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Where have all the incentives gone?

SAVE on digital room thermostat wearing woolly hatIts highly likely that its only in the last few days that you’ve had to think about how cold your house is.

There has been a lot of talk recently about the removal of many of the incentives to retrofit i.e. disappearance of insulation subsidies, massive reductions in the Feed In Tariff, demise of the Green Deal etc.  Does that mean it’s not worth upgrading your house?
single sash windowIf you are only concerned about extremely rapid financial revenue returns (and not capital
returns) then the answer may well be yes.

If however you are also concerned with having a warm and cosy house, free from condensation and damp, with moderate returns on investment and more rentable or saleable, then it’s a definitive no.

In some ways, the reduction of some of the incentives will actually focus the mind for those people for whom energy bills aren’t the deciding factor.  How come? One example would be PV panels for electricity. When the incentives were at their peak, if you had a spare £5,000 to £10,000 it was really a no brainer to invest in PV if you had an unshaded south facing roof.  Whilst this made perfect financial sense, offering returns above 10% at one point, it would have done nothing for the warmth of your house or how pleasant it was in which to live.

It may now be that you’d be better off investing that capital in a new boiler and some wall insulation – perhaps not offering the same financial returns but offering other intangible benefits too i.e. a much more comfortable house.

Similarly, it could be upgrading your loft, or fixing the draughts or making your heating more controllable.

So how do you decide what it best for you with British Gas pushing boilers and controls, the remaining PV companies pushing solar, Everest or Anglian pushing windows and nobody offering anything but basic measures for your walls, roofs and floors?

That’s where our Home Energy Masterplan comes in. We offer a service, based on a detailed site survey and interview with you, that is totally independent and provides all your options in a simple and informative report.