Our top five ways of saving money whilst helping the environment in your home

6th December 2012

Insulate, Insulate, Insulate!

Insulating your home saves you money, energy, helps the environment and improves your EPC rating. Not only this but with grants available to almost everybody you can have 40-100% of the cost paid. This means it pays itself off in less than 2 years! Over a 50% return on investment. Lowering the bills in this way not only makes the property more comfortable but also makes it more attractive to potential purchasers or tenants as the running cost are lower.

 

Cut out Those Draughts

Draught proofing your property is essential particularly in older properties as draughts can often make it feel colder as well as being responsible for significant heat loss. This can be DIY or professionally installed but should involve putting draught strips on loft hatches, windows and doors as well as looking to temporarily seal open fires that are not in use.

 

Control Your Heating

Do you keep the heating on for the same times each day, manually switch it on and off or are you heating spaces that there is no need to? Then you may be wasting energy and money. To control your heating correctly you should integrate a timer with a central room thermostat and individual radiator valves. This allows you to set times for when you want the house to be heated, set a maximum temperature at which you want to reach and turn down individual rooms that do not require heating. This reduces the load and ensures your boiler turns off once the desired temperature is reached saving energy and money!

Change Those Bulbs

Changing your bulbs from traditional tungsten lamps to modern compact fluorescent can save up to 90% on the cost of lighting your home. We know what you’re thinking energy bulbs take ages to light up and even then it’s still dark! It’s true that as with any new technologies there were problems with early models but new lamps match tungsten for performance and last up to 6 times as long. They are also taken into account in your EPC and can change the score by more than 3 points!

The client and experts view...

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