Our Victorian house (in Cambridge) has no loft insulation and we plan to install some. At first glance there appear to be grants available to help with this, but on second glance they all appear to work by having an "approved contractor" come and do the work.
Does anyone know if we can get a grant and do the installation ourselves?
Robert
Some of the energy companies supposedly subsidise the price of insulation for DIY installers from places like B&Q, Homebase or Focus as they're obliged by the government to reach targets for home energy efficiency improvements. I'm not sure that this makes much difference to the price you pay though.
You'll probably find that the cost of DIY install is similar to the cost of getting someone else to do it and claiming the grant.
The energy savings trust is likely to be the best place to get information on what's available for you. You could certainly do worse than giving them a call.
Kieran
In message , at
02:32:18 on Thu, 9 Apr 2009, RobertL remarked:That might be difficult because the council will want to know that you really did spend the money in insulation, and that the work was done effectively. It's probably easier for them to police this by insisting you use an approved contractor, rather than running around themselves inspecting DIY installations.
No, you can't. See
It's routed through approved contractors because they have to provide proof that the work was done in order to claim the subsidy. If the grant was paid directly to you then there wouldn't be an audit trail to show that the work was actually carried out.
As has already been pointed out, though, even if you did get the grant money directly you'd be unlikely to be able to do it significantly cheaper as the contractors can buy the insulating materials at bulk rates. So their materials prices are cheaper even before the grant subsidy.
Mark
I had a look at the approved contractor pricing, the diy warehouse pricing and the builders merchant (Ridgeons) pricing, for a rather large loft.
Ridgeons was significantly the cheapest, even after reckoning in the grants on the approved contractor.
I'd agree with that.
Trouble is a reasonable DIY job will probably be far better than the one done by the "approved contractor". They are given less than the minimum time required to do the job properly and are paid by the job not the time required to do it. So it is in the contractors interests to do the work as quick as they possibly can and get onto the next one.
One approach could be to go for the grant and approved contractor and when the come round to do the work. Take the insulation but send them on their way. This means they can get to the next job far quicker but you may find they take a bit of persuading.
I issuing building control notices.
In message , at
11:30:08 >If you or I did it, maybe. I'm not so sure that on average it would be done better. Most people are frankly appalling at DIY.
And they'll be on the dole far quicker, as soon as one of the DIYers doing that is found selling the insulation at a car boot sale.
No more difficult than when you were able to DIY and claim a grant. My father did it years ago. All he needed was the reciept for the materials.
MBQ
After having already inflated their prices by the same amount, you mean?
MBQ
No; you genuinely do get the full value of the grant. That's one of the conditions for contractors being part of the scheme. What they get out of it is regular work with guaranteed payment, so they are benefitting in that sense - they're not being asked to give anything away. But they're not allowed to misrepresent their normal prices in order to manipulate the system to make additional profit.
Mark
Part of the reason that was stopped was because it was open to abuse - people were buying the material, claiming the grant and then re-selling it instead of actually installing it.
The other point is that the current scheme isn't aimed at people who are competent enough to do their insulation, it's aimed at those who aren't but can't afford the full cost of having it done commercially.
Mark
Yes, B&Q were selling loft insulation at £1 a roll earlier in the year, subsidised by British Gas. There was a limit of 45 rolls per household and an average house required 25 rolls.
I'm not disputing that.
What if their "normal" price is artificially inflated, even for those who employ them for non-grant aided work? There's no misrepresentation to those claiming the grant. Hopefully competition will stop this to a large degree, but I remain cycnical.
MBQ
t
OK, but the insulation was being used *somewhere* which is probably still a "good thing".
MBQ
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember "Man at B&Q" saying something like:
Exactly what I think. The most blatant proof of that kind of thing is local to me, where a Govt grant for a pellet burning boiler leads directly to the burner price being shoved up by exactly the amount of the grant.
at
d:
So the simple way to do this subsidy, if you are going t o do it at all, is to subsidise the loft insulation materials themselves. They can't be used for anything else so such a subsidy would be targeted exactly right.
Are they are zero rated for VAT , that would be a start?
Robert
I've hit the same problem over here, unfortunately - both for insulation and for other energy-saving schemes such as ground-source heat pumps; there are grants and reduced tariffs available from the energy companies for installing such things, but only if they're done by one of their "approved contractors".
Seems a bit silly that you aren't free to get the materials from anywhere, DIY if you want, and just have the work inspected by an independent afterwards to prove that you did indeed do what you said you were going to do...
Oh Yes They Can!
Hum, maybe that's why I'm appalled at the quality that people seem happy to accept from professional tradesmen.
There is that but no one here would do that would they. B-) We all want a good job done not a rush job...
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