> For the complete documentation index, see [llms.txt](https://wiki.greatcollaboration.uk/knowledgebase/llms.txt). Markdown versions of documentation pages are available by appending `.md` to page URLs; this page is available as [Markdown](https://wiki.greatcollaboration.uk/knowledgebase/events/banter-sessions-inc-table-of-all-sessions/banter-143-28oct26-basic-energy-efficiencies-with-ben-wielgus.md).

# Banter 143 - 28Oct26 - Basic Energy Efficiencies, with Ben Wielgus

reduce energy costs and carbon footprints, free behavioural changes: boil only needed water, low-cost improvements: LED lighting, hot water cylinder jackets, draft proofing, and loft insulation.

{% embed url="<https://youtu.be/X89ty81W8zM>" %}

#### Video Timeline:

00:00 - 36:25 Presentation - first part\
36:25 - 51:54 Q & A\
51:54 - 56:13 (end) Presentation - last part

***

#### Presentation:

{% embed url="<https://pub-9ddb403de2ff40f3bd1a5612014bb288.r2.dev/Great%20Collaboration%20-%20Helping%20Residents%20Save%20Energy%20v03%20-%20October%202026.pdf>" %}

You are very welcome to view (click on popout, top right) or download this .pdf presentation.   A markdown copy (text-only) is available at the bottom of this page.  A Powerpoint version is available below, that you can download and edit if you wish.

{% embed url="<https://pub-9ddb403de2ff40f3bd1a5612014bb288.r2.dev/Great%20Collaboration%20-%20Helping%20Residents%20Save%20Energy%20v03%20-%20October%202026.pptx>" %}

***

#### Meeting Summary:

Oct 28, 2026 11:55 AM LondonID: 834 5460 8536

#### Quick recap

The meeting focused on energy efficiency and how parish councillors could help residents reduce energy costs and carbon footprints. Ben presented a tiered approach to energy saving, starting with free behavioural changes like boiling only needed water, closing curtains, and turning off unused devices. He then covered low-cost improvements such as LED lighting, hot water cylinder jackets, draft proofing, and loft insulation. The discussion moved to larger investments, including double and triple glazing, solar panels, and heat pumps, with Ben noting that heat pumps are most effective in well-insulated homes. Participants discussed the role of batteries, with some sharing positive experiences of energy independence and others questioning the current payback period. Frank emphasized a "fabric first" approach, arguing that retrofitting insulation should precede installing new heating systems to avoid inefficiency. The group also touched on the impact of energy costs on health and the potential for local councils to share tips and grant information with residents.

#### Next steps

#### Ben

* Add information about the cooling facility within heat pumps to the presentation slides before sending them to Graham.

#### Graham

* Circulate the presentation slides and the newsletter story with energy-saving tips to the attendees.

#### Summary

### Energy Savings Initiative Presentation

Ben presented on a new initiative to help residents save energy, noting that while older residents are familiar with energy efficiency measures, newer technologies may be unfamiliar to everyone. He explained that as parish councillors, there's an opportunity to engage with residents and help them implement energy-saving strategies, particularly benefiting those with less access to digital technology and national organizations. Ben shared his background in sustainability and energy efficiency projects, including renovating three houses with energy efficiency in mind, and highlighted the importance of supporting residents to reduce both energy costs and carbon footprint while improving home comfort and health outcomes.

### Energy Costs and Household Bills

Ben presented data on energy bills, explaining that while energy costs have increased since 2022, energy still represents the lowest proportion of household bills in recent history. Graham pointed out that modern homes require more energy for heating and electricity than historical homes, which Ben acknowledged by noting that while energy costs are now 5% of household income, this represents more consumption than in previous decades. Ben emphasized that reducing energy costs by 20-30-40% could free up money for other essential needs while also improving health outcomes through proper heating and ventilation.

### Energy-Saving Tips and Cost Savings

Ben presented various energy-saving tips and their associated cost savings, including closing curtains at night, clearing radiators, switching off unused devices, taking shorter showers, and lowering thermostat settings. He explained that while some savings are modest, others like closing curtains can make a significant difference, and emphasized the importance of understanding background energy usage rather than just focusing on spikes. Ben also discussed the effectiveness of timer systems for heating and the benefits of boiler servicing, noting that heat pumps require different running considerations than traditional gas or oil boilers.

### Home Energy Efficiency Measures

Ben discussed energy efficiency measures for homes, including bulk energy purchasing by local councils and optimal indoor temperatures. He explained that while 21 degrees is most comfortable, 18 degrees may be healthier for fat burning, though caution is needed for older individuals. Ben then covered cost-effective energy savings, including LED light bulbs which can save 95% of electricity compared to incandescent bulbs, and hot water cylinder insulation jackets that cost around £30 and save about £45 annually.

### Home Insulation and Energy Efficiency

Ben discussed various home insulation and energy efficiency improvements, including sealing drafts, loft insulation, and upgrading to double or triple glazing for better comfort. He explained that while the payback for some improvements like loft insulation can take 35 years in worst-case scenarios, the benefits are faster when installing new insulation or when there's no existing insulation. Ben also highlighted the benefits of solar panels, noting that while the initial costs may not be fully recouped, they can significantly increase a home's desirability and value.

#### Home Solar and Energy Efficiency

Ben discussed the benefits and considerations of solar panels and energy efficiency improvements for homes. He explained that solar panels can have a short payback period, especially when factoring in value-increasing improvements, and addressed common myths about panel performance in cloudy weather. Ben also shared his experience with insulating walls and floors, noting that while payback periods are longer for insulation, it significantly improves home comfort when combined with renovations.

### Heat Pump Installation Discussion

Ben explained that heat pumps are efficient because they move heat rather than creating it, providing up to four times more heat for the same electricity cost compared to gas or oil boilers. He noted that while installation costs around £12,000, government grants ranging from £2,500 to £9,000 can help offset the cost, especially when replacing existing heating systems. Ben addressed concerns about heat pumps working in cold weather and older homes, explaining that while they work effectively below freezing, older homes may require additional studies to understand heat loss and might benefit from heating the building's fabric rather than just the air.

### Solar Panel Economics Discussion

Ben discussed the economics of solar panels and batteries, explaining that while batteries provide power during outages, they don't currently pay for themselves due to the cost difference between buying and selling electricity. He noted that new tariffs allowing battery charging during cheap overnight rates could improve the business case, though current electricity pricing makes heat pumps less attractive than gas. Ben also mentioned that heat pumps are becoming more competitive compared to oil, with some quotes matching oil prices from the previous year.

### Heat Pump and Renewable Technologies

Ben discussed the coefficient of performance (COP) for heat pumps, explaining that it ranges from 2.5 to 5.2 times efficiency depending on technology, with 3-4 times being typical for well-installed systems. The discussion included perspectives on various renewable energy technologies, with Cllr sharing his positive experience with heat pumps, solar thermal, and batteries, noting that his batteries paid for themselves within two years. Garry also shared his successful experience with a 4kWh battery system, reporting a payback period under 10 years and zero grid electricity usage from April to September.

### Home Energy Efficiency Retrofit Presentation

Ben presented on energy efficiency and retrofitting homes, discussing various options from behavioral changes to solar panels and heat pumps. Graham suggested including information about using electric vehicle batteries for household energy storage, while Frank emphasized the importance of a whole-house approach rather than single solutions. Ben concluded by outlining actions councillors could take, including sharing energy tips in newsletters and directing people to relevant organizations and grants, noting that proper advice and studies are essential before making capital investments.

***

#### Chat:

00:33:15 Mike Bundock CENF Southampton: you can buy smoke pellets or smoke matches at toolstation for a couple of pounds and these are a huge help in finding where the drafts are
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00:35:41 Mike Bundock CENF Southampton: sorry Ben, Graham, I have to leave - will look at the recording. Thanks
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00:55:15 Alan Muncaster, Weymouth: ASHP, 9 KW PV, 24 KW battery and 2 EV's. EPC rated A. Together these give great overall performance and costs
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01:00:40 Alan Muncaster, Weymouth: We have a 1960's bungalow which was EPC D. 12 years later and EPC A
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01:04:24 Ben Wielgus: Reacted to "We have a 1960's b..." with ❤️
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01:04:27 Frank Deas, Killearn: many thanks Ben

***

#### Audio-Transcript:

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Ben Wielgus: Okay, good. I can use technology, that's a good relief. Well, it's really good to see you all again, and I'm going to talk about a related initiative to the one I talked about last year, which is about helping residents save energy. It's something that's very much on people's minds over the last few years, with inflation and energy costs seeming to go up.

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Ben Wielgus: And what I've found is, those of us who are a little longer in tooth, or grayer in hair.

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Ben Wielgus: We're all familiar with energy efficiency and how we do it, because we were raised on it. A lot of the simple, cost-effective measures we know about

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Ben Wielgus: Perhaps some of the newer generation coming in haven't had that same education on simple ways to save energy.

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Ben Wielgus: But then, the flip side is, some of the new technologies that are coming on stream to save energy are unfamiliar to everybody, or people have read the headlines and not necessarily had the opportunity to get into the detail.

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Ben Wielgus: And so for us as parish councillors, I think there's an opportunity to engage with our parishioners and help them look at energy efficiency fresh, make sure that they're not spending money they don't need to, because that keeps the money in the local economy, and ultimately help them live happier and healthier lives.

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Ben Wielgus: So I'm gonna whiz through quite a few slides here, because I think, looking at the folks on the call, some of you will be familiar with a lot of this, and I'm gonna stay on some of the slides which are maybe newer.

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Ben Wielgus: A little introduction to myself. Graeme did say I work as a parish counsellor, and run the local environment group here, which has culminated in a nature reserve being established of about 6 acres.

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Ben Wielgus: But I've actually spent the last 25 years working in sustainability, including with organizations who help businesses and householders reduce their energy use and their carbon footprint. In particular, I've kind of thrown a lot of time into solar projects.

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Ben Wielgus: And I've been lucky enough over the last 20 years to renovate 3 houses of very different design, and I've done so with energy efficiency in mind. So my current house is 300 years old, and we're doing an energy efficiency refit.

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Ben Wielgus: Prior to that, I was in an old school up in Nottinghamshire, and we completely refurbished that to make it as energy efficient as possible.

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Ben Wielgus: And then I was also in a fairly new build, terraced house before that, which we also upgraded. So I've got a little bit of experience on this, but I'm by no means the UK's expert in this, so I'm trying to share what I've learned over the years, and what some research and prepping for this has done.

