Step onto the Pathway of Love, part 3. This morning at 5 am, rumbles of thunder woke me. I lay there, listening to this uncommon sound and the hush of the rain falling, counting the seconds before flashes of lightning lit up the room. I’m glad I woke up. I needed to witness the coming of the [...]

Step onto the Pathway of Love, part 2 Slugs are the enemy. They have eaten virtually everything I’ve tried to grow in my veg patch this year: carrots, parsnips, brassicas, beans. All gone. So I’m not particularly impressed with slugs at the moment. But I decided to do a little research. What useful niche do these creatures [...]

Step onto the Pathway of Love, part 1. The Pathway of Love For all of us world changers, it started with love. Whether we are volunteers for charity, fully paid up activists, or fighting the battle in our vegetable patch, we are all doing it for the love of the Living Earth and her children. Somewhere along the line, [...]

Idiopathic pancreatitis. It came back and put me in hospital for a few days. The pancreas is an important organ that makes different kinds of hormones and also produces chemicals that help with digestion. Mine doesn’t behave very well. In the past two years, it has become inflamed twice, for unknown reasons (that’s what makes it [...]

When you start thinking about shrinking the carbon footprint of your house, you come across a variety of options. The only way to make a sensible choice is to weigh them up against each other, and work out what brings the best return for investment, both in money and in carbon saved.

In the early phases of our planning for the Westacre Project, we looked into the benefits of installing a ground source heat pump (GSHP). GSHPs extract heat from the ground in your garden to heat your home. The technology doesn’t use any fossil fuels and requires little or no maintenance. In the end we decided not to have one. Why not?

GSHPs work most efficiently in a well insulated home. They work at much lower temperatures than your conventional central heating. The system can’t heat your house effectively if it is draughty or loses lots of heat through solid walls like ours.

Clearly, Westacre’s 1930s house wouldn’t be up to that. We would need to do something drastic to improve our insulation. We are planning external wall insulation and good quality draught-free windows, as well as insulation under the floor and in the loft.

It turns out that installing external wall insulation to a high standard is very effective indeed. If you were to insulate a standard three bed semi that is heated with gas, you could save up to £460 in heating bills and 1.9 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year. That is a significant saving.

Our house is larger and is detached, so our savings will be even greater. We certainly noticed just how leaky it is at the moment when we discovered we were using over £6 a day to heat the whole house during the cold winter.

External wall insulation is not cheap. If you get a contractor in to install the insulation, for that typical semi, it may cost you between £9,400 and £13,000. That’s an eye-watering cost, but our whole aim is to spend the money up front so our house will be very cheap to run and virtually carbon neutral in the long run.

Of course, we could have a ground source heat pump as well. It would work effectively for a well insulated house. But the system is also very expensive: £9,000 to £17,000, and wouldn’t give us that much added benefit.

The typical gas-heated semi mentioned above would in fact lose money from operating its moderately efficient GSHP as compared with just burning gas. If the GSHP was performing at best efficiency, it could save about £110 per year and 850kg of carbon. GSHPs are most effective if you are currently heating your house solely with electricity. If you are in that situation, it could save up to £650 per year.

When Westacre is well insulated, it probably won’t need as much heating as a GSHP can generate. It would not be worth the extra investment. Just insulating the house well should keep us warm for most average weather conditions. We will have to live with our insulation for a while to work out how much extra heating we will need. For extra cold days, we intend to install backup in the form of solar hot water and a wood burning stove with a back boiler.

Our intention is to make the house as carbon neutral as possible. This obviously will reduce our impact on the climate. But on top of that, it will protect us from any fluctuations in fuel prices in the long run. For now, we may be able to save up to £500 per year, but who knows what our investment will be worth when gas prices rise?

Do you have any experience with either external wall insulation or ground source heat pumps? Please share below.

Sources:
Figures and insulation image from the Energy Saving Trust. Their web site is a great source of information, starting from turning off your lights all the way to generating your own energy.
GSHP image from UGE.

Westacre’s Spiritual Centre is slowly taking shape. I have written a basic framework for its teaching and put it on the Westacre web site. If it speaks to you, please share it widely. Over time, it will become a great resource for strengthening your soul in times of uncertainty. Click here to go to the page.

This morning, people started shooting badgers in Somerset and Gloucestershire. It is a ‘cull’, an attempt to stop the animals spreading Bovine Tuberculosis between cattle herds. Scientists gravely doubt the effectiveness of this action. Many are concerned that the cull will in fact disperse surviving badgers and make the situation worse. Still, the killing begins. Also [...]

Full Flower Moon (better late than never!) I can’t even begin to tell you how beautiful it is. Just looking out of the living room window, I see the young green of ash reaching for the sun, the white of cow parsley against the beech hedge, different blues of lungwort and forget-me-not interspersed with oranges and [...]

New Flower Moon We’re having one of those typical English days. We’ve had a mixture of sunshine, drizzle, heavy showers, more warm sunshine, and now thunder and hail. You never know what you’re going to get next. It’s a bit like life. Any given day can be a mixture of joy, dullness, and outright pain. We encounter [...]

Beltane Spring has finally sprung at Westacre. Just three short weeks ago, the last of the snow still lingered in the shadiest corners of the garden. Now the sun is shining down warmly, and flowers are blooming everywhere. We have damson blossom, cowslips and seas of forget-me-nots. Because of the long, cold winter, and the still chilly [...]