Reducing Heat Loss at home 

As the pyramid shows, the first stage is to Reduce energy use – from simple tips like improving the controls on your heating to eliminating draughts. Click here for an in-depth article about how to reduce your energy Bills.

Insulating your home.

  • The Energy Trust has lots of advice for internal or external insulation, loft and cavity walls, as does the Centre for Sustainable Energy
  • You may get some ideas from the Retrofit webinar that DCAN ran in 2023 – see this link.
  • LEAP (Local Energy Advice Partnership) is sponsored by Dorset Council through Ridgewater energy. Anyone can get advice from them, and a wide range of eligibility criteria will get you a full visit to your home free.

  More efficient Heating

The Energy Trust  again lays out the alternatives. NB the Gas industry and the Hydrogen lobby have published a lot if disinformation about the cost and efficiency of heat pumps. Talk to someone who has installed one their home, for more impartial advice. You don’t need prefect insulation, they are generally not noisy, and they work in British winters ( 2/3  of Norwegian homes have heat pumps).

Other green alternatives are a modern storage heater, eg this one, or an air-to-air heat pump.

Technology roundup:

Robert Llewelyn’s  Fully Charged Home Energy  series  reviews heat pumps, boilers, PVs  and batteries in 6 short videos.

Grants

A wide range of grants are available – HUGS, ECO4, ECO+ etc, each with its own eligibility criterion. You can get information from Ridgewater Energy, which administers grants for Dorset Council and the government, or the Citizens Advice Bureau.

Other Useful links

  • Association for Environment Conscious Building.  aecb.net
  • Installers & Eco-Retrofitters in Dorset. We asked our Greener Open Homes Hosts who did their work for them. Here is a list of their recommendations.
  • Green register This puts you in touch with builders and installers who specialise in greening your home
  • Trustmark are Energy improvement companies with good reviews.
  • Centre for Sustainable Energy (CSE) have some really useful fact sheets  on a number of energy and home improvement topics.
  • Sustainable traditional buildings alliance A wealth of resources for tackling traditional buildings