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Ben Wielgus: It's obvious, I'm sure, why we want to do this. Of course, lots of people want to save money, they also want to save carbon, but getting our homes insulated and running efficiently can also help with comfort.

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Ben Wielgus: and improve health outcomes. We've all seen some of the terrible stories about kids who get sick or die from poorly ventilated homes. We know a lot about pensioners and retired people who can't afford to heat their homes, or they choose between food

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Ben Wielgus: and fuel.

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Ben Wielgus: And really, the more we can do to support people, To be more energy efficient.

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Ben Wielgus: Whilst keeping their home healthy, that will help our parish be better.

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Ben Wielgus: In terms of what we can do.

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Ben Wielgus: We've got a unique opportunity, really, because we've got that local reach, and we're perhaps more trusted and listened to than large national organizations like the Energy Savings Trust.

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Ben Wielgus: And ultimately, we can help the people who have less access to the internet and digital technology, who are probably the hardest to reach for the national organizations. And again, we can go in there and help those people who are perhaps more vulnerable access the right information.

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Ben Wielgus: In terms of why we're talking about this now.

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Ben Wielgus: We all see the headlines about energy bills going up since the Ukraine invasion, and particularly since the Iran conflict.

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Ben Wielgus: What we're seeing is, if you look at, kind of, the range of households in the UK, they're spending in the region of £1,200 to £2,400 a year, depending on the size of the house, how it's built, how the users use it, because that makes a much bigger difference than you might imagine.

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Ben Wielgus: But this is… this is the average range, according to the data. I've met people who spend four or five thousand pounds a year on… on utilities, which is…

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Ben Wielgus: Utterly insane, and that is not for an unusual house, it's just their house isn't optimized to run efficiently, and they don't know how to run the house efficiently.

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Ben Wielgus: Also, for those of you who are more rural, it's important to point out this isn't,

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Ben Wielgus: off-grid houses, so this doesn't include anyone who uses oil for heating or LPG for heating. With oil having tripled in price in the last few months, obviously you'd be spending a lot more on that.

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Ben Wielgus: So this is a substantial part of a lot of people's income, and it's definitely changed, although not by as much as we thought. So when I pulled the data on how energy bills have changed over the last few years for that middle house, that medium usage.

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Ben Wielgus: It is more expensive this year than it has been since 2022, when the Ukraine invasion caused that incredible spike in gas prices, so that orange one there is after the government grants and discounts that were given.

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Ben Wielgus: So really, the big increase happened 5 years ago, and although people have become more used to it, it's still a significant stretch on the pocket.

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Ben Wielgus: I did pull this, though, out of interest, so I went back and tried to find data on what percentage of household energy bills go… sorry, household bills in total goes on energy.

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Ben Wielgus: And, funny enough, although we think energy's very expensive now, compared to back in the 70s, or back in the 1920s, when I could find the oldest data, energy still represents the lowest proportion of household bills it has in a long time.

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Ben Wielgus: what I haven't been able to do is pull data for 2020, when the bills were much less, but you can make the assumption that back then, it was maybe 2.5 or 2.6% of household bills. So energy…

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Ben Wielgus: Has become more expensive in the short term.

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Ben Wielgus: Compared to where we were.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: Can I raise a point there, Ben?

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Ben Wielgus: Congrats, please.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: I think that back in 1922, I don't suppose you were heating the whole house with that 8.3%, you were just keeping the kitchen warm, or, you know, there was no central heating, there were no bedrooms that had individual heating, no en suites or anything like that. So I think your 5.3% now is actually doing a lot more than it used to back in 1922.

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Ben Wielgus: And our homes were bigger, and we had fewer devices and lots of other things. So yeah, per household, we're definitely consuming a lot more energy now. Now, our relative incomes have gone up, but of course, we tend to feel the price of energy as a proportion of how much money we've got. So back in 1922, that energy was very rare.

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Ben Wielgus: You know, it's very expensive, and so you'd use it much more stringently. I say, I think,

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Ben Wielgus: if I had dates for 2020, 2021, I think we'd see it was a lot lower. So what we're feeling is more of a pinch

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Ben Wielgus: Now, because of what we were used to 5 years ago, but if you were to take someone from 1922 or 1976, they maybe wouldn't be as shocked as we are now.

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Ben Wielgus: But, even though it's only 5% of our household income, if we can bring that down by 20 or 30 or 40%, we're freeing up more money for people to spend on food, or in the local economy, or looking after themselves. It's also, again, remembering… I'm going to keep talking about money.

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Ben Wielgus: But this is also about health, heating a house properly, ventilating a house properly, lighting it.

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Ben Wielgus: All have impacts.

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Ben Wielgus: On physical and mental health.

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Ben Wielgus: We all know that sitting in cold rooms for a long time can be a killer, so this is about making sure that, you know, people are healthy as well as

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Ben Wielgus: As well as financially better off.

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Ben Wielgus: As a reminder, in case you've not seen these diagrams before, studies are well established that heat leaves our homes in different ways. Obviously, the exact percentages depend on how the home is built.

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Ben Wielgus: But in a reasonably modern home that doesn't have insulation, a lot goes out through the roof, but even more goes out through the walls.

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Ben Wielgus: and then through windows and drafts on the floor. So you think about this leaky box that we've learned to build, the challenge is that we need to think about the whole house, and how to approach it in terms of managing that heat loss, as well as the electricity usage.

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Ben Wielgus: And that's where we get into the established wisdom that I think a lot of you will be familiar with. So I'm going to go fast through this section, because there's lots of places we can save money. On each of these pages in the top right, the first number is the sort of cost.

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Ben Wielgus: for doing it. The next is about what it saves, and then a little source of where I've pulled that data from. So, little things like, you know.

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Ben Wielgus: Only boil the water you need, boil pans with lids on, and use microwaves rather than hobs or ovens. Those all lead to some savings, but they're not massive. 10 pounds a year is probably the lowest saving I've got in here.

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Ben Wielgus: Closing curtains at night makes a huge difference. Remember, a lot of that heat is being lost through windows, either because of drafts or because of the heat radiating out through the glass, in the same way that heat comes in during a sunny day. So.

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Ben Wielgus: getting those curtains, tucking them behind the radiators, this is something amazing to me that just some of the young kids I talk to on this stuff, they don't do this. Yeah, they leave the windows open, or they just pull the curtains. So, we're probably very used to it being of a slightly older generation, but not bad to remind people of this stuff.

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Ben Wielgus: A big thing I see in a lot of homes, people put things in front of radiators, which means that the radiators can still convect the heat, the hot air can flow, but they can't radiate it using infrared radiation. So making sure those radiators are clear and can do their job

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Ben Wielgus: Makes a huge difference to how well they warm the room.

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Ben Wielgus: It still puts the same amount of heat into the house, it still costs you the same, but that heat ends up trapped behind furniture, and therefore you can't make a cold house hotter very quickly. That's why those little fans that you can buy, that you put on top of radiators work so well, is because they move the heat in the room and they distribute it better.

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Ben Wielgus: And switching off unused devices, I think this one's worth pausing on, because this blows me away, that we spend, on average, £45 a year simply because we don't turn things off at the plug sockets.

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Mike Bundock CENF Southampton: dear.

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Ben Wielgus: They're just running in the background whilst we're not using them. So anything with a little red glowing light shows it's active.

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Ben Wielgus: chargers you're not using, although the newer ones will turn off. There's lots of opportunities to turn this off, and something I've done in a lot of places in my house is I've installed very cheap timer switches so that they automatically turn things off when I've gone to bed, or at times I'm not in the house during the day.

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Ben Wielgus: So all these things sort of add up.

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Ben Wielgus: One I don't do, personally, because I do like my showers, but taking a shorter shower actually saves, again, £45 a year if you cut your shower from 8 minutes to 4 minutes. Some of you have got the same hairstyle as me, we obviously need even less time in the shower.

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Ben Wielgus: So, the idea of saving water, but also saving energy, it's interesting how much that adds up. 45 pounds a year.

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Ben Wielgus: And again, older generations are better at this, but it's amazing how people have become very habituated to using, dryers.

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Ben Wielgus: So, turning to 30, the new formulations of washing powder tend to work equally well at 30 rather than 40.

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Ben Wielgus: And that will save £26 a year. And if we air our washing outside, the savings are about £50.

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Ben Wielgus: And again, if you're inside, rather than using a tumble dryer, if you use a dehumidifier in a closed room, you will save money, as well as improve indoor air quality, because it's extracting that moisture from the air. Whatever you do, as we all probably know.

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Ben Wielgus: We don't dry wet clothing on radiators in a room because that adds to humidity, which causes mold and makes it harder to heat a room anyway.

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Ben Wielgus: Something that we hear a lot of, and I think makes a surprising difference to the pocket, is turning the thermostat down by a couple of degrees. Some homes heat their homes to 24, 23, or 22 degrees.

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Ben Wielgus: And even a very comfortable 21 degrees, which is the temperature that's recommended by health authorities, that saves about 120 pounds a year.

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Ben Wielgus: Which is surprising, because would you really feel the difference between 22 and 21?

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Ben Wielgus: Also, you could expand that to only heating rooms you need.

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Ben Wielgus: Putting thermostatic radiator valves out, so you cool… you keep bedrooms at 16 degrees, but you keep living spaces at 21 degrees, because that's where you're sitting in the day without duvets.

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Ben Wielgus: I kind of was going to do a vote to see how many of these people were familiar with, but we don't have a huge amount of time.

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Ben Wielgus: Something I love talking about,

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Ben Wielgus: There is an urban myth that it is better to leave the heating on all day, even when you're not in the house, because that saves money.

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Ben Wielgus: All the studies have shown that's not true for an ordinary gas or oil boiler. Those systems are designed to pump out water at 80 degrees, and that means the radiators you've got in your house can really kick out heat and heat in the house so quickly, particularly if it's well insulated and doesn't have drafts.

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Ben Wielgus: So if you're gonna be away for several hours in the day, you can set the heating to go off, and then use timers to make sure the heating comes on.

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Ben Wielgus: 30 minutes or an hour before you were in that house.

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Ben Wielgus: If you're home all day.

