How to decarbonise your home
Journal part 1
Follow the journey of two climate and energy experts as they decarbonise their home.
As it involves their private life, we’re withholding their identities.
I want to decarbonise my house. Where do I start?
We hear a lot about lowering our carbon footprint. Take fewer flights/give up flying, move to a plant-based diet, lower your thermostat, go plastic free, make sure you drive less and walk more, switch to a renewable energy supplier. However, the advice given out never really goes as far as running a house.
I thought I had it figured out. I was already paying a renewable energy company and I’d made sure they were ‘additional’ to the grid ie. would plough their earnings into generating renewable energy for the grid rather than buying carbon credits or offsetting. I made sure that I used electricity instead of gas wherever possible. I ran my heating only two hours a day.
I figured the next step in my low-carbon journey was to get solar panels. Then I could replace my fossil fuel car with an electric one and I could replace my gas hob with an electric one. Then I could look at moving away from my gas boiler towards an air source heat pump. Sounds like a logical progression doesn’t it?
I talked to a colleague from work. As an engineer she sees things differently and didn’t agree with my decarbonisation plan. She pointed out that even if I was paying a renewable energy company for my electricity I was still getting it from the National Grid. She also pointed out that my boiling the kettle for pasta at 6pm might be higher carbon than heating the water on the hob (because electrical grid demand is highest between about 5 and 8pm so they turn on more gas power stations to keep up with demand). Finally, and this was a shocker… she said that my car mileage (despite it being only 5,300 miles per year) might be my highest source of carbon emissions and so switching my car might be the first thing to do.
So, as a good engineer, she wanted data. Through daily gas and electric meter readings we would figure out where my highest emissions were and then decide on a plan of action.
I thought it might be useful to blog about the experience to hopefully inspire and educate others hoping to start a similar journey.
Collecting data
This week came with a nasty shock. A bill from Npower requesting £225 pounds for one month’s dual fuel energy use. This was to cover November 2019 after we’d moved into the current house and before we’d been able to switch over to renewable supplier Bulb. I called requesting confirmation of this exorbitant cost and after running the numbers the customer service person confirmed that we had used over 900 kWh of electricity in one month which equalled a £175 electricity bill. Ouch. She asked what it was that we had in our house consuming that much electricity and I told her about our electric underfloor heating system.
I love our underfloor heating system. It’s only in the kitchen but our kitchen is very long and the hub of the house. It’s a balmy 68 degrees Fahrenheit for most of the day. This is mostly because I haven’t figured out the complicated heating controls to reprogramme it, so it is set to default. It’s also the reason that we only need the gas heating on for a couple of hours a day – we spend so much time in the kitchen it doesn’t matter if the rest of the house is cold.
However, it was a shock and after taking daily meter readings for a week I’ve realised that the majority of our 30 kWh per day is going on the underfloor heating.
(My husband works from home and uses an oil radiator (powered by electricity) and a fan heater (1 hour per day) to keep warm, as well as his computer with two screens. However he’s been away this week for work and therefore hasn’t contributed to the electricity consumption.)
Our gas consumption has averaged at 3 m3 per day which is 33 kWh. This covers gas heating (radiators), hot water and cooking on the hob.
So this is week one of data collection. So far it’s going well and now that I have a baseline to work from I can start understanding how to lower our consumption – not just for the environment but, based on that Npower bill, also for my wallet!
Questions for next week will be:
How much does my husband working from home add to the electricity usage?
What happens if we turn the underfloor heating off?
I’ll keep you posted in the next blog.