green diary

Our house is a solid-walled house built around 1905.  Being end-of-terrace, it used to be very cold in winter.  We've gradually insulated over the past three years.  In terms of thermal performance, the house should now perform roughly on a par with a new build.  The majority of the work has been insulating the walls.  I did the bedrooms, living room and dining room and we used builders to do the bathroom.  In total, the energy-saving measures now installed include:

• 65-80mm of rigid-foam insulation on all external walls (mostly DIY; some done by builders during other work)
• at least 270mm of glass-wool insulation in the loft (DIY)
• insulated the suspended timber floors in the living room and dining room (DIY)
• we worked with a local sash window maker to put high performance double glazing units into wooden frames for the front of the house
• lots of draught proofing and a focus on airtightness during the DIY refurbishment
• mechanical ventilation with heat recovery in the bathroom (it works very well)
• fitted wet underfloor heating in the living room (DIY).  UFH is wonderful!
• solar thermal (evacuated tube) fitted professionally (would have done it DIY if it weren't for the new regs)
• light pipes to bring natural light into the kitchen and corridor (installed by builders)
• home-made 450 litre rain water tank in back garden, with piping running under living room floor to bring rain water to front garden
• thermostatic radiator valves on all radiators; new condensing boiler with walk-about thermostat (which is great)... plan to install room-by-room digital radiator controls

Overall it has been a lot of work and at times it's felt overwhelming.  But we're pretty much finished with the insulation and there's absolutely no question that the house is considerably easier to heat and more comfortable than it was.

I've finally gotten round to plotting our gas consumption on a graph. I'm not expecting a measurable drop in our consumption yet. We finished insulating our living room in July 2011 and I'm only just getting round to insulating our bedrooms (Feb 2012). We installed a new condensing gas boiler and solar thermal in July 2011. But we also had a baby in August 2011 so we've had the heating on far more than normal for the last quarter of 2011!

Temperature data from the Heathrow MetOffice weather station

What does this data tell us? And why did it take a fair amount of effort to plot our gas consumption?

• Must be dimmable down to 5% or 1% (some LEDs only dim to 60%)
• Must produce enough light to fill the kitchen
• Must produce a warm, cosy light
• Must produce a light with a high enough colour rendering index to mean that skin looks like skin and not like pale plastic

A little while ago I wrote some notes describing my "ideal" central heating control system, which I was planning to build myself.  Time is short so it looks like this system won't be built for a while so I need something which I can buy off-the-shelf which will satisfy as many of my requirements as possible and also leave the door open to DIY tinkering in the future.  This blog post is a collection of notes about off-the-shelf central heating control systems.

We live in an end-of-terrace Victorian house, built around 1905.  I've spent the last few years insulating our living room.  This blog post is the second in a two-part story.  By the end of the first part of the story, our living room looked like this:

I'm pleased to say that our living room now looks like this:

One big design change since my last blog is that we decided to install wet underfloor heating ourselves.

So, let's start the story...

I plan to build (or buy) a solar-powered pump to take water from our main rainwater tank uphill to the top of the garden.  This second tank would then be able to gravity-feed a hose pipe for watering the garden, instead of having to use watering cans (I'm lazy).

Links for solar-powered rainwater pumps:

Notes whilst gearing up to install a solar thermal system in Summer 2011:

Final Solution:

We went with Draught Busters Ltd to make and install the windows.  Great company; very easy to work with.  Mel spent a lot of time helping me to get what we wanted.  The final solution was to ask Draught Busters Ltd to make the frames.  If I remember correctly, the glass we specified was a 24mm unit fro

A quick health warning: the blog below makes it sound like it's a huge amount of effort to insulate a Victorian property.  And it was a huge amount of work to do our living room!  But I'd say that 90% of the work we had to do was correcting mistakes made by previous owners / the original builders.  If we had started with a healthy Victorian house then it would have taken a fraction of the time.  OK.  Are you sitting comfortably?  Let's start the story...

We have a draughty, poorly insulated Victorian end-of-terrace house.  Back in January 2009, the weather was freezing and work was quiet so I decided to take the plunge and insulate our living room.

Here's what the living room looked like before I got stuck in:

Not only did I want to reduce our gas consumption but the room was also decidedly uncomfortable on cold winter days: even if we left the heating on all day, the living room would still be uncomfortably chilly.

The original plan: On the floor, I planned to pull up the floor boards, install chicken wire under the joists, lay glass fibre insulation between the joists and re-lay the floor boards.  On the external walls, I intended to glue 60mm Kingspan K17 insulated dry lining board directly to the walls.  Before starting the project, I expected it to take a month (i.e. January 2009).  At the time of writing (July 2010) the project still isn't finished, largely because the room provided plenty of surprises once we started revealing the underlying structure.

And here's what it looks like after 18 months of work!