Warmer Homes

@Richard Tol

“I was wrong.”

Sound man Richard! Science is as simple as that.

Stop the presses.

Politicians splurge taxpayers’ money in wasteful pursuit of ill founded ideological ambitions.

More seriously. To see how to really fail with such a program, read a little about the Australian experience (just google Australia insulation program). The Keystone Cops would have made a better job of it.

Forgot to mention that a man named Tony in Kerry runs an EXCELLENT blog monitoring all these madcap green schemes promoted by Eamon Ryan and SEI.

One of natures wise men , here is the blog…essential reading.

http://wood-pellet-ireland.blogspot.com/

If we could bottle up the hot air that Eamon Ryan produces sure we could warm all of D6 all winter.

The most egregious scam of all has been the Wood Pellet scheme. When the Wood Pellet scheme/scam started not ONE SINGLE PELLET was being produced in Ireland. They were all IMPORTED.

Nor was the technology ready for prime time and half the manufacturers/suppliers have disappeared off the face of the earth.

http://wood-pellet-ireland.blogspot.com/2010/02/yet-more-wood-pellet-woes.html

“The whole system cost €21k and is useless. I have tried it on logs and the only warmth generated is me sweating trying to keep logs in the thing. After 10 hours non-stop the intake temp was only 40 degrees – which for radiators is useless. I am in the process of getting an oil burner installed. I have been in contact – many times with the manufacturer and they happily tell me that I only had a contact with the installer – even though this company is on their website as a recommended partner in Ireland. So as they are happy to tell me that I do not have a contract with them and the installer is gone bust I can amuse myself by rocking on my heels.”

http://wood-pellet-ireland.blogspot.com/2010/01/is-your-geo-thermal-heating-sustainable.html

The Cold Snap

“Unless the external heat-gathering pipes in a ground sourced system are buried deeper than a meter, there is every chance that the system could be an “Over – Unity” system – that is, it would take more than a kilowatt of electricity to give a kilowatt of heat.

Air sourced Geo-Thermal with external temperatures of minus 10 degrees centigrade would be nothing short of a joke – dont waste your time turning them on.”

Lots more good stuff there. EamonRyan has never admitted to any of the myriad failings of his schemes or the technologies promoted by his schemes.

That blog is replete with the sad reality of how “Smart” and “Green” ‘work’ in Ireland.

Ryan should concentrate on joined up thinking rather than waffling on primetime like he did last night, what an utter trainwreck that was like Cuffe on Vincenzo a few weeks back. 🙁

http://www.politics.ie/media/127812-david-mcwilliams-coming-up-primetime.html

Geckko
Correct! As it is a stimulus, fewer controls applied! Get the money out there! Use a shovel ……….

Richard says:

The SEAI should be praised for studying the impact of their interventions and for publishing the results.

So too, should it be the goal of every state organisation. Eddie Molloy’s observations about self measurement by the department of finance spring to my mind. An article by Lenny Antonelli has some information about the scheme ongoing in Tipperary. But seriously, you saw on news last night the €27 million of DunLaoghaire Rathdown Coco funds tied up in the affordable housing scheme, which unfortunately got wrong footed by the market. Everything to do with the housing market, has been turned inside out. It is simply not fair to judge success or failure of SEAI’s implementation of EPBD, given events in markets in recent past. I would stand up for minister Eamon Ryan on this count, SEAI did a professional job of bringing the EPBD EU wide directive to bear on the market here in Ireland. It is not their fault the market itself went all weird. Antonelli says:

“We can’t convince people in post 1991 houses that they need to upgrade,” says Paul Kenny. He reckons many people think that if they can heat their home adequately, that means its energy efficient. “People don’t have the knowledge of what an energy efficient house is,” he says.

http://constructireland.ie/Vol-4-Issue-10/Articles/Policy/The-lessons-learnt-from-North-Tipperarys-home-energy-upgrade-scheme.html

@ Richard,

I recently had cause to study the EPBD implementation action plan of July 2006, which you can download from the link below. Take a look at page 38 in that document for instance. There was a lot of ducks to be arranged in a row to make the entire scheme work. The EPBD was only to deliver reliable information to the market place at a reasonable cost to building owners. I don’t believe the market though has consumed very much of the information to do with energy efficiency, because most ordinary Joe Soap’s are too busy trying to crunch through the numbers pertaining to falling values. There is a lot to be said for a relatively stable property market, if such a thing ever exists. Because then, peoples’ attention can divert laterally into other items on the ‘information stack’ such as comfort. Even buyers of more expensive property, by right, should care about comfort inside a dwelling. It time I am sure they will. BOH.

http://www.seai.ie/Your_Building/EPBD/Legislation_and_Background/

@ fergaloh

I don’t have time to read through everything, but I think you may have made a couple of errors in your reading of the results in pdf 5. Any mention in a statistical report of significance refers to Statisical Significance. The report seems to say that for heating oil (very different from fuel oil, incidentally), there was no significant fall in spend for the intervention group (though curiously there was for the control group). Like I said, I haven’t read much of it, so perhaps I’ve missed something.