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Ben Wielgus: Especially if you've not got great health, or you're a little bit older, or a little bit younger for kids under 10, you definitely want to have a house that's heated throughout the day for when the kids are there. So this is not about sitting in the cold, but it's about recognizing that

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Ben Wielgus: those gas and oil heating systems can dump heat in a house very, very quickly. It does work your boiler harder, so you kind of want to build it up still, but it is… it's a good idea to use those timer systems. It can save a lot of money in a year.

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Ben Wielgus: If you have a heat pump, we'll come on to that, but those work differently, and therefore, we have to think about running them differently.

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Ben Wielgus: Boiler servicing, I've seen data that says boiler servicing can improve the efficiency by a few percent, up to 10%, I think was the… one of the numbers I saw, so getting that boiler checked out, making sure that the central heating pump is set to the right flow speed.

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Ben Wielgus: And that, if the boiler's not working too hard, will also help.

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Ben Wielgus: Most of us have got smart meters. People find it fascinating, you become very addicted to keeping an eye on when the smart meter goes up and down.

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Ben Wielgus: But what I've found in my own homes is it's not so much the spikes in usage you've got to worry about, like, when you turn the kettle or the oven on, there will be a big spike in energy usage, but they don't run for very long. It's actually more what the background usage is. So, you could be using a small amount to, you know, keep the lights on.

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Ben Wielgus: But you could also be using more than you expect, just to keep your chargers plugged in and all those devices that you're not actually using. Goes back to the switch-off question. So if you understand what your base load is, that's the thing that really adds up over the year, is those little things that are running.

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Ben Wielgus: And finally, in this section, I think we're all pretty good at this now, but it's worth reminding people, there are websites and tools to help people understand whether they're paying the right rate for electricity. The government has been talking for a long time now about getting rid of standing charges, which could help people who use very small amounts of electricity save a lot of money.

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Ben Wielgus: So it'll increase their cost per unit, but no standing charge makes a big difference.

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Ben Wielgus: And, most people, they sort of forget to do this checking on an annual basis, so therefore reminding people what to do is a good thing.

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Ben Wielgus: I haven't yet seen a parish council do what I've seen some city councils do, which is set up, like, a citywide energy program. I think Bristol's most famous for this. But the idea of bulk buying your energy as a city and then reselling it to your residents has been growing in popularity.

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Ben Wielgus: I'm gonna pause now, just in case there's any questions on that. I'm assuming I'm teaching a lot of you to suck eggs here, because this is stuff we've been hearing for decades, but as I say, what I'm finding is that the younger generation doesn't necessarily think about this stuff, and everyone appreciates the…

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Ben Wielgus: I can't see the chat window, by the way, so if anyone's saying anything in chat, Graeme, perhaps you could read it now.

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Ben Wielgus: But any questions?

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Mike Bundock CENF Southampton: Then I read a scientific article that although the most comfortable temperature to live in is 21,

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Mike Bundock CENF Southampton: for… for health, the… they suggested 18. This is… this was a big study.

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Mike Bundock CENF Southampton: And 18, your body burns fat, and all sorts of good things happen to you.

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Mike Bundock CENF Southampton: At that temperature.

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Ben Wielgus: Yeah,

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Ben Wielgus: given this is public record, I'll be careful what I say, because I'm not a doctor, but yeah, I prefer a cooler home, but I'm active, I move around quite a bit, and I would say that if you are more stationary, the 21 degrees tends to be for sedentary activities, sitting in an office. Obviously, if you're working in a workshop, and you're really physical, or you're vacuuming the house.

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Ben Wielgus: You're gonna be burning more energy, and, you're gonna, you're gonna want it to be cooler.

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Ben Wielgus: For the 18 degrees one, burning more fats, I absolutely can understand that, because you're burning that fat to stay warm.

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Ben Wielgus: And, that would be great if you're young and healthy. I'd say if you get older, your physiology's probably not as willing to do that, and maybe you don't want to tax yourself as much.

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Mike Bundock CENF Southampton: Shit.

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Ben Wielgus: Similarly with drafts, drafts cause an inordinate amount of health issues because they can suck heat away from particular parts of the body or cause issues. You still want fresh air in a house, but it's funny, you know, if you sat in a draft, you'll feel the cold more than the ambient temperature.

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Ben Wielgus: So yeah, I think there's a lot to be said for it. I think, certainly, if you're older or you have young kids in the house.

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Ben Wielgus: If you're getting down to 14, 13, 12 degrees in the house, that is a problem, and that definitely needs to be.

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Mike Bundock CENF Southampton: Yes.

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Mike Bundock CENF Southampton: Hmm.

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Ben Wielgus: All right, thank you for the question. I'm going to move on, because I think we'll get a little bit more controversial in the section after this one.

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Ben Wielgus: As Graham said in his invite to this, I've divided this into three sections. The things that are essentially free, and just change… just involve a change in habit, although you can spend a bit more, like, on lined curtains.

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Ben Wielgus: I think we're now onto the inexpensive things that pretty much everybody can afford to do.

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Ben Wielgus: And the final section is the most substantial stuff.

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Ben Wielgus: So, it's quite well established now, but…

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Ben Wielgus: Most people have moved from old incandescent light bulbs to either fluorescent light bulbs and halogen, but the new LED lights have moved further beyond, and I think the statistics are they save something like 95% of electricity that a traditional incandescent bulb does.

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Ben Wielgus: Now, you could get really technical on this and say the incandescent light bulb creates heat, and if it's winter, a little bit of heat from a light bulb's not a bad thing, it's not wasted.

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Ben Wielgus: But in reality, you want to separate these things out, and LED lights come in a range of different lighting colors for different moods.

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Ben Wielgus: They're, supposed to last 15 to 25 years, so they'll outlast pretty much any other light bulb out there. You're not changing halogens every 6 months. But ultimately, they are much, much more efficient at producing lights, and well worth the investment, especially now they're only a few pounds each.

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Ben Wielgus: On average, that saves about £45 a year, and you'd spend somewhere between 10 and £100, so the payback here is very good.

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Ben Wielgus: An oldie but a goodie, if you've still got a hot water cylinder. Traditionally, they've got about 25 millimeters of insulation pre-installed on them.

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Ben Wielgus: And buying an inexpensive, jacket that you wrap around that hot water cylinder, it costs about £30, and it's estimated to save about £45 a year. So that pays back really well.

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Ben Wielgus: Flipside is, if your cylinder is in a room you want to keep warm.

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Ben Wielgus: Then, maybe you don't worry about wrapping it, because you want that heat to come out.

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Ben Wielgus: But the sort of prevailing science says, keep the heat where you want it, in the hot water, and then heat the room with a radiator so it's more controllable. So there's an opportunity here, and I used to do this on all my houses, but now I want my hot water tank to keep a room warm, because there's no radiator in there. So you have to sort of trade that one in now.

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Ben Wielgus: Drafts are a big thing. I've talked about this a lot, but it's really surprising 10-15% of household energy tends to be lost because of drafts.

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Ben Wielgus: And a draft is a non-controlled ventilation, and it's really important to point that out. Some people, they run around and they seal their house up. They seal all the vents, they seal everything, and actually, as we all probably know, vents are in houses.

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Ben Wielgus: because we've got combustion systems in there, either a gas hob, or a gas boiler, or a wood burner, or something similar, and they require a fresh supply of oxygen. So it's incredibly important that we keep the deliberate gaps

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Ben Wielgus: open, you know, the vents and things, but we then seal up things like underneath doors. There's very inexpensive things we can fit using DIY to put draft strips on, or you can make yourself a little sausage dog, like this picture shows, or you can seal round windows properly.

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Ben Wielgus: So, keeping an eye on where the drafts come from is really important. On one of my houses, I actually paid to have a massive fan installed.

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Ben Wielgus: that sucked all the air out of the front door, so you could walk around the house and listen for where the air was coming in. That was quite expensive, it was a few hundred pounds, I needed it for my heat pump calculations.

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Ben Wielgus: But it was fascinating where air was coming in. Lots of air coming around where my soil pipe from the toilet went outside. Lots of air coming in around the halogen bulbs, the LED bulbs that were sticking out of the ceiling. So there was, gaps around those because the old units are not very well sealed.

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Ben Wielgus: So this is all places where airs and heat's coming in or out of my home in a way that I don't want it to.

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Ben Wielgus: So, it's worth giving a good thought to where could you seal up?

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Ben Wielgus: Loft insulation. Everyone's known about loft insulation for a long time. We all remember the days when they used to give away loft insulation for free. Sadly, that doesn't happen anymore unless you're on benefits. There's still grants out there, but it's relatively cheap to install if you're fit enough.

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Ben Wielgus: And the recommendation is there's 270 millimeters, or about 11 inches of insulation. So that's usually one roll going along the joists, as you see here, but then another roll going in the opposite direction across the top of the joists. That's seen as the best way of doing it.

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Ben Wielgus: It is expensive to get professionals to install it, and if you're just doing a top-up, the payback's not great. It's actually about 35 years in a worst-case scenario. But if you have

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Ben Wielgus: No loft insulation, it's a much faster payback, and similarly, if you do it yourself, it costs maybe £100, and will pay back much faster.

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Ben Wielgus: So it's always worth thinking about that. There are also new systems that allow you to still board a loft with that extra insulation. So there's either stilts that will hold

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Ben Wielgus: the platforms above the insulation, or there's even insulated board that's solid that you can put across the rafters. So this is a no-brainer if you're looking to use your loft space better, because you can put insulation at the same time you are installing it.

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Ben Wielgus: Similarly, if you have rooms and roof, if you actually have converted this, huge amounts of heat are lost through the rafters. So that's always worth thinking about how that room is used.

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Ben Wielgus: I'm just going to go into the big stuff now. I've got an eye on the clock, and I think there's four areas in here it's worth talking about. So, the first thing is double and triple glazing.

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Ben Wielgus: The payback is not great.

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Ben Wielgus: Depending on how many windows you're doing, you're going to be spending thousands of pounds on this.

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Ben Wielgus: But, if you have to replace them anyway, it is absolutely worth going the next step up and getting triple glazing. It's not a lot more expensive now. I've put it in one of my homes, and actually in two of my homes.

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Ben Wielgus: And the best thing about it

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Ben Wielgus: is actually not the energy saving, it's the comfort factor. So, if you live in a house with single glazing, and you go near that window, you can feel the drop in temperature. You'll have problems with condensation, so upgrading to double glazing

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Ben Wielgus: It can reduce the problems with the condensation on the inside of the house, and it will still feel cool to the touch.

