retrofit components
It is possible that your home could become carbon neutral. In the work that we’ve carried out using our Whole House Assessment Method we have shown that homes can be improved so that utility bills can be reduced by between 60 - 100%. We have carried out work to properties that have delivered 80% reductions.
Retrofit can be expensive : to target your spending most effectively we have introduced our Whole House assessment method
Red has been working with GMCA and University of Salford to create a pattern book of retrofit details that allows performance improvements, new products and new ways of doing things to be shared
You can do this by examining the items as listed below:
Alongside retrofit consider behavioural and lifestyle changes to reduce your bill by up to 25%
Next look at the fabric of your home, click on the bold text for further information:
walls : British homes are amongst the most thermally inefficient in Europe, in a lot of cases due to their age. Insulating them can be cheap if there is a cavity, however this is only a start : to achieve the kind of levels needed in the long term a lot more insulation is needed. This can either be added on the outside or the inside.
roof : Your roof may have already had some insulation put in it but it’s often not as thick as ideal and so cheap that there is almost always room for more.
floors : There are several different types of floor - some easy to insulate, some less so. Interventions range from not touching the floor but insulation around the outside, to getting underneath and fitting insulation under the floorboards to lifting the floor and starting again
windows : Whilst a lot of heat leaves through the windows it is not as much as many think and replacing the windows can be extremely expensive. On the other hand old upvc windows can be very draughty and thermally inefficient, almost as bad as old Victorian timber ones. Interventions here range from secondary glazing through to full replacement with engineered triple glazed windows.
doors : Super insulated doors are extremely expensive and may well be beyond the budget of most people. It may be possible just to draught proof or line them.
air tightness : There is a difference between ventilation that you are in control of and the kind that means all of the heat in your house leaves when the wind blows. Work to reduce the latter starts with draft proofing around windows and doors and carries on up to installing air tightness membranes around the internal surfaces of the property as part of a larger retrofit.
ventilation : The health of the building and its occupants depends on the removal of stale, moisture laden air and its controlled replacement with adequate fresh air.
services : Once you have reduced heat loss through the building fabric (often referred to as the fabric first approach) then you get to the building services
heat sources : We carry out feasibility assessments on heat sources both as part of our Whole House assessment and on special cases. We have quite a lot of experience getting biomass and solar thermal installed. Where we are unable to provide the detail you want, we're not afraid to say so - we then work with people that can.
renewable energy : You can only reduce your household electricity usage so far, after which the only way to fully offset it is to generate an equivalent amount of renewable energy.
