recommendations

Peter Rickaby produced a National Home Energy Rating (NHER) certificate for our house.
Our rating is 5.6 (on NHER scale of 0 to 10) or 42 (on SAP scale of 1 to 120) respectively. Did you know the estimated carbon dioxide emissions associated with our house are nearly 12 tonnes per year!
In order to reduce carbon dioxide emissions (this is essentially what wer are "investing" in) he made a number of recommendations:

• adding 200 mm thick mineral fibre insulation in the accessible loft spaces
• filling the cavity wall of the rear extension with blown fibre insulation
• installing secondary glazing (custom made in our case) and draught proofing to all the windows
• dry-lining the sloping first-floor ceilings with insulating thermal board (a laminate of rigid plastic foam insulation and plasterboard)
• dry-lining some of the other, solid walls of the cottage with thermal board during the course of any redecoration or refurbishment
• improving the heating controls by adding more thermostatic radiator valves
• re-locating the existing room thermostat nearer the centre of the house

This in itself would probably reduce carbon dioxide emissions to approximately 8.5 tonnes or less and bring the rating to 7.7 NHER/ 59 SAP or better.

For a more significant reduction (and back to the original resolution) he confirmed

• a ground source heat pump (GSHP) extracting heat from a borehole
  
• and perhaps for the future local electricity generation from an array of photovoltaic (PV) solar cells (they are very expensive but by fuelling the GSHP through solar cells could bring down carbon dioxide emissions to zero!)