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Ben Wielgus: Once you get to triple glazing, those windows actually maintain the same temperature on the glass on the inside as the houses on the inside, because of the way the triple glazing works. So you can… you can absolutely walk past those windows, and it feels much warmer.

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Ben Wielgus: There's…

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Ben Wielgus: lots of, better glasses out there as well, in terms of treated glasses and coated glasses, that will improve it, but I'd say to think very carefully about whether you're doing this to save money.

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Ben Wielgus: If you're cutting out drafts and improving comfort, though, it's definitely worth one looking at.

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Ben Wielgus: Solar panels, one of my favorite things. Who doesn't want free electricity from the sky? They can be installed on almost any building now, depending on how you want to do it, and we've put them on everything from slate roofs to tiled roofs to flat roofs.

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Ben Wielgus: The maths initially doesn't look great.

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Ben Wielgus: Based on a 4.5 kilowatt system, which is about what you'd put on an average house, that's about 10 to 14 panels. So this photo here would show about a 10… sorry, about a 4kW system. You're allowed to connect those to the grids, and sell any excess. If you go bigger than this, you need permissions.

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Ben Wielgus: But what it does is it reduces the electricity you buy from the grid, and if you make more than that, you can export it.

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Ben Wielgus: I'd say that battery systems currently don't pay for themselves, but the price is coming down very quickly, and obviously having a bit of energy independence is good.

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Ben Wielgus: And, for me, the thing I've pointed out to a lot of our neighbors and our residents who've talked to me about buying solar panels is solar panels now have become a somewhat aspirational thing for anybody installing it.

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Ben Wielgus: So, insulation in the loft, not very sexy and exciting.

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Ben Wielgus: But anything that you put on the rooftos of solar panels tends to make your house more attractive. Lots of people like the idea of generating their own power. So I often encourage people to do the maths and say, how much more desirable would your house be

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Ben Wielgus: If you put solar panels on it.

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Ben Wielgus: And would that add maybe half a percent or 1% to the value of your…

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Ben Wielgus: Sorry about that, if you can see these messages coming up.

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Ben Wielgus: If you,

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Ben Wielgus: If you say you put 1% on the value of your house, depending on the price of your house, those solar panels maybe pay for themselves already.

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Ben Wielgus: or it significantly reduces the payback period if you sort of add an allocation for value increasing. So, so many efficiency improvements, nobody really cares about notices. Others create value on the house and are worth factoring in.

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Ben Wielgus: For my own solar panels, we were able to get down to a four and a half year payback period because we bought them at a good time. We use a lot of the power ourselves, and we get a good export. So, this, for me, is a no-brainer if you've got a little bit of money sitting around. It pays an interest rate equivalent to putting it in the bank account in terms of how fast it pays back.

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Ben Wielgus: Some common myths, cloudy Britain.

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Ben Wielgus: It's true that panels do generate a little bit less on a grey day, but

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Ben Wielgus: A lot of the panels that are sold in Britain are tuned to deal with the light that comes through cloud.

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Ben Wielgus: And certainly this summer, when we didn't see clouds for several weeks, the panels have been generating far beyond expectations.

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Ben Wielgus: Panels can also go on pretty much any roof, except pure north-facing ones. And even then, there's an argument to say they have some value.

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Ben Wielgus: If you've got panels that are on a west-facing roof, that can actually be really good.

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Ben Wielgus: Because a lot of us use more power at the end of the day. People coming home from school.

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Ben Wielgus: cooking dinner, things like that. So there's… you get to use more of your power if the panels are oriented to get the most sun at a time that you use the energy most.

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Ben Wielgus: And there's all sorts of options in terms of selling that power, storing the power,

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Ben Wielgus: Ultimately, the models that predict how much sun will shine throughout a year are pretty robust and established, and they're also conservative, because they didn't want solar panel sellers overselling the panels. So it's a really good idea to get quotes for it if you can, and then assume that's a worst-case scenario.

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Ben Wielgus: I'm not going to talk too much about insulation, but you saw from that picture of a house right at the beginning that a lot of energy is lost through the walls and through the floors. We've talked a bit about dealing with drafts, we've talked about lofts, but walls and floors are definitely something worth looking at.

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Ben Wielgus: I've done this in two of the homes I live in, but I've only did it because I was refurbishing that room anyway. So if you're ripping out a bathroom and you're having the whole thing redone, it's a really good opportunity to consider insulating that room's walls better, especially if you've got solid walls.

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Ben Wielgus: We did it with one of our north-facing bathrooms that was hellish to be in in winter. You just couldn't touch anything in there, it was so cold.

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Ben Wielgus: There was one winter where the water froze in the toilet bowl.

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Ben Wielgus: And when we put, 3 inches of insulation on the inside walls and in the floor.

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Ben Wielgus: It was a really pleasant room to be in and needed very little background heat. It had a little bit of electric heating in the floor, just to kind of make a difference.

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Ben Wielgus: We've all heard lots of horror stories about this, in terms of people getting insulation fitted that then causes damp and mold and other problems. I'd say, in my experience, that's when people have used,

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Ben Wielgus: Unprofessional, unqualified fitters, a lot of the time, where those fitters are maybe doing it in bulk for a cheap government contract.

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Ben Wielgus: If you get a really good installer who designs a custom system, I've very rarely heard of any problems. The key thing is just to make sure the house is still ventilated, because most insulation will reduce how much the house breathes, and that can trap moisture in, so you do need that controlled ventilation.

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Ben Wielgus: Usually a small humidity-triggered ventilation fan.

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Ben Wielgus: More insulation is generally better up to a point, but in most cases, retrofitting a house, you'll never reach that point. So it's always worth thinking about, you know, if you're putting

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Ben Wielgus: 1 or 2cm on, could you put 4 or 5cm on? Because that does make a difference. It's diminishing returns, but it does make a difference.

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Ben Wielgus: And similarly, the estimates of this are only estimates, but they tend to be more cautious on that.

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Ben Wielgus: Payback periods are not great. In my experience, they pay back in around 10 to 14 years, but because I'm doing it at a point I'm refitting a house anyway, it's made sense to do it while there's the opportunity, because if I'm going to plaster a wall, I might as well put some insulation on, then plaster over the insulation.

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Ben Wielgus: If I've got a relay of floor, I might as well bury more insulation in the floor by digging another 6 inches deeper. And that helps. And ultimately, what it did was it transformed the comfort of sitting in that house.

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Ben Wielgus: I think finally, you've probably heard a lot from me now, heat pumps, hugely controversial for, for…

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Ben Wielgus: I'd say unfair reasons. They are absolutely ubiquitous and common in Scandinavia. They've been a de facto approach to this for many years.

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Ben Wielgus: And, the reason they're seen as so good, if you haven't come across this before, is they essentially work like the opposite of your refrigerator, in that they move heat from outside a building to inside a building, where there's a refrigerator that moves heat from inside the fridge to outside the fridge. Same technology, it's very well established.

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Ben Wielgus: But by doing that, by the fact it's moving heat rather than creating heat by burning something, it can be a lot more efficient, because it takes one unit of electricity to move four times as much energy from the outside to the inside. Because you're not making it.

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Ben Wielgus: You're not transforming it, you're just literally moving it from one place to another, which is why they're so efficient.

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Ben Wielgus: So, when you're thinking about whether a heat pump pays off, what you're actually doing is you're comparing the cost of electricity

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Ben Wielgus: For a unit of heat.

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Ben Wielgus: To the cost of the fuel that you use for the unit of heat. So if electricity is

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Ben Wielgus: half… is the same price as gas for a unit of heat, then you get four times as much heat from using that electricity as you do from burning the gas, because you can move that electricity with a heat pump, and you get four times as much heat. If electricity is four times the price of gas, a heat pump isn't worth it.

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Ben Wielgus: So, what we're seeing at the moment is a sort of debate of whether gas prices and oil prices are much higher than electricity prices. There is a trade-off in that.

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Ben Wielgus: It is expensive to install a heat pump. A typical home costs about £12,000 to install a heat pump.

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Ben Wielgus: But, if you're replacing your oil or gas boiler anyway, well, you can use that money to put it towards a heat pump.

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Ben Wielgus: And the government is currently, giving out some grants, which range from about £2,500 to up to £9,000 if the house is on oil.

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Ben Wielgus: So, £9,000 plus the cost of a new oil boiler, you've pretty much paid for that heat pump already, and it should save you money in the lifespan of operating it.

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Ben Wielgus: Again, this is one of those technologies that creates a lot of confusion, but a lot of people ask if they work in cold weather. Yes, they do. They absolutely work below freezing. That's how they work in Scandinavia.

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Ben Wielgus: What I'd say is if I was doing this, I would probably have a couple of electric radiators on standby anyway, just in case it got to, like, minus 15 again. They should still work, but it's nice to have that supplementary heat if you need it.

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Ben Wielgus: There is also a thought that they'll only work in new homes, and that's not strictly true.

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Ben Wielgus: But different house structures lose heat faster than others. So really, modern homes are well insulated. Retrofitted homes, like the ones that have had a lot of insulation in, are well insulated, and that means that the heat pump can work more efficiently.

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Ben Wielgus: In older homes, they do work, but you need to do more studies. You need to really understand how much heat that house is losing.

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Ben Wielgus: The reason why this is a concern is, I said that oil and gas boilers run at about 80 degrees, so radiators can pump out a lot of heat.

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Ben Wielgus: Whereas heat pumps tend to only circulate water that's been heated to about 40 to 50 degrees. So radiators can't put out as much heat, which means if your home is really leaky, it loses heat, and there's lots of drafts, it's really hard for those radiators to put out enough heat to keep the rooms warm before all that heat is lost.

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Ben Wielgus: The flip side is, older homes tend to be built more substantially. My house, in the center of it, there's a 2.5 foot thick stone wall.

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Ben Wielgus: So if I put a little bit of heat into that house gradually over time, using a heat pump, that inner wall will warm up, and that heat still will keep a house warm for days, if not weeks.

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Ben Wielgus: So, you just have to think about heating the home differently. It's not about dumping as much heat into the air with a really hot radiator, it's about warming the fabric of the building.

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Ben Wielgus: Which is where the studies help.

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Ben Wielgus: That's why a lot of people think you need all new radiators, because if the water in the pipes is a lower temperature, you need a bigger radiator to put out the same amount of heat as if there was hotter water in that radiator from the more traditional systems.

