end all. Other factors include efficient heating and cooling systems, using the cheapest fuels available, good windows and doors, to name a few.
“the cheapest fuels available” are becoming ‘unavailable’ fast.