@ Richard,

I came across this DB report yesterday. Although some of the figures relate to Germany, it might be of some interest.

http://www.dbresearch.com/PROD/DBR_INTERNET_EN-PROD/PROD0000000000256216.pdf;jsessionid=8EE8F47B39D4632A1CC31A1A8A801827.srv11-dbr-de

@ All,

My own understanding is that the different schemes by the SEAI, take on different kinds of risks [which need to be managed carefully] and aim to solve different kinds of problems.

To add to that, there is another dimension that SEAI have to manage. Another kind of ‘risk’ if you will. SEAI, have to worry that the concept of energy efficiency isn’t brought into disrepute or scandal (not suggesting that we ever do anything wrong in Ireland) by one part of the scheme, being abused by contractors, energy efficiency consultants and what have you.

I mean, I know how the construction industry works from inside to out – and there are a million ways that SEAI could be dragged through the muck, over these kinds of schemes. That is why I had to sit down and study the EPBD legislation, and the resulting national statutory instruments to implement it. I can tell you, the national legislation, is pretty darn water tight to my eyes. And I have seen or experience most of the booby traps existing in the Irish construction game, down through the years. Thumbs up to SEAI. BOH.

@ Ahura Mazda,

This is a very true statement from the Deutsche Bank research report:

The real estate industry lacks a universal definition of what constitutes a green building as well as consistent data sources and metrics on green buildings. These deficits make an assessment of the profitability of green building investments difficult and therefore hold back stronger investor interest. Potential misalignments between landlord costs and tenant benefits also hinder faster adoption of green building standards.

Refer to my post above, where I list some of the different kind of standards to do with residential energy efficiency. I can assure you, behind each ‘standard’ of energy efficient house, is a gang of experts who will not give an inch and say their standard is the one to choose. It is basically like a ‘format’ war, between blue-ray DVD, or Sony VHS video tape, or whatever. But I don’t think we will ever get over the format war, as it pertains to housing in Europe. There are all kinds of complexities. For instance, the Passivhaus institute in Germany, the highest standard in the world, is working with their government to change legislation on rates. To calculate rates on property to use ‘net’ floor space area, rather than gross. Because the net floor space area stays the same when you add six inches of external wall insulation or more. But the gross floor area gets larger, which means rates for the property get larger too. You are incentivised by rates taxation not to externally insulate, and incentivised by the passive house standard, to do the opposite. I hope we can avoid those kind of trip-ups when we introduce property taxes in Ireland. But as it is, at Zoe developments I encountered stuff every day, where local authority instructions would conflict with building control, or visa versa. It is easy for people loosely connected with the industry to throw out criticisms in columns in newspapers etc, etc. But they don’t always know fully what is going on.

Remember, we have not even discussed the United States approach to residential construction here. They have had ASHRAE codes for the last 30 years, which relate to mechanical ventilation in residential property. Which by all accounts are pretty darn good at this stage. Now, the Europeans are doing over there telling them to drop all of that, and adopt the new, shiny European codes, which claim to be more energy saving, have more eco-bling and buzzwords etc. The Americans are simply going, no way. It is the same with other stuff – fire codes, earth quake proofing etc, etc. The British and Germany consultants love going out to places such as Beijing and re-writing the local codes completely, to build new projects. Which works in a place like Beijing, where they need to be re-written at times. But in the United States, it simply demonstrates an arrogance. My fear is that Ireland is barking up the wrong tree, when it thinks it can develop the ‘systems’ for management of an fleet of electric cars and sell its services to an export market. But on the other hand, look at Finland which developed the mobile phone and the United States were years catching up. Maybe that was because fixed line telephony was so cheap over in the States, like fossil fuels are for home heating etc. Sure it was the same in the car industry – the big three/four in Detroit got too seduced by only serving to the needs of the domestic market. BOH.