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Ben Wielgus: But, if you run it slower, and you heat up the mass of the building, you, you don't necessarily need new radiators, and you're not required to get them under the rules of the grants. You just have to say that you waive the need to upgrade the radiators at the moment, you run the heating and see if you need a new radiator.

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Ben Wielgus: On my house, we were able to run our oil-fired boiler at 40 degrees, to circulate lower temperature heat, and we found that pretty much every room stayed warm with that temperature of water, so I don't need new radiators when my heat pumps come.

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Ben Wielgus: I'm gonna pause for a second, see if there's any questions. I'm well aware of. I've probably got 5 minutes left, Graeme.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: Yep.

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ANDREW HUGHES: Hi, it's Andrew Hughes. You didn't mention batteries at all in the solar panel.

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Ben Wielgus: Good question, yeah,

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Ben Wielgus: I've got batteries, and in our 38-hour power cut that we had last weekend, they were very good.

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Ben Wielgus: The latest data I saw was about a year ago, and although batteries are coming down a lot in price, they don't quite pay for themselves. So, although you can store some of that extra power you get from the solar panels.

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Ben Wielgus: it doesn't really stack up in terms of being able to use your own power. So, for example, I'm paying, let's say, 25 pence a unit for electricity. I can sell that electricity for 10 pence, so if I store it, I can save 15 pence a unit when I'm using it myself.

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Ben Wielgus: But at the moment, that saving's not enough to pay for the large cost of the batteries. And what I'd say to somebody who's doing this for purely cost reasons, hold fire, because those batteries are probably going to keep dropping in price over the next 2 or 3 years, and then everyone's going to have them.

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Ben Wielgus: If you want it for independence and resilience, batteries are better. You know, I'm in the middle of the country, power gets cut off 4 or 5 times a year.

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Ben Wielgus: But I did have to pay extra for some extra circuitry to be able to cut my system off from the grid to stop my battery energy going out on the grid during a power cut, because that's a risk to the engineers working on it. So…

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Ben Wielgus: I think it's a wait and see at the moment.

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Ben Wielgus: there are clever tariffs coming down the line where you can charge your battery up using cheap power overnight, a bit like old storage heaters, and then use it during the day. And those are… those will help the business case, but I'd say I haven't seen a convincing technology yet, given.

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ANDREW HUGHES: That also sounds rather unstable, in that you're at the whims… sounds like you're at the whim of policy as to whether that's going to be… continue to be a sustainable model or not.

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Ben Wielgus: Yeah, there's a whole debate around changing how the government prices for electricity anyway, because at the moment, the people… electricity generators bid to put their energy on the electricity grid.

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Ben Wielgus: And the electricity price is set at the most expensive bidder who is the last in the door. You know, people who are too expensive don't get accepted, but that's almost always gas-powered companies now, so…

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ANDREW HUGHES: Do you know what the rationale for that is? Why do they do that?

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Ben Wielgus: It, it's, it's a, it's…

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Ben Wielgus: it's out of date, and I think it's from a world where we didn't have

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Ben Wielgus: solar power, which was cheaper than gas. So I'm not a great policy expert, and I'd probably do a bad job of explaining it, but it is… they're talking about electricity market reform. If you Google that, there's a whole explanation of why it doesn't work anymore. Because it drives me crazy that…

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Ben Wielgus: I've got… you know, I buy from a company that only sells me wind and solar, and then they put up my prices when the Ukraine war happens, because gas prices go up. I'm thinking, well, that's not fair. You know, I pay for you to build wind turbines, you should give me a fixed price. But…

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Ben Wielgus: It's a good question, probably not one I could answer today in detail.

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ANDREW HUGHES: It isn't, although I think it's very pertinent, because if you're… when you're promoting heat pumps.

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Ben Wielgus: Hmm.

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ANDREW HUGHES: it's a… it's a difficult sell, with the way that electricity is priced at the moment. I mean, you mentioned that

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ANDREW HUGHES: You know, if you mentioned the sort of the different… the changes in that ca… in the, value proposition, if you want to call it that, depending on the relative cost per kilowatt hour of, gas versus electricity.

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ANDREW HUGHES: But as I understand it right now, I mean, with the way that the current pricing system works, it can be difficult to sort of come out, get the heat pump to come out on top.

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ANDREW HUGHES: Oh, we lost him?

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: I'm…

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Ben Wielgus: I'm back.

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ANDREW HUGHES: Oh, fuck.

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Ben Wielgus: Yeah, I don't know where… yeah, I don't know where my video's gone, but I am here. So yeah, you were saying, does the payback stack up?

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ANDREW HUGHES: With the current pri… the current electricity pricing system that we've got.

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Ben Wielgus: Yeah, it's also been incredibly volatile over the last 4 years, so as the electricity prices 3 or 4 years ago were horrific. If you're on oil right now, I think, heat pumps are a no-brainer, especially with the grass.

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Ben Wielgus: And if they… if they manage… as we move more towards renewable power, which again is cheaper than gas and coal and nuclear, electricity prices, in theory, will come down, at least relative to stuff, so those heat pumps become more attractive as well.

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Ben Wielgus: I… I didn't… the numbers have changed so much, but in my…

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Ben Wielgus: I had two air source heat pumps quoted last year. One of them cost me the same as oil at last year's prices, and one of them, cost me a little bit more, but oil's now doubled.

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Ben Wielgus: So, again, I'm laughing. Oh, I've just seen how many hounds we've got up. So, yes, I think it's a roll of the dice, and most people investing in heat pumps right now are either in very well-insulated homes, or they're doing it for sustainability reasons and resilience reasons, as well as,

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ANDREW HUGHES: And they've got solar, possibly.

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Ben Wielgus: Yeah, yes, that is true.

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Ben Wielgus: Okay, thank you for the question, Killearn, and, should we go with Stuart next, because you're next on my screen.

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Cllr Stuart Withington Gt Dunmow TC, Essex: Thank you.

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Cllr Stuart Withington Gt Dunmow TC, Essex: I agree with 90% of what you're saying. I think you're a little bit optimistic with certain heat pumps, quoting a COP of 4.

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Cllr Stuart Withington Gt Dunmow TC, Essex: I'll entirely agree about the cost of gas compared to electricity.

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Cllr Stuart Withington Gt Dunmow TC, Essex: But I believe the two are related, because we still…

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Cllr Stuart Withington Gt Dunmow TC, Essex: Need to keep the, gas generators going.

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Cllr Stuart Withington Gt Dunmow TC, Essex: So I think about 50% of our power is still coming from, gas.

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Ben Wielgus: Yeah, yeah, for those of you who are not familiar, COP is coefficient of performance. It's the efficiency of converting the electricity to the heat. So, yeah, they vary. Stuart, I've seen numbers from anywhere between 2.5 to 5.2 times on some of the new gases and technologies that are coming down the line.

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Ben Wielgus: But, yeah, 4 is… 4 is keen, and I think… I think it was arranged, like, 3 to 4 times was the number, but that's for a well-installed heat pump, using the right professionals.

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Ben Wielgus: And yes, you're sort of straying there into.

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Ben Wielgus: we need to keep some gas power stations running, because when it's not windy and not sunny, we need power generation that's reliable, and until we get a better storage infrastructure, then it's going to be important to have those reserve capacities. So, very true. There could be a whole other talk on national energy policy and security.

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Cllr Stuart Withington Gt Dunmow TC, Essex: Yeah.

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Ben Wielgus: into. But you.

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Cllr Stuart Withington Gt Dunmow TC, Essex: The other thing I'd just like to mention is solar thermal.

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Cllr Stuart Withington Gt Dunmow TC, Essex: Seems to have dropped off the radar completely.

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Ben Wielgus: Yeah, I have never done a solar thermal system, I wanted one, and they work really well with heat pump systems, because this is where you have solar panels that make hot water from the roof, because you need a water cylinder, and of course, modern oil and gas boilers don't tend to have a water cylinder.

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Ben Wielgus: The government got rid of the renewable heat incentive payments, I believe, so that they don't pay quite as well as they used to, but it's certainly another technology I could have mentioned. It's…

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Ben Wielgus: it's a complex thing, and some of the stuff that I'm hoping will come to the market soon is a better controller that can coordinate your batteries, your solar panels, your heat pumps, your gas boiler, your solar thermal system to make sure you're using the best choice at any given time.

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Cllr Stuart Withington Gt Dunmow TC, Essex: I would certainly agree with that. I have got 4 heat pumps, solar thermal.

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Cllr Stuart Withington Gt Dunmow TC, Essex: 30-odd PV panels, 20 kilowatts of batteries. So, I would disagree with you about your batteries, because I…

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Cllr Stuart Withington Gt Dunmow TC, Essex: certainly in the winter, I charge them at 7p per kilowatt hour overnight.

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Ben Wielgus: Okay.

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Cllr Stuart Withington Gt Dunmow TC, Essex: And I think they're probably more… more than paid themselves in about 2 years.

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Ben Wielgus: I might have to talk to you offline then, because you've got a better deal than I have on those. Your energy supplier is. And again, it is… I mean, some of this is very much personal circumstance. Once you get into this territory of batteries and heat pumps.

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Ben Wielgus: There's so much about how you manage it, how you set it up, how good the installer was, is it sized right, so…

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Ben Wielgus: it's not a one-size-fits-all, unfortunately, and it's one of the reasons I left it till last on the presentation, because

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Ben Wielgus: it's only when you start getting really serious you've got to think about these things, and I've heard great stories, and I've heard about people ripping them out, because they don't like them. And sometimes I think that's more user error.

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Cllr Stuart Withington Gt Dunmow TC, Essex: And the other thing is, wood burners.

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Ben Wielgus: Yes.

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Cllr Stuart Withington Gt Dunmow TC, Essex: which are being condemned by The Guardian and various environmental groups.

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Cllr Stuart Withington Gt Dunmow TC, Essex: But I, I, homegrown wood.

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Cllr Stuart Withington Gt Dunmow TC, Essex: And I think they're marvelous things.

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Ben Wielgus: Yeah, I miss my wood burner a lot. Yeah, I think the government's cracking down on them because at the… in some of the inner-city regions in particular, where there was a high density of wood burners, there was a lot of 2.5 micron particulates coming from the.

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Cllr Stuart Withington Gt Dunmow TC, Essex: Yeah, the PM is too close.

