LEAN, GREEN AND CLEAN
Now’s the time to boost the eco-credentials — and value — of your home, says Samantha Partington
THE PAST few months have triggered a new determination for many people, whether that’s growing vegetables, learning a language or perfecting sourdough.
Now, it seems that many of us are keen to change the way we live and are looking forward to a cleaner, greener lifestyle.
One way to do this is by saving hundreds of pounds each year on your energy bills by making your home more environmentally friendly. any improvements will also add value to your home, as eco homes are growing in popularity.
and this is the time to do it. the Government has launched a Green home Grants scheme, which provides homeowners with up to £10,000 in vouchers to pay for the cost of energysaving measures including insulation, double and triple glazing, and lowcarbon heating.
‘ Improving the efficiency and sustainability of your home is an investment that will become more valuable over time,’ says Kunle Barker, copresenter of Love Your home & Garden and Grand Designs Live, and property expert for sustainable building firm InFrame.
here are Barker’s top tips for making green home improvements . . .
PLUG THE GAPS
THE place to start is insulation, which is covered under the Green homes Grant scheme available from the end of this month. You can claim up to £5,000 (or more if you are a low earner) towards twothirds of the cost of the work, which must be completed before March 31, 2021.
‘around 70 per cent of your heat goes out of the walls and if your windows are leaking, it is like throwing fivers into the wind,’ says Barker.
Draught excluders are a quick win that can be fitted around doors and windows from between £200 and £300, saving you up to £20 a year on your energy bills.
Loft insulation costs about £300, reaping an annual saving of £180 a year.
Replacing draughty windows with double glazing will keep you snug and save up to £175 a year. prices for one window range from £350 to £600. Barker recommends choosing windows with a socalled solar film for greater energy savings, but says triple glazing is not worth it.
InFrame uses ‘superfoil’, a Nasa space technology, in its renovations. superfoil is a type of external solid wall insulation. It makes your home airtight and radiates heat back into the house.
‘think of it as like wrapping your house in a huge thin duvet,’ he says. It costs £3,500 for a threebedroom terrace and can save you about £145 a year on bills.
BOOST YOUR RATING
‘THERE is no onesizefitsall approach when it comes to improving the efficiency of a home, so carry out an energy survey first,’ says Barker.
an energy performance Certificate (epC) rates the efficiency of your home, with G being the worst and a being the best. If you don’t have an epC, instruct a professional to survey your property using epcregister.com. prices vary, costing up to £120.
a higher rating can improve the value of your home. For example, going from a G to an a could add 14 per cent to the average property value in england, according to research for Moneysupermarket.com.
LOW-CARBON HEATING
AIR source heat pumps and solar panels are covered by the Government’s grant.
an air source heat pump, which costs about £8,000, takes heat from the air outside and increases it to a higher temperature. If you are replacing a liquid gas heating system, you can save about £285 on your bills a year.
solar panels are less expensive to install but not suitable for every house. You can generate your own reusable energy and earn money by transferring unneeded power to the National Grid.
eight panels on a semidetached house cost about £3,800 and will save typically £90 a year while earning you up to £120 a year for sending money to the grid.
SMART TECH
SMART thermostats, available via the Green homes Grant, allow you to control your heating remotely using your phone. some systems detect if a window has been left open and turn the heating off, others begin heating your house as you return from work. You can also have electronic valves on radiators to adjust the temperatures of individual rooms. prices range from £150 to around £300.
EARLY in lockdown, I did what thousands of Britons did: cleared out the garage. among all of the junk, I found a pot of black Cuprinol Ducksback 5-year Waterproof paint. So I painted the shed.
Bad move. Instead of using my Ducksback shed paint to, well, paint my shed, I should have hung on to it for a few more weeks, then sold it on eBay for a tidy profit.
at the height of lockdown, we got used to shortages: toilet paper, handwash, flour. One by one, the supermarkets got their supply chains in order and those products returned to the shelves. But if you’ve been to your local DIy store recently in search of shed paint, you’ll have experienced that empty- shelf feeling all over again.
you might see an own-label tin in such unfashionable shades as Woodland Moss or Forest Green, but I almost guarantee you won’t see any black Ducksback 5- year Waterproof. What about online?
On several websites I used the ‘find stock in your local store’ function to track some down. I live near Chesham in Buckinghamshire — Wickes said it had a tin in Bishop’s Stortford, 55 miles away; Homebase claimed one existed in Maidenhead, a mere 20 miles away. But could I have been sure that the eager DIy masses of the Thames Valley hadn’t descended on the store and snatched that precious, single tin?
amazon? yes, even now, there’s a variety of sellers if you are prepared to wait for two weeks. also, the price: £22 for five litres. Normally it’s £12 to £14.
Now, call me a skinflint if you wish, but I have set limits, thresholds, for certain products. So I won’t pay more than £100 for a shirt or £15 for a bottle of supermarket wine. My shed/fence paint threshold is definitely £3 a litre.
What’s happening here? First, we have all gone DIy-mad. Kantar, the retail market analysts, said that in June there was a 48 per cent growth in spend on DIy and garden items in physical stores. That’s year- on year, not from May (when the stores weren’t open).
PAINTING and decorating, according to Kantar, is the most ‘accessible’ DIy job. This is a kind way of saying even deskbound numbskulls like me can do it.
Intriguingly, younger DIy-ers are getting stuck in, too: an extra £9 million was spent on decorating supplies by pre-family households in June.
Is this a generational shift? The 2003 book How To Mow The lawn: The lost art Of Being a Man was aimed at all those adult males who were hopeless at the things at which their dads were naturally good: mending cars, putting up shelves and, yes, mowing the lawn. Maybe now the new generation will be showing up their dads. But they won’t be painting their fences black. Over the four weeks to June 14, 2020, wood paint was brought home from 1.7 million trips, up 110 per cent compared with the same period last year. The figures for July and august are likely to be just as high.
at first, I thought the shortage was simply the old retailer’s trick of pretending they were running out in order to make us desperate for the popular product.
If so, Cuprinol, a fine old Danish company that’s now part of the akzoNobel giant, is playing the long game. I invited it several times to talk about the shortage and why its paint should be in such demand, but answer came there none.
Maybe I should just admit defeat and paint the shed Forest Green. I’ve repainted the house (white), the wall (pebble white), the iron fence (silver grey) and relaid the drive (black ice). My dad, bless him, would have been proud of me. But there’s no room for greens and browns in our shaker/ Scandi paradise.
Hang on, though. according to author and TV presenter Georgina Burnett (The Home Genie) fashionistas on Instagram are trying to lure us away from that look.
Despite their best efforts, however, grey, greige, whatever you call it, ‘is not going anywhere’, Georgina reckons.
‘I like green in gardens, but it depends which shade. The darker browns? No.’
She recommends blue as an alternative for that ‘Greek garden’ feel.
and the good news is that Wickes has one tin of Cuprinol Beach Blue left in my ‘local store’. It’s in Glossop, Derbyshire — a mere 130.2 miles away.