Save Energy in the Attic
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Often the place for stuffing stuff that can’t be stuffed anywhere else, the loft must not be ignored. It offers massive opportunities for reducing household energy consumption.
HOW IT WORKS
Hot air rises. Ultimately a lot of the hot air that your heating system has worked so hard to produce will find its way up to the top of the house. Depending on how much resistance it finds it will then leak out of the roof or the walls. In many homes the level of resistance in the ceiling is so low that the bulk of this heat will go straight through it and into the loft space… lost forever, except for giving the starlings a bit of underfloor heating.
Anything we can do to block the passage of this heat loss has got to help.
POSITIVE STEPS:
Insulation, insulation, insulation:
In just the same way as an extra blanket keeps us nice and toasty in bed, an additional layer of insulation makes the whole house feel warmer. Most old properties, and many not-so-old ones can benefit hugely from such blanketing.
Not so long ago we’d get warm in one room around the fire, yet the air temperature in most of the rest of the house would be not much warmer than the ambient. I can certainly remember frost on the inside of my bedroom window panes in our student house in 1990!
However with the advent of central heating, we can now heat the air in the whole of the house to whatever temperature we like. While boilers and radiators have been added to many of these houses, unfortunately the insulation part of the equation has often been left untended. The result is we burn loads of fuel to make warm air and then leak way too much of it straight out of the roof.
So dust off that loft ladder, take a trip to the DIY shop and roll out the lagging ! If you know what you’re doing, it can be done relatively quickly and once done, will immediately start saving you energy.
(Obviously make sure you know what you’re doing as lofts can be hazardous places, with weak floors and electric cable runs. Check with an expert how best to do it or get someone in to do it for you).
Don’t squash it !
Fibrous insulation works so well because of its loose structure allowing it to trap the warm air. The more trapped air you can hold, the better the insulation. If however you squash the insulation down it loses air and becomes less efficient. So it’s worth looking out for things like boxes or old suitcases that might be squashing the insulation, giving your home's heat a nice thermal short-circuit.
Block the draughts:
Just as hot air rises, cold air sinks. Lofts are a classic place for this to happen from, with an ill-fitting door being the route in for the cold air. If we could see it it would look like a waterfall of heavy cold air cascading down from the loft and flowing down to the ground floor of the house.
The answer is to block this cold flood. Make sure that the loft door is well-sealed with draught-proofing strips. Holding a candle nearby is a good way of detecting draughts.
Lights out:
A lot of lofts have lights, and a lot loft lights get left on for weeks and even months before being detected. Because the loft light is the one light you won’t notice, it can hijack your power consumption in complete secrecy.
A 100Watt bulb left on for a month will invisibly add 75 kWh onto your electricity bill for no benefit at all other than keeping the bats awake.
So for the bats, your bills and the greater good of the planet, just make double-sure it’s switched off when you close the hatch!