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Ben Wielgus: And that's, I think that's a poor education thing, because people are burning wood they shouldn't be burning a lot of the times. So yeah, it's…

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Ben Wielgus: We could go down that road. Yeah, but I say I miss my wood burner a lot. Thatched roofs and wood burners don't get on well, is what I've been told by the insurance company.

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Cllr Stuart Withington Gt Dunmow TC, Essex: Thanks.

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Ben Wielgus: Nice to hear from you, Stuart. Graham, you're next on my list.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: Actually, I think Gary is, he's been up for a long time.

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Ben Wielgus: Guys, sorry, Garry, go on.

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Garry Ford - Corsham Town Council: Thank you, Graham. Yeah, Ben, I just want to agree with what Stuart was saying, and, like, my own personal experience of solar and batteries has been very positive. So, my solar system is 4 kilowatt hours, battery system, it costs less than £7,500 to install.

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Garry Ford - Corsham Town Council: Current payback is well under 10 years.

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Garry Ford - Corsham Town Council: And for 6 months of the year, we use zero grid electricity whatsoever because of the batteries. So, from April to September, we've used no grid electricity at all.

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Garry Ford - Corsham Town Council: We're gonna use, probably, Last year, we used 260 kilowatt hours.

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Garry Ford - Corsham Town Council: Of electricity from the grid.

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Garry Ford - Corsham Town Council: And we export more solar electricity than we use in total anyway, so…

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Garry Ford - Corsham Town Council: I think the advice that batteries, you know, still a wait-and-see situation, I think for a lot of people, that's not the case anymore, and it's certainly not the case for me.

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Ben Wielgus: It's really helpful to hear that, actually, and

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Ben Wielgus: My wait and see was coming from active. The predictions are battery prices are going to halve or quarter in the next couple of years, in the same way that solar panels have this incredible exponential diminishing return… sorry, exponential drop…

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Garry Ford - Corsham Town Council: I think we're there, Ben. I think we're there. But like I say, you know, like you say, everybody's different and stuff, but, you know, if you… if anybody wanted to use me as a case study, I'm more than happy to show my… share my own experience, but for me, it's been… it's been brilliant.

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Ben Wielgus: That's great. Yeah, and I say I've got batteries, and I really like them. You know, that idea of being completely energy independent for a lot of the year is really rewarding. Would I spend it on batteries or internal wall insulation? I think it'd be an interesting toss-up. You know, I'm not quite sure where I am on that, but yeah.

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Ben Wielgus: We'll go back to Graham, and then, maybe… I see you've still got your…

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Ben Wielgus: Your hand up, Frank, I don't know if you've got another question.

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Ben Wielgus: Okay, and then I'll wrap up with my last couple of slides after the questions. Go on, Graham.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: One point arising from what Gary has just been saying, I saw the other day someone saying that the cheapest way of getting good batteries is to take the ones from a used electric vehicle, because they stop being useful to the car.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: when they get dropped below about 80%, but 80% is fine for a household installation, and you can get them very cheaply, and as more and more EVs come onto the road, then the older ones are going to be saying, so what do we do with these batteries? So I think that would help the mathematics a little bit. The other point I was going to raise was that I would certainly like to ask you to put this into the slides before you send them to me, which is the

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: cooling facility within heat pumps, that, as we get hotter and hotter summers, and I've just been talking to somebody who was mentioning all the nurses that were fainting in the hospitals during the summer, that you desperately need now to think about cooling as well as heating. And of course, the solar, the heat pumps are wonderful for doing that.

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Ben Wielgus: Yes.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: blowing cold air. I'm not quite sure what they do with radiators.

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Ben Wielgus: So, yeah, the heat pumps that you can reverse and turn into coolers, they're generally air-to-air heat pumps, so they pump out hot air or cold air rather than heat your radiators. So they're really good in certain circumstances. We're actually looking at them for my mum's house.

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Ben Wielgus: On the batteries, really funny you should say that, for years, there has been a few companies that take old electric vehicle batteries, they rack them up in shipping containers, and they use them for off-grid storage, like a, you know, national-scale energy storage.

412
\
00:59:11.130 --> 00:59:22.109
\
Ben Wielgus: But, I just saw some adverts yesterday for a company that literally straps an electric vehicle battery to the outside of your house or inside of your garage and uses that as a cheap battery.

413
\
00:59:22.150 --> 00:59:23.350
\
Ben Wielgus: It looked…

414
\
00:59:23.490 --> 00:59:34.010
\
Ben Wielgus: very dodgy, actually, but they did look like a legitimate company, so I… I'm… yeah. Frank, go and jump in, and then I'll wrap up with my last two slides, because I think we've probably all got something that we're…

415
\
00:59:34.010 --> 00:59:38.399
\
Frank Deas, Killearn: I… I think it… I… everyone's been sort of saying the same, same things.

416
\
00:59:38.990 --> 00:59:44.659
\
Frank Deas, Killearn: the progression you've done is great, but I think the challenge with the SRC pumps is you can't jump straight to them.

417
\
00:59:44.920 --> 00:59:49.840
\
Frank Deas, Killearn: If you haven't retrofitted your house, all you're gonna do is rack up a much bigger electricity bill.

418
\
00:59:50.240 --> 00:59:55.659
\
Frank Deas, Killearn: And too much of our existing housing stock is in temporary condition.

419
\
00:59:55.930 --> 01:00:12.210
\
Frank Deas, Killearn: So, so it's actually… the government is doing a disservice. It's back to… the government has kept on doing silver bullet solutions. Everyone should do loft installation, everyone should do cowboy wall insulation, condensing boilers, whatever. And the challenge of that is always, A, cowboys rush in, and you get really bad workmanship.

420
\
01:00:12.230 --> 01:00:32.939
\
Frank Deas, Killearn: And the… a single thing doesn't actually solve an overall problem, and you don't get the health benefits and the comfort benefits. So you need to get away from single solutions and saying, retrofit fabric first, and then look at whether it's panels and batteries, or air source heat pumps, or whatever, but that's the last stage, it's not the… you can't start there.

421
\
01:00:33.430 --> 01:00:43.370
\
Ben Wielgus: I so agree with you, and this idea of a whole house approach is absolutely at the heart of doing this properly, and that requires really skilled professionals. It would create a lot of jobs for a lot of people.

422
\
01:00:43.370 --> 01:00:55.829
\
Ben Wielgus: The challenge is solar panels and air source heat pumps, they're cool and sexy, everybody wants a gadget, you know, rather than insulation, which is really boring. You know, who… you know, draft stopping. I mean, it's not a career any kid in school ever wants.

423
\
01:00:55.840 --> 01:01:06.909
\
Ben Wielgus: But I totally agree with you. Like, the failed heat pump installations I hear about, I think, are 50% user behavior and 50% building inappropriate.

424
\
01:01:07.230 --> 01:01:16.619
\
Ben Wielgus: Let me wrap up with the last couple of slides, because I really want to finish off all of you. So, I hope that you can now see my screen again.

425
\
01:01:16.750 --> 01:01:17.800
\
Ben Wielgus: Fingers crossed.

426
\
01:01:19.530 --> 01:01:19.900
\
Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: Yep.

427
\
01:01:19.900 --> 01:01:23.529
\
Ben Wielgus: Yep. So as councillors, what can we do?

428
\
01:01:23.860 --> 01:01:30.419
\
Ben Wielgus: Well, ultimately, when you add up everything I've talked about, again, take it with a pinch of salt, and this is for the lowest energy bill.

429
\
01:01:30.560 --> 01:01:36.379
\
Ben Wielgus: The simple behavioral stuff that costs nothing could cut about 8-10% off the electricity bill.

430
\
01:01:36.720 --> 01:01:38.969
\
Ben Wielgus: If you then do the things with a little effort.

431
\
01:01:39.280 --> 01:01:42.329
\
Ben Wielgus: You could get up to nearly a fifth off the energy bill.

432
\
01:01:42.700 --> 01:01:46.979
\
Ben Wielgus: And then if you happen to have the money, And longer-term patients.

433
\
01:01:47.360 --> 01:01:55.100
\
Ben Wielgus: you might be able to halve the energy bill. My second house that I retrofitted, we actually saw a nearly a 70% reduction in our energy bill.

434
\
01:01:55.110 --> 01:02:08.490
\
Ben Wielgus: And a massive improvement in comfort. Like, frankly, I would have kept my energy bill the same just for that improvement in comfort, because we cut out drafts, we got rid of the cold single glazing. It was… it was… it was a joy to be in that house.

435
\
01:02:09.050 --> 01:02:16.650
\
Ben Wielgus: As counsellors, you know, do we have outlets to be able to share these as tips? You know, do we do one or two in every newsletter we put out there?

436
\
01:02:16.790 --> 01:02:25.559
\
Ben Wielgus: Can we give people a steer to where they can go for help and grants? Here in Somerset, there is a whole bunch of grants that the Council are giving out.

437
\
01:02:25.740 --> 01:02:33.290
\
Ben Wielgus: And we've talked in our parish about bringing people together for an energy advice event, you know, like an evening session where I gave a presentation like this.

438
\
01:02:33.500 --> 01:02:47.869
\
Ben Wielgus: Funny enough, we asked parishioners in a recent newsletter, would you like this? And so far, we haven't had anybody say they want it. So, maybe they all know this, maybe they don't want to hear me talk again. You've just experienced it for an hour, so you can imagine how fed up of me they are now.

439
\
01:02:47.900 --> 01:02:58.260
\
Ben Wielgus: But if you're interested in a newsletter, we put together a newsletter story with lots of these tips written down in a short, punchy style, so you're welcome to grab that when the slides get circulated.

440
\
01:02:58.740 --> 01:03:13.589
\
Ben Wielgus: And ultimately, there are folks out there who know much more about this than I do, so I rate the Energy Savings Trust very highly, and some of the councils also employ their own people, who are doing various things. We have Retrofit Southwest down here in the Southwest, who are great.

441
\
01:03:13.960 --> 01:03:26.329
\
Ben Wielgus: And there's grants, particularly for folks on benefits, so if you're in a parish in a particularly deprived area, there are definitely things going to help people out. I've been very lucky, I think, so far. I've had…

442
\
01:03:26.850 --> 01:03:33.119
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Ben Wielgus: I don't have £25,000 worth of grants on the homes I've upgraded, and I'm not on benefits, so they are out there.

