Heating
At the bottom of this page, we provide the chapter summary for this portion of 'How to Live a Low-Carbon Life'. This provides some of the main conclusions from the material covered in the main text. In the rest of this page, we comment on new products, research findings and offer feedback from customers. Chapter Summary Many people do not realize the importance of home heating in determining how much carbon dioxide we generate. It is, for example, far more important than emissions produced by our use of electricity in the home. Very approximately, the typical UK house uses about 280kWh of gas and electricity per year for every square metre of living space. Space heating represents over 170kWh/year of this total. The typical house (containing an average of 2.3 people) produces over 2.7 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year just to operate the central heating boiler. This means 1.2 tonnes per person. Heating the house is therefore responsible for nearly 10 per cent of a person’s total responsibility for emissions, and about 20 per cent of the greenhouse gases that we can directly control. What can be done about this? Four measures are particularly worth taking: 1 New boiler: the typical home has a boiler that is less than 75 per cent efficient at taking gas and turning itinto usable heat in the home. Buying a new condensing boiler with maximum efficiency takes this up to 90 per cent or so. The savings may be as much as 0.2 tonnes. A new boiler might cost about £1500. 2 Reducing internal winter temperatures will also have a substantial effect. A 1 degree reduction may decrease fuel needs by as much as 15 per cent and takes total emissions down to not much more than 0.8 tonnes. Initially it seems like a struggle; but the typical householder completely acclimatizes within days to a temperature of 19 rather than 20 degrees Celsius. 3 Better insulation, particularly of cavity walls and roofs, is important. Insulating the house’s cavity wall might reduce emissions by 0.3 to 0.5 tonnes per person. Better insulation is heavily subsidized and will generally cost less than £300 for the cavity walls. 4 Intelligent central heating controls will also help. A good heating programmer will save as much as 10 percent of the cost of gas used for heating. Unfortunately, one cannot simply add all of these savings together to get the approximate reduction from taking all four steps. Better insulation, for example, means lower gas need, which reduces the benefit from installing a better boiler. Taking all four measures might cut 40 per cent from the heating bill and reduce personal emissions by 0.5 tonnes.
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