Find out what home measures you can take to help reduce carbon emissions
Home insulation
Improving your home insultation can help reduce your carbon footprint.
Improving insulation means that less heat escapes from your home, so less energy is required to heat your home. If you're heating your home through a greenhouse gas emitting source such as oil, gas or solid fuel, then this is a good first step.
Types of insulation such as loft and cavity wall insulation can reduce your heating related emissions by up to 20%. Insulation also has a relatively small payback period (often up to five years). Other insulation methods include:
- installing double or triple glazing
- draught proofing your home
Further information can also be found at the simple energy advice website.
Low carbon heating
Installing a low carbon heating source is another way of reducing emissions from your home. Rather than burning a fuel like oil or gas, low carbon heating generates heat through renewable methods.
Heat pumps are one form of low carbon heating. Whilst they require electricity to run, they do produce more energy as heat than they use through electricity. When also coupled with a renewable electricity system, you could power your heating and power completey renewably.
Heat pumps work by extracting air from outdoors. This is then transferred into fluid and compressed until it's hot enough to provide heating through a radiator system.
Other low carbon heat options can include:
- ground source heat pumps
- solar thermal
- biomass boilers
Some low carbon heating options are covered by the green homes grant if your house already meets certain insulation standards.
Further government incentives for the installation of low carbon heat comes from the Domestic Renewable Heat Incentive (DRHI). This can see you get paid every quarter by the government over a 7-year period for the renewable heat you generate. Find out more on the Ofgem website.
Electricity
The electricity we use can also be generated renewably. Solar photovoltaic panels (solar pv) are a common source of renewable electricity that can be mounted to your home. They provide you with fossil fuel free electricity. Solar PV generates electricity when the sun shines on them, which feeds directly into your home circuit.
When you aren’t using electricity, then sun still shines and therefore your panels still generate electricity. Don’t worry though, you won’t miss out. This excess electricity is sent back to the grid for others to use. You can claim money for exporting your excess generation through your energy provider Smart Export Guarantee (SEG). When the sun isn’t shining you just use grid imported electricity from your energy provider as normal.
You can also think about switching to energy providers that offer renewable tariffs to ensure that the electricity you use comes from a renewable source. This will however increase your energy costs as this is a premium you pay for renewable energy.