443
\
01:03:33.500 --> 01:03:39.210
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Ben Wielgus: And I think there's a lot more out there, but you have to put in the effort. That's the hardest thing.

444
\
01:03:39.490 --> 01:03:51.200
\
Ben Wielgus: And I think using the best advice is the thing I'd start with. If you're going into any of those capital investments, as we've all talked about, it really pays to use a good advisor and pay for some studies first.

445
\
01:03:51.320 --> 01:03:56.610
\
Ben Wielgus: I particularly enjoyed the one where they put a fan on my house and sucked all the air out. That was, that was very interesting.

446
\
01:03:57.850 --> 01:04:08.200
\
Ben Wielgus: That's it from me. My email address is there. If anyone had any questions, I would definitely love to hear who's selling you electricity at 7pence a unit, because I, am certainly paying more than that in the evenings.

447
\
01:04:09.000 --> 01:04:13.270
\
Ben Wielgus: And, Graeme, thank you again for the invitation to… To present?

448
\
01:04:13.630 --> 01:04:22.450
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Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: Ben, we really enjoyed having you. Thank you so much for refreshing our memories and adding a few extra points here and there, and it's been a great session. Thank you very much.

449
\
01:04:22.860 --> 01:04:27.260
\
Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: And, thank you all for coming. I was… you see a question from Stuart.

450
\
01:04:27.560 --> 01:04:30.760
\
Cllr Stuart Withington Gt Dunmow TC, Essex: Thank you, I was just gonna say I'm with, Octopus Energy.

451
\
01:04:31.620 --> 01:04:33.310
\
Cllr Stuart Withington Gt Dunmow TC, Essex: Interesting.

452
\
01:04:34.380 --> 01:04:38.679
\
Cllr Stuart Withington Gt Dunmow TC, Essex: It's, a widely available tariff, I think.

453
\
01:04:38.870 --> 01:04:41.390
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Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: Yeah, so… Yeah.

454
\
01:04:41.390 --> 01:04:43.959
\
Cllr Stuart Withington Gt Dunmow TC, Essex: And I think the other thing…

455
\
01:04:44.230 --> 01:04:52.069
\
Cllr Stuart Withington Gt Dunmow TC, Essex: maybe worth including in the future is, V2G, using EV car batteries.

456
\
01:04:53.570 --> 01:04:59.489
\
Cllr Stuart Withington Gt Dunmow TC, Essex: Yeah. I think that'd be quite a big thing when they get the technology sorted out.

457
\
01:05:00.290 --> 01:05:10.399
\
Ben Wielgus: Yeah, there's so much cool technology. If you ever wanted to nerd up on this, there is, Undecided by Matt Ferrell as a YouTuber who specializes in all of these kinds of technologies, and…

458
\
01:05:10.400 --> 01:05:21.520
\
Ben Wielgus: he's talking about sand batteries and compressed air batteries, flywheels, like, the innovation that's coming down from engineers is incredibly exciting. It's just hard to know which technology to back.

459
\
01:05:21.520 --> 01:05:23.850
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Ben Wielgus: But I think we're gonna have a very interesting time of it.

460
\
01:05:24.210 --> 01:05:29.040
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Cllr Stuart Withington Gt Dunmow TC, Essex: Well, I think the new sodium batteries are going to be interesting.

461
\
01:05:29.890 --> 01:05:30.440
\
Ben Wielgus: Yeah.

462
\
01:05:30.870 --> 01:05:31.700
\
Ben Wielgus: Yeah, I agree.

463
\
01:05:31.850 --> 01:05:36.199
\
Ben Wielgus: All right, I'm being waved to my next meeting, unfortunately, as well, so thank you, everybody.

464
\
01:05:36.200 --> 01:05:39.270
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Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: Thanks, Ben. Take care. Bye-bye, everybody.

465
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01:05:39.490 --> 01:05:40.260
\
Ben Wielgus: Bye.

***

#### Markdown version of presentation:

## Helping residents save energy

**What can be done? How do we help our constituents?**

Ben Wielgus · 28 October 2026\
Great Collaboration · Energy Efficiency Ideas · Session 143

*Markdown transcription in slide order. Layout and punctuation have been tidied; figures and claims are reproduced from the presentation, rather than independently checked. Slide numbers below follow PDF page order.*

Source: /Volumes/CRUCIAL X8/IDrive-Sync/Cloud-Drive/Current/ClimateChange/GC Great Collaboration/Admin/Banter-GC/2026/GCB143-261028-EnergyEfficiency/Great Collaboration - Helping Residents Save Energy v03 - October 2026.pdf

***

### 2. A little about me

**Ben Wielgus**

* **25 years** working in sustainability for businesses.
* **Carbon Trust** among the organisations I have worked with.
* **3 houses — 1990s, 1890s, 1700s** refurbished with energy efficiency in mind.
* **10+ solar projects:** advised schools, homes and businesses.
* **15 years as a parish councillor**, in Nottinghamshire then Somerset.
* **More than 100,000 tonnes of CO₂ saved** through work and personal life.

### 3. A warmer home can mean more than a lower bill

| Bills                                | Comfort                           | Health                   |
| ------------------------------------ | --------------------------------- | ------------------------ |
| Use less energy for the same service | Reduce cold surfaces and draughts | Support a warm, dry home |

**Start with what the household needs and can afford.**

### 4. Parish councils can make trusted help easier to find

1. **Reach:** newsletters, websites and noticeboards.
2. **Trust:** independent advice and current links.
3. **Access:** include people who do not use the internet.

Terraces, flats, suburbs and rural homes all belong in the conversation.

***

### 5. Why now?

### 6. What does household energy cost?

*Ofgem, October–December 2026 rates and July 2026 consumption bands.*

| Household use | Annual cost | Electricity, kWh/year | Gas, kWh/year |
| ------------- | ----------- | --------------------- | ------------- |
| Low           | £1,210      | 1,600                 | 6,000         |
| Medium        | £1,720      | 2,500                 | 9,500         |
| High          | £2,420      | 3,800                 | 14,000        |

GB Direct Debit averages. Rates vary. Excludes oil, LPG and Northern Ireland.

October–December 2026 rates, annualised. Later Energy Saving Trust (EST) tip figures use reference homes, not this single identical building.

### 7. Bills remain above five years ago

*Ofgem tariff history, DESNZ Energy Price Guarantee guidance, Commons Library.*

| October snapshot              | Annual bill |
| ----------------------------- | ----------- |
| 2021                          | £1,090      |
| 2022 — Energy Price Guarantee | £2,100      |
| 2023                          | £1,640      |
| 2024                          | £1,540      |
| 2025                          | £1,580      |
| 2026                          | £1,720      |

**About 58% higher.**

Same use every year: **2,500 kWh electricity + 9,500 kWh gas**.

Figures are nominal £/year. The 2022 figure uses subsidised Energy Price Guarantee rates. £400 support excluded.

### 8. Energy’s share of spending: a broad historical comparison

*Domestic fuel as a share of total spending.*

| Year    | Basis                      | Energy share |
| ------- | -------------------------- | ------------ |
| 1922\*  | Repriced historical budget | 8.3%         |
| 1976    | Household spending         | 5.7%         |
| 2024/25 | Household spending         | 5.3%         |

\*1922: an older UK wage-earner budget repriced to July 1922, not a survey of all households.

Coverage and classifications differ across years. Historical context, not a like-for-like trend.

*Sources: 1922 Cost of Living report, p. 16; UK Housing Energy Fact File 2013, Table 4f; ONS Family Spending FYE 2025.*

***

### 9. Quick wins

**Little or no cost.**

### 10. Where does the heat go?

*One illustrative uninsulated house.*

| Area     | Share of heat loss |
| -------- | ------------------ |
| Roof     | 25%                |
| Walls    | 35%                |
| Floor    | 15%                |
| Windows  | 10%                |
| Draughts | 15%                |

Shares vary by building, insulation, glazing and air leakage. **These are not shares of the energy bill.** Doors are not separately identified.

*Source: National Energy Action, 2017, p. 13.*

### 11. Boil only what you need

**Cost:** £0 to change the habit\
**Saving:** about £10/year — EST reference example

* Measure the water for your cups.
* Respect the kettle’s minimum fill.
* Also boil pans with lids on.
* Microwaves are cheaper than hobs or ovens as less heat is wasted.

Saving depends on the excess water boiled today.

*Source: EST, Quick Tips, 6 October 2026.*

### 12. Close curtains at dusk

**Cost:** free for existing curtains\
**Annual saving:** varies — fabric, fit and glazing matter

* Use what you already have.
* Keep curtains clear of radiators.
* If you can afford it, consider lined curtains or even wooden shutters.

Curtains help comfort. Ventilation and damp still need attention.

*Source: EST, Windows and Doors.*

### 13. Let radiators properly warm the room

**Cost:** £0 to move obstructions\
**Annual saving:** varies — comfort may improve

* Keep furniture and curtains clear.
* Use room controls sensibly.
* Leave clear space so warm air can circulate.

Persistent cold radiators need diagnosis. Heat-pump settings may differ.

### 14. Switch off unused standby

**Cost:** free using socket switches\
**Saving:** about £45/year — EST reference example

**Off means off.**

* Use socket switches for suitable appliances.
* Keep essential equipment powered.
* Consider installing timer switches.

Check instructions. Leave medical, security and other essential equipment on.

*Source: EST, Quick Tips, 6 October 2026.*

### 15. Try a four-minute shower

**Cost:** £0 to change the habit\
**Saving:** about £45/year — EST reference example

**4 minutes:** a small change to a daily habit.

Also saves water, which is increasingly important.

Saving depends on current shower time, flow rate and water-heating system.

*Source: EST, Quick Tips, 6 October 2026.*

### 16. Wash cooler. Dry naturally.

**Cost:** £0 to change habits\
**Annual savings:** £26 washing; £50 drying — EST examples

* Try 30°C where suitable.
* Use full loads and a line or airer.
* You can buy hats for whirligigs to keep them dry.
* If you must dry inside, try a dehumidifier in a closed room.

These are separate examples, not a guaranteed total. Ventilate when drying indoors.

*Source: EST, Quick Tips and damp guidance.*

### 17. Try one degree lower, if it stays comfortable

**Cost:** free to adjust\
**Saving:** about £120/year — EST reference example

**22°C → 21°C**

* Find a comfortable setting.
* Protect warmth for anyone who needs it.

