It's December, and time I blogged again. The last seven months of occupancy have been intense at ECF, not only with moving in but also just catching up with 'normal' family and work life. Despite the festive season being just round the corner, we at least feel we're getting there!
On the energy front, seven months of occupancy means we've got some data on energy consumption to compare with what we specified and predicted...and the results are quite a relief!
The bottom line is that we're using 25% less energy than we expected; and that's in a house already designed to use less than a quarter of the energy of the average new housing stock. In general hot water and space heating energy use are on target, although these account for less than half of our predicted energy use. The big savings have thus been made in other energy use, namely lighting and appliances. In particular the use of LED and CFL light fittings, coupled with A and A+ energy rated kitchen appliances has paid dividends.
Whilst in most houses heating and hot water use accounts for up 80% of domestic energy demand, our experience just shows that real savings can be made with little effort by replacing lighting and appliances (when worn out of course!) with more energy efficient equivalents.
4 comments:
Have a great Christmas and New Year Debs! L xx
Just wondered if you had any more info on the costs of running the heat pump and Ventilation system? Are you still happy with them?
Indeed; on an annual basis for heating, the heat pump uses around 2,900kWh of electricity for heating (£390 @ 13.5p/kWh), and 1,700kWh for hot water (£230). The ventilation system is currently switched off (we open the windows in the summer!) but for the 8 months a year that it is switched on, it consumes around 30W constantly costing £24 per annum. We're about to move onto an Economy 10 tarriff which should reduce costs further. With total costs for heating and hot water just over £600 annually, this is around a fifth of the typical costs of heating a similarly sized house built to current building regs and using oil or LPG for heating fuel. In summary, we're very happy with the choices we've made!
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