Saving the planet

How do you feel about this being put on the wiki? Could be useful information I think.

NT

PS cant get goggle group to reply to thread :/

The Natural Philos Ok, found the book

This is U values not K. Watts per sq meter per degree K.

DG windows range from 2.2 to 4.2..depending on gap, filling and frame.

SG windows are in the range 4.7-5.8 depending on frame.

Note a good wood frame SG is almost as good as a crap DG metal frame...

solid doors are about 3.

9" solid brick wall about 3.5

4=2E5" single brick wall 7.

10mm expanded polystyrene or rock wool or 6mm Celotex 3.5

.=2Eyes folks, thats how little will HALVE the heat loss through a 9" solid brick wall. and if its a single 4.5" brick wall..just 5mm of polystyrene will halve it, too..

15mm plasterboard has a U value of about 10.

15mm of wood paneling is about a U value of 10 too.

Its very instructive to see how a brick wall without cavity, a window and a door are all very similar..this is typical Victorian style construction, and how little 15mm of wood flooring will help with an underfloor vented cavity, or 15mm of plasterboard ceiling will help with a vented roof cavity..Brr!.

Its also very instructive to see how little insulation is needed to make a substantial difference to this sort of property.

Now building regs are trying to get U values down below 0.3 overall..about TEN TIMES better than a Victorian 'as built' standard.

You can instantly see that uninsulated plasterboard ceilings to a vented roof are by far and away the worst losers of heat. Which vindicates the emphasis on loft insulation.

Its also easy to see why Britain, with loads of suspended wooden floors has a penchant for fitted carpets with thick underlay..

Its very hard to see why double glazing is so insisted on.

Its very easy to see just how bad solid brick walls are as well..and remember a cavity wall with exterior air bricks is not far off a 4.5" single brick wall, in a moderate breeze..you don't need a lot of insulation to radically improve these sorts of wall..dry lining with just 1/4" of Celotex will halve the heat loss through a solid brick wall. Add in 15mm of plasterboard and U value is down to 1.5 from

3=2E5. For a total loss in room dimensions of less than an inch all round the exterior walls. No brainer innit?

Now lets consider a room - say its 12x8 ft. and 8ft high, with two external walls. So external area is 96+64=3D186 sq ft..and lets consider it has a suspended floor and be generous with carpeting and put that as U value of 3.5 same as the walls.. so another 96 sq ft takes us to

270 sq ft.

Thats a total area of 25 sq meters. Lets assume an average annual internal temp of 19C and 14C average annual external..so 5C drop..so the watts required is 5x3.5x25=3D 437.5 watts. And a peak requirement at

-6C external of 5 times that..2187 watts.

Consider how we might improve all this.

Let's say we have two windows totalling 2.5 sq meters. At a U value of

5=2E.so thats just 8% of the total heatloss from the room. A GOOD DG unit should more than halve that..netting us a 4% gain, or ariound 17.5 watts average, and annualized around 155KWh..say at 10p per unit..=A315 a year gain.For probably about =A31500 outlay. So a 1% ROI.

Now let's dry line the room with 2" celotex on the external walls..thats

50mm. Thats a U value of 0.4, so with 15mm plasterboard at 10, and our wall at 3.5, neglecting cold bridging by studs we can achieve an overall wall U value of 0.35. 186sq ft (17.2799654 sq meters) less 2.5 sq meters of windows nets us 15.2..and the saving in heat will be an average of 240 W average. Or 2097KWh over the whole year.

Thats for 5 sheets of celotex and 5 sheets of plasterboard..and some studwork..say 400 quid in all? and a hundred quids worth of skim and paint..well anyway its WELL under =A31000, and at 10p a KWh, it will save =A3200 per annum. An ROI of around at LEAST 20%.

Similar gains may be expected from doing the same to the floor.

In short even if my figures for energy costs are high, based on electricity, the gains to be had from drylining are about 20 times as cost effective as double glazing.

If we add in an insulated floor as well..then our gains are about 234 watts out of the 437..such that all that is left is the window really..about 63W average...and our walls are now losing just 40 watts average.