Saving depends on starting temperature and heating use.

*Source: Energy Saving Trust, Heating Controls.*

### 18. Heat the home when it needs heating

**Cost:** £0 with existing controls\
**Annual saving:** varies — depends on today’s schedule

* Match the programme to daily life.
* Avoid unnecessary heating.

**Illustrative schedule:** morning → away/setback → home again.

Gas and oil boilers can normally heat a house up quickly, so you can turn off when not at home.

Heat pumps often suit steady, lower-temperature operation. Follow system advice.

*Source: EST, Heating Controls and Heat Pumps.*

### 19. Check boiler settings and keep it maintained

**Cost:** settings £0 / service quote\
**Annual saving:** varies — no blanket servicing saving

| Settings                                            | Service                                               |
| --------------------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------- |
| A suitable lower radiator flow temperature may help | Follow the maker’s schedule with a qualified engineer |

Combi radiator settings differ from stored hot-water settings. Check before adjusting.

*Sources: EST and Gas Safe Register.*

### 20. Make energy use visible

**Cost:** smart-meter fitting £0 upfront\
**Saving:** no automatic bill saving — action makes the difference

**kWh: what changed?**

* Look at kWh as well as pounds.
* Notice what changes after a new habit.

Metering costs are recovered through the energy system, not an installation bill.

*Source: EST, Smart Meters.*

### 21. Compare the tariff as well as the habit

**Cost:** often £0 — check exit fees\
**Annual saving:** varies — compare actual annual use

Check:

* Units used.
* Price per unit.
* Daily charges.
* Exit fees before switching.

Plenty of tools and websites now exist to help with comparisons and make switching easy.

A “green” tariff is not an efficiency measure or a guarantee of lower cost.

*The original slide also says: “But often a green tariff can be the same price as renewables.” This wording is reproduced as supplied; its intended comparison is unclear.*

*Source: Ofgem, tariff rates and renewable certificates.*

***

### 22. A little effort

**The inexpensive improvements.**

### 23. Replace halogen bulbs with LEDs

**Price:** £10–£100\
**Saving:** about £45/year — EST all-halogen example

| Halogen                             | LED                                      |
| ----------------------------------- | ---------------------------------------- |
| More electricity for the same light | Much less electricity for the same light |

Halogens and traditional incandescent lightbulbs also last less time and break more often, meaning you save money on replacements.

*Source: EST, Lighting.*

### 24. Check the hot-water cylinder jacket

**Cost:** about £30 for a DIY jacket\
**Saving:** about £45/year\
**Simple payback:** under 1 year

**25 mm → 80 mm**

An easy check if the home has a suitable hot-water cylinder.

The EST example upgrades a 25 mm jacket. Modern cylinders may already be well insulated.

*Sources: EST, Tank Insulation and Quick Tips.*

### 25. Stop draughts. Keep purpose-made vents open.

**Cost:** up to £250 installed\
**Saving:** about £55/year\
**Simple payback:** about 5 years

| Seal                                   | Keep open                                 |
| -------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------- |
| Unwanted gaps around windows and doors | Air bricks, extractors and required vents |

> Houses need ventilating. But a draught is non-controlled ventilation.

EST reference house. DIY materials cost less. Never obstruct flues or safety ventilation.

### 26. Check what is already in the loft

**Cost:** approximately £600 for an installed top-up\
**Saving:** about £17/year\
**Reference:** 120 mm to 270 mm\
**Simple payback:** about 35 years

A bare loft and a small top-up are different investments.

* Look out for grants and savings from self-installation.
* Many houses do not have the recommended **270 mm (11 inches)** of insulation.

This is a top-up example, not a bare loft. Preserve eaves ventilation and fix damp first.

***

### 27. Larger measures

**Investment for the future.**

### 28. Better glazing: upgrade or repair?

**Cost:** about £4,800 installed\
**Saving:** about £85/year\
**Simple payback:** about 56 years\*

#### Upgrading single glazing

Compare A-rated double or triple glazing. Triple can insulate better, but costs more.

#### Misted between the panes?

If the frame is sound, ask about replacing just the failed sealed glass unit.

Glazing also helps with comfort, draughts and noise.

\*EST example: entirely single-glazed, gas-heated semi upgraded to A-rated double glazing, Great Britain.

Triple glazing and glass-only repairs need separate quotes. Keep vents clear; check heritage rules.

*Sources: Energy Saving Trust, Windows and Doors; Glass and Glazing Federation, repair or replace guidance.*

### 29. Solar: use some, export the rest

**Cost:** about £7,600 for 4.5 kWp\
**Annual bill saving:** £260–£420\
**Additional annual export income:** £290–£360\
**Model simple payback:** about 11–12 years

| Use at home                           | Export the surplus       |
| ------------------------------------- | ------------------------ |
| Less electricity bought from the grid | A separate income stream |

Illustration:

* 4,000 kWh/year generation.
* 25–40% own use.
* 12p/kWh export.
* No battery.

Don’t forget that it is also a visible investment in your house.

*Basis: EST typical cost; presenter’s explicitly stated PV scenario.*

### 30. Solar: three common worries

**Typical cost:** about £7,600\
**Annual saving:** varies

1. **Cloudy Britain:** panels generate less than in bright sun.
2. **Only south-facing?** East and west roofs can also be useful.
3. **Guaranteed return?** Roof, own use and tariffs change the sums.

Check shading, roof condition, permissions and export terms. Batteries add cost.

*Sources: EST; Ofgem Smart Export Guarantee. The original slide refers to “slide 28 paired scenarios”.*

### 31. Choose insulation for the building you have

**Cost:** scope-specific quotes\
**Annual saving:** varies\
**Assess before committing.**

| Measure                | Considerations and typical cost            |
| ---------------------- | ------------------------------------------ |
| Cavity walls           | Survey suitability; about £2,200 installed |
| Solid walls — internal | About £12,000                              |
| Solid walls — external | About £15,000                              |
| Floors                 | Construction and access change the scope   |

Typical EST costs before grants. These are different jobs, not a comparable price range.

*Source: EST, Wall and Floor Insulation.*

### 32. Insulation: three questions worth asking

**Cost:** use the actual scope\
**Annual saving:** varies

1. **Will it cause damp?** Diagnose moisture and design ventilation.
2. **Is more always better?** Starting condition changes the return.
3. **Will it save the diagram’s percentage?** Heat-loss shares are not bill savings.

Traditional buildings may need specialist material and moisture advice.

*Sources: EST; Historic England. The original slide refers to slides 18, 19 and 25.*

### 33. A heat pump moves heat from outside to inside

**Cost:** about £12,000 installed, but there are grants\
**Model annual saving:** about £0–£200 versus gas, before maintenance

**1 unit of electricity → 3–4 units of heat**

A heat pump uses electricity to move heat from the air. The 3–4 figure is illustrative seasonal performance.

Illustrative running costs at the stated rates. Some homes spend more. Grants are separate.

*Basis: EST typical cost; presenter’s stated model at Ofgem October–December 2026 rates.*

### 34. Heat pumps: three common worries

**Typical cost:** about £12,000\
**Annual saving:** varies

1. **Cold weather:** suitable models work below freezing.
2. **Older homes:** many can work with the right design.
3. **All new radiators?** Check each room. Some may need upgrading.

Efficiency falls in colder weather. Heat loss and radiator output need assessment.

*Sources: EST Green Heat Toolkit; Energy Systems Catapult field work. The original slide refers to the “slide 27 model”.*

### 35. What could the three stages save?

**Illustrative worked example, not an average.**\
**Starting energy bill: £1,724/year.**

#### Quick wins

| Measure                       | Saving per year |
| ----------------------------- | --------------- |
| 22°C to 21°C                  | £32             |
| Shorter showers               | £42             |
| Switch off standby            | £23             |
| Cooler washes                 | £11             |
| Line-dry one load/week        | £21             |
| Boil less water               | £5              |
| **Added at this stage**       | **£134**        |
| **Total with earlier stages** | **£134**        |
| **Original bill saved**       | **8%**          |

#### A little effort

| Measure                       | Saving per year |
| ----------------------------- | --------------- |
| Five halogens to LED          | £42             |
| Draught-proofing              | £30             |
| Loft top-up                   | £29             |
| Cylinder jacket               | £23             |
| Better controls               | £27             |
| Boiler flow setting           | £11             |
| **Added at this stage**       | **£162**        |
| **Total with earlier stages** | **£296**        |
| **Original bill saved**       | **17%**         |

#### Bigger changes

| Measure                       | Saving per year |
| ----------------------------- | --------------- |
| Wall / floor insulation       | £102            |
| Single to double glazing      | £20             |
| Heat pump                     | £59             |
| Solar used at home            | £342            |
| Triple glazing / battery      | —               |
| Other measures                | —               |
| **Added at this stage**       | **£523**        |
| **Total with earlier stages** | **£819**        |
| **Original bill saved**       | **48%**         |

Percentages are cumulative and cover quantified measures only. Measures are applied in order to reduce overlap.

Assumed performance, not a forecast. Excludes upfront costs, maintenance and solar export income. The slide states that details are in the notes.

Calculation: one hypothetical gas-heated home at Ofgem October–December 2026 rates. EST guidance informs the measures, not these package totals.

***

### 36. What can we do as councillors?

### 37. Three useful things to offer

| Share a tip                | Point to help                   | Bring people together               |
| -------------------------- | ------------------------------- | ----------------------------------- |
| One clear action at a time | Trusted advice and grant checks | An advice event, if capacity allows |

**A good outcome is a resident taking one sensible next step.**

For an example newsletter story, see [Long Sutton Parish Council’s environment plan](https://www.longsutton-pc.gov.uk/environment-plan).

### 38. Help residents find the right support

*GOV.UK and national energy advice services, checked 27 October 2026.*

| Support                 | Where / details                                                |
| ----------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Independent advice      | Energy Saving Trust and local energy advice                    |
| Warm Homes: Local Grant | England, through councils; mainly for those on benefits        |
| Boiler Upgrade Scheme   | England and Wales: £2,500–£9,000; air-to-water / ground-source |

Other nations have their own advice and grant services.

Eligibility, funding and local delivery vary. Grants do not promise free work for everyone.

### 39. One useful next step for your parish?

**Questions**

<ben@wielgus.co.uk>

Ben Wielgus · Great Collaboration · 28 October 2026

***

<br>


---

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