What was it like having the Refit West survey? Well, it certainly took a while, and everything went quiet for quite long stretches. But eventually, in early 2010, both parts were done. The first lot of data were collected by a pleasant chap who told me, while we chatted, that he didn’t personally believe CO2 emissions cause global warming – all to do with solar cycles apparently – which was interesting… Then a wait for the second stage, and two more chaps taking lots more measurements. And, after a further moderately long silence, the actual report. The whole process took from January until the end of March.
Was it useful? My feeling, I’m afraid, is: only up to a point. The presentation was OK, though I didn’t really need a picture of my own house on the front: I’m living in it. It confirmed that our rather inaccessible loft was under-insulated, and that the overall household rating is exceedingly low. But there are numerous problems knowing what to make of the detail.
First, the figures in the main report don’t really add up. The estimate for our current annual energy consumption is way too high – it is costed at £1500, but is in fact consistently below £1000. OK, we don’t keep our house especially warm, but the assumed figure for domestic thermostat settings strikes me as ludicrously high, and in any case, why not actually ask people what they tend to use?
That makes a bit of nonsense of the cost savings suggested for the various measures listed which we could take. Even taking that into account (that is, reducing them by a third) they still don’t quite add up. Each saving is calculated as a stand alone measure, but add them up and they sum to rather more than the total current estimated energy consumption cost, even though the report says doing the best combination of things would only reduce our consumption by around 60 per cent. Why is that? I haven’t figured it out, but it makes one view the individual ROI calculations with some suspicion.
(Incidentally, when it comes to CO2 savings there are further discounts to apply because of supply. Our juice comes from Eco-tricity, who currently claim that 50 per cent of their supply derives from renewables. Soon, our gas will come from the same supplier, and though the renewable portion there will initially be negligible it will also gradually increase over the years if their plans work out.)
Next problem is divining how to relate the measures described in the Excel presentation of all the things you could possibly do – a textbook example of a user-unfriendly document – to the individual house report. This, as I think other have found, is a non-trivial task. I feel strongly that the spreadsheet which has been compiled may be suitable for office use, but a scheme like this deserves a much more effective presentation of this material for the punters. Otherwise, it’s chance of gaining any traction outside the band of the already converted is greatly reduced. Anyhow, there were in the end some measures proposed which it was possible to decode. What did we make of them?
