Why Retrofit?
At Hearth we are all about simplifying our day-to-day & working smarter, so we thought it may be handy to put together a little “guide to Retrofit”, after our next three blogs you’ll practically be an expert, or at least dazzle at a dinner party. This blog is a simple explanation of why we need to retrofit and what the basic issues are. The next will go through why it’s necessary to set up a specific system to tackle the problem and why we believe this is the best way forward for home-owners, the third will be all about our take on things.
Future posts will look in detail at what grants and incentives are available (this will be updated regularly) and look at specific technologies and techniques in detail as well as tackle some of the bigger customer questions and other bits n bobs we think are especially interesting.
What’s all the fuss about? Why retrofit.
The UK pledged to be “net zero carbon” by 2050, meaning that all energy used in the country must be carbon neutral.
Every part of the economy is trying to figure out how to achieve this. We’ve made some notable headway, with a rapidly decarbonizing electricity grid and transportation network.
The energy needed to power our homes is one of the biggest headaches in this equation since most homes are powered by gas, and there is no such thing as net-zero gas. So we need to switch our homes to electricity. New homes are already built with better insulation, better windows, and increasingly with heat pumps, highly efficient systems running off the electrical grid, or in some cases, from solar.
That leaves us with the 85% of UK building stock that is already in existence, and still will be in 2050, for which there is no quick fix. In addition to the issue of carbon, we also have a very high level of “fuel poverty” in the UK. About 18% of the country can’t afford to pay their fuel bills and this is mainly due to inefficient, leaky properties. This and the other side effects, such as mould and damp, also leads to persistently high levels of health issues arising from living in unsafe homes. With councils strapped for cash, strangely the carbon goals may benefit the issue of fuel poverty, since the two issues can often be tackled as one.
By 2050 all 20 million homes built pre-1990 will need to be refurbished. Adding some less-efficient post-90’s properties and we need deep energy retrofits of 833,000 properties per year or 1 every 40 seconds. Compared to the scale of refurbishments happening currently, this is mind-boggling.
There are three main reasons why this is challenging:
Lack of incentives and grants
Existing homes are complicated
Lack of skills and capacity
Let’s break it down.
The UK cost to get to the target 60% energy reduction is estimated at nearly 21 billion. Homeowners will have to come up with nearly all of this—the Green Homes Grant has been retired, and though there are other grants and incentives (we’ll detail these in upcoming blogs), the much-heralded new £5,000 grant per household for heat pumps will only fit 90,000 homes with this one technology and doesn't pay for insulation, draught proofing and other upgrades that may be necessary for a heat pump to work efficiently in the first place. Green mortgages and green loans for upgrades are only getting started and don’t offer the kind of straightforward incentives that we need to see, though we think this is a rapidly developing area and we will be tracking developments for our followers.
Each home is different: not only did every era and location of building in the UK introduce new formats, techniques and materials, but building is still essentially a craft product and a home is only as good as the skilled or unskilled builders who worked on it. Older buildings were built to “breathe”, newer ones are built to be air-tight, with quite big ramifications either way. Recent decades have seen repairs and updates to historic homes made from completely unsuitable materials, often causing worse problems than they intended to fix. Luckily we are now taking lessons learned and can apply them for better results.
Compared to say 5 years ago, many people are very keen to make better choices and they are even willing to put some of their savings towards doing so. But we tend to want a quick answer which will often lead to choosing a technology which may not get much bang for their buck, and miss out on other benefits such as increased comfort and better health (this is the optimistic scenario!) Perhaps even more significant, because there isn’t a one-solution answer, most people don’t feel very confident about how to get started.
That’s where the lack of skills and capacity comes in. The construction industry needs skilled managers who know how to assess properties correctly and help people to the best value solutions, but also knowledgeable suppliers and installers. It is estimated that to service the country's goals we currently have about 10% of the necessary capacity. That’s why most boiler suppliers, for example, won’t suggest an air source heat pump, because it's far easier to keep installing gas boilers as long as the law allows it.
However we believe there has been a sea-change in people’s attitudes and we have significant legislation coming up that will affect decision-making including banning the rental of inefficient properties (in 2025) and banning gas boilers for new homes (in 2035) and eventually in existing ones. Furthermore, the price of gas is rising. Government tariffs will be transferred, from gas to electricity over the next 10 years. With heat pump technology set to get cheaper, efficiencies to improve, and gas to get more expensive, hopefully we’ll see all these come together so that it makes it an easy decision to upgrade, not only if homeowners get grants and incentives to do so. We’d like to see this happen soon.
Reference source: Retrofit Academy