In short we have come from 437.5 watts down to 103W..75% of the heating bill has gone. Adding SG might net us a further 40W or so, but so would a decent set of nice lined curtains.

My points are these.

1/. Loft wall and floor insulation represents ROI of up to 30% or more..

2/. Loft wall and floor insulation on an uninsulated property represents up to 70% energy reduction. More if you do it to full building control specs. With a typical figure of less than 10% of wall area and only a factor of two improvement, double glazing represents at best a 5% energy saving on an otherwise uninsulated or just loft insulated house, and probably less than 1% ROI. It is in fact a total waste of money and will never pay for itself..unless you had to replace the windows anyway.

3/. Fitting a new boiler is easy enough..going from a 50% efficient boiler to an 80% efficient one is a net energy improvement of 37.5% in bills..the ROI will be easy to calculate from your annualised fuel bills.

4/. Let's say our 437W room has two 100W lamps, used an average of 4 hours a day..291.2 KWh per year..and we replace then with two 17W CFLs..costing a fiver each. So we come down to just 49Kwh per annum. AND we have to make good the heat no longer added to the room..well anyway the net saving IS about =A324 on electricity...not bad returns for a tenner..but mitigated by the fact that we have to add the heat back with the boiler..in terms of saving the planet we don't really save that much after all..as our boiler is not a great deal better than the electricity generating plant. Still, it's something.

5/. Here's another interesting calculation. Let's say our house is a 4 bed detached one comprising 8 rooms on two storeys as calculated. so it's total heating is 8x437 watts. Annualised that is 30MWh. About =A33000 to heat then with electricity (and as anyone who has used storage heaters, in a house like that, thats not far off true). Now you get about 10KWh per liter of heating oil (and similar for a cu meter of gas actually) so at say a 50% boiler efficiency, that's around 5Kwh per liter..which equates to 6000 liters of oil to heat that house. Again those of us who have heated houses like that know thats not unrealistic.

That's 1320 gallons..enough to take a nice tidy 45mpg diesel car

60,000 miles...let's say you insulate your house and knock that down by 70%..you can afford to run a car for 42,000 miles a year and still be using less oil.

Makes you wonder sometimes why car fuel is 90p a liter and heating oil is 30p a liter.

That actually puts a new 80% efficient boiler into perspective. Say it costs a grand. But puts out 8.5Kw/liter. You save 1500 liters a year. or around =A3450. On an uninsulated house.

On your 1800 liters a year insulated house, you will save just 450 lites, or =A3150. Not that great a saving..15% ROI.

6/. Wearing a =A350 pullover that you replace every year, and knocking your stat down by one degree, to 18C..saves you 20% of your annual fuel bill. If its at =A31800 a year (30p/l and 6000 liters) and you are a family of 4, that's =A3360 a year off your fuel bill for a cost of =A3200 of woollies. :-)

Of course, once you insulate the house and are running at a mere =A3540 a year heating bill, the savings of =A3108 are not worth the cost of buying (and washing) the pullovers..;-)

7/. One annual trip of 2000 miles by plane (at about 70mpg per passenger)is peanuts compared with the 12,000 miles you do to commute to your job at 45mpgh, or less in congestion..

8/. Lets say you do 60 miles a day, 200 days a year ..a nice 12,000 mile commute. And you elect to stay at home and work 3 days a week from home. That takes you to 3000 miles a year commute. The direct savings on fuel at 45mpg are 200 liters. About =A3180 a year..but with motoring costs in total running at around =A3.20 a mile your real savings are nearer =A31800..and since you pay out of taxed income, that's about =A33600 off your gross salary..and =A34000 of what you cost your employer..before the cost of office space., heating and lighting, and kit is taken into account. Probably another =A31800 or so. So he could afford to pay you another =A32200 a year to work from home, and you would be directly =A31800 better off..so the equivalent to a =A34k pay rise to you, and a gain of about 6 hours a week....240 hours a year on a 200 day working year..or about 6 weeks extra holiday in gain of leisure hours, to you.

Why ARE we commuting then? No real answer.

9/. What does a hot bath cost? well mine is 1.3 long x .5 wide x . 3deep 195 liters. But I take up a lot of that so lets say 100l for a really good soak. I like my bath to be as hot as I can stand..lets say 45C and we will assume the average incoming water temp is around 14C ..so 39 c rise and 100liters is 3900 calories or 16.4 Mjoules. That's getting on for a liter of fuel with a 50% efficient boiler. Gosh. Almost 30p.

Could cost as much as 100 quid a year to have a real soak every day.

10/. Do showers save money and the planet? Well that depends on how good they are. we know that a mingy electric shower soaks up 10KW..so on a 6 minute shower thats 1KWh..3.6MJ. Most decent showers will do at least twice that..a typical combi today might do 30KW..so a 6 minute shower would be 10.8MJ. In short unless you simply use showers for a quick brush up and are in and out quickly, they don't save you any money or water really at all over a medium bath.

11/. Does an electric kettle half full save the planet? Let's say your kettle is a liter. 2 pints or thereabouts. And the water in it is at room temp..say 20C because you left it there from the last cup of coffee. And you make 10 cups of coffee or tea a day. That's 800 kilocalories of heat a day. 3.36MJ. At a 50% fuel to electric conversion ratio that's almost a 1/6th of a liter. 5p!! almost =A315 a year on coffee boiling!!! so lets say we save half of that directly..30 liters of fuel a year..In fact we don't, because a lot of the time we are heating our houses and the kettle is part of that..the net gain is probably less. say 15 liters of fuel a year. about a fiver. Or to put it another way thats about 3.3 gallons of fuel a year, or 150 miles of road fuel usage.

Taking two days off work saves nearly that. or going to the supermarket at a 5 mile round trip one time less a week saves more.

Why did I taker the time to write all this?

Well..in cam.misc someone complained their gas bill was too high, and in UK.D-i-y, someone wanted to know how much better double glazing was than single glazing..and I really thought.."we get bombarded with green crap, told to buy CFL's take showers not baths, half fill kettles, buy new boilers, fit double glazing and not fly"

And yet the reality is that the massive dominant and overriding two things we do that chew up oil and cost us a bloody fortune, are heat uninsulated houses, and drive to work every day. And the supermarket every other day and the kids to school half the year..

The rest is completely irrelevant as long as we don't insulate the walls ceilings and floors, and continue to use the car on a daily basis to do an average of around 50 miles a day.

Reply to
meow2222
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The reality is that nobody cares, and nobody wants to read anything more than one sentence. I'm going to fit a solar panel to the the top of my

4x4 and leave it at that.
Reply to
Stuart Noble

|! snipped-for-privacy@care2.com wrote: |!> How do you feel about this being put on the wiki? Could be useful |!> information I think.

|!> |!The reality is that nobody cares, and nobody wants to read anything more |!than one sentence. I'm going to fit a solar panel to the the top of my |!4x4 and leave it at that.

The reality is that owners of gas guzzling 4*4s care nothing about the planet, or the environment, only themselves.

Most people *here* would find the information interesting.

Most people would be happy to make small changes to their houses/lives to save the planet. It would only cost 0.12% of GDP every year, which is peanuts.

FWIW I have been insulating my house, to well above the then standards for more than 40 years. Every improvement I have made has made money in the long run.

Reply to
Dave Fawthrop

What a lot of nonsense. This really is media hype for the gullible.

It is the pattern of use which matters, which, in summary, was TNP's original point.

I have two Land Rovers. They are useful for the things that I want to do and I like them. The amount of use is quite small, with neither exceeding 4000km per annum and is considerably less than the average.

Illogical statement. More gullibility.

As would be the outcome.

Given infinite time, almost anything can do that.

Reply to
Andy Hall

But, to go back to the original point, it is indeed surprising that

*any* thickness of insulation makes a huge difference. The problem is the lack of any material that you can stick on the wall and decorate. I lived in a house with polystyrene lined walls 40 years ago. Cheap and easy, but so vulnerable to knocks that it wasn't practical. Even then people were lining their walls with vinyl cushion floor. I lined an exposed room with cork in the 70s. Difficult to believe there aren't better solutions out there now.
Reply to
Stuart Noble

It shouldn't be. Consider the difference between being stark naked and with half an inch of windproof padding on..

Cork was also quite good. But with isocyanurate backed plasterboard availlable, these are no longer worthy of consideration

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

There's your flaw, right there. You are blindly accepting that the planet needs saving. It doesn't. It's managed perfectly fine for billions of years, and will continue to do so long after we're gone.

Reply to
Grunff

Very mild, my immediate response was FOAD.

Also a Land Rover owner/driver, it doesn't guzzle gas (its diesel...). I get over 30mpg on long runs and the average over 2.5 years is a shade over

29mpg. The car it replaced (a Mondeo) gave an average of 34mpg.

I do about 15,000 miles a year and don't change cars every year or three. I keep 'em until they wear out or get broken. The Mondeo got broken, at near 10 years old. the car before it wore out (or rather the body work gave up) again not far short of 10 years old. I fully intend to run this Land Rover until it seriously breaks or is worn out.

Most of the environmental cost of a vehicle is in manufacture and disposal not actually using it. This is my 5th vehicle in 30 years of driving. I bet there are many out there who would have got through 10 to 30 vehicles in that time.

As for not the direct and irrefutable link between 4x4 ownership and being utterly selfish. It's such a daft statement it doesn't stand up to any scrutiny and says much more about the gullable, media led, blinkered view of the author than anything else.

Reply to
Dave Liquorice

There are. It's called Celotex.

The question then becomes one of how much is one willing to lose from the room dimensions.

50mm sheet would go some way towards modern standards. Installation would imply 75-100mm reduction in room dimension once finished. There are then the joinery (window reveals and skirting) and redecoration issues (walls, floor coverings, ceilings) to address, so although simple in principle there is a lot in the implementation.
Reply to
Andy Hall
[A lot.]

What I want to know is why do we want to save the planet anyway? So we can carry on splattering Iraqi kids over mud walls, or squeeze and grind Africans dry for oil and minerals? I wouldn't give you tuppence for the frigging planet. Then again, hosting the Olympic Games is something of an honour and privilege, so let's wait 'til we've done that before making any drastic decisions.

Reply to
Mike Halmarack

The reality is that some people fall for stereotypes without giving them a moments analytical thought.

Reply to
John Rumm

Short answer:

A detail tables of accurate u values would be quite handy - if fo no other reason than being able to work out how meet building regs.

Reply to
John Rumm

Another interesting article would be how best to insulate period properties without also destroying the period features. For example: how do you insulate a solid brick wall that has ornate masonry and brickwork on the outside, and complex covings, mouldings, picture rails and skirtings inside.

Reply to
John Rumm

Another reality is that there's no form of destructive anti-social activity that can't be justified by some vested interest clever-clogs. Take the recently incarcerated German cannibal for just one instance.

Not meaning you of course John, you're one of the good guys. A thermoplastic glue-stick wouldn't melt in your mouth.

Reply to
Mike Halmarack

You don't. Period. Haha.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

Well its notr so much saving the planet, as avoiding carrying out a Holocaust-by-proxy that would make Auschwitz look like Butlins..

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

You have a purpose built bubble built which protects it from bad weather too. You'd have to have a hole for the chimney and door. Probably the protection from the nasty pollutants in the air would be good for it too.

Or go bigger and insulate whole areas with domes like the ones at Eden.

Reply to
Mogga

Oh no, not an update of Godwin's Law to include Billy Butlin! Things really have come to a pretty pass.

Reply to
Mike Halmarack

Not true, go read the report.

Then go look up how many climate scientists requested that their names be removed from the report.

Reply to
Grunff

|!> Most people would be happy to make small changes to their houses/lives to |!> save the planet. |! |!Illogical statement. More gullibility.

Where is the illogicality in that? The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)

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found that man is causing Climate change and has found that to limit the damage will cost only 0.12% of GDP, a trivial amount,
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I have spent more than 0.12% of my income over many years to limit my use of energy.

Reply to
Dave Fawthrop

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