Off topic but very important, the infamous hockey stick graph that purported to show significant global warming,

“The ‘hockey stick’ that became emblematic of the threat posed by climate change exaggerated the rise in temperature because it was created using ‘inappropriate’ methods, according to the head of the Royal Statistical Society.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/7589897/Hockey-stick-graph-was-exaggerated.html

@ Colin

Interesting hypothesis!!

But if they had denied every application and spent no money then wouldnt this have been a better outcome?
??

Anecdote:
I had a former council house with crap insulation and I installed double glazing
My heating bill stayed the same but instead of wearing a jumper all the time, I was walking around in a t-shirt.

Is there any reason the folks who got the insulation in didn’t do the same? EUR 85 lower bill but much warmer.

Really?
Wouldnt it be, it was the least well of, of those who applied, as opposed to, being the least well off in general?
Would be interesting to have a good look at it!
Was it all farmers?

It seems to me a little pointless to change the insulation of a house unless you also change the heating system. My experience of oil-fired systems is that you decide when you want them on and they pump heat into the house until they switch off. As most Irish houses are badly built concrete, you only vaguely heat the internal walls with the three hours in the morning and four in the evening. Keeping (through better insulation) the heat in for an extra two hours of the night or two hours of the day (when people are either asleep or at work) seems entirely pointless.

So what changes would be useful? Well, heating a floor slab to a particualr temperature might make a difference. Could it be that people (like me!) like their geothermal systems because they have modern distribution systems (underfloor heating, thermostatically controlled by room, combined with decent insulation and passive glass) rather than just more of the same insulation?

Has anyone done a study on how long people generally spend in their houses anyway?

@Mokabaybob and Ciaran Daly

Your comments are off-topic but in any case I read the link that was provided and it states:

Lord Oxburgh said the scientists at the research unit arrived at their conclusions ”honestly and sensibly”. But the reviewers found that the scientists could have used better statistical methods in analysing some of their data, although it was unlikely to have made much difference to their results.

Prof Hand the original critic of the graph said that it showed global temperature records going back 1,000 years, was exaggerated – although any reproduction using improved techniques is likely to also show a sharp rise in global warming. He agreed the graph would be more like a field hockey stick than the ice hockey blade it was originally compared to.

That doesn’t sound to me like the findings are a load of s**te and leads me to think that it is you that I should not be trusting.

@Ciaran Daly,

The “denialism” of the Daily Telegraph has gone beyond funny. Read with caution.

This is a “spin” on the House of Lords report clearing the Climate Research Unit of any impropriety in regard to data, arising from the so-called “Climategate” e-mail hack. The RSS made a submission about the methods – not about the results, which are sound. The recommended RSS methods do not give different outcomes, something the Telegraph might have added.

As even the Telegraph grudgingly admits:

“… the review, led by Lord Oxburgh into the research carried out by the centre, found no evidence of ”deliberate scientific malpractice”. “

By the way:

Steve McIntyre recently announced to his readers at ClimateAudit.org that he’s “been doing some mining business in the past few weeks and it’s taken time. I’ll likely do more this year for a variety of obvious reasons.”

According a bio listed on the University of Guelph website, this period involved, among other things, “general corporate management, including specific oversight of company audited financial statements, annual reports, numerous corporate disclosure documents; oversight of exploration programs; direction of several corporate re-organizations.”

http://www.desmogblog.com/steve-mcintyre

@ fergaloh,

I had a former council house with crap insulation and I installed double glazing
My heating bill stayed the same but instead of wearing a jumper all the time, I was walking around in a t-shirt.
Is there any reason the folks who got the insulation in didn’t do the same? EUR 85 lower bill but much warmer.

The problem is, if one focusses too much on reducing emissions, it tends to conceal the dimension of comfort in upgrading of homes. (See sub-note below on Low carbon housing) Holbrook Fields made an interesting point – the 17,600 homes which were upgraded using funds of almost €11.0 million. Lets assume, that averages at €625 per home. So I am assuming that the occupants put in some of their own money. Attic insulation on its own costs over €1,000. The government wisely chose to leave VAT, value added tax on products such as insulation. It ensures that the SEAI have a paper trail back to the contractor who is registered for VAT and where he purchased his raw materials, who he purchased them from. Do bear in mind all, one of the reasons for the Statutory instrument 666 of 2006 to implement energy ratings for residential property – along with building regulation revisions in 2006 and 2008 for new dwellings – is to avoid a situation, whereby Ireland became a ‘dumping ground’ within the EU for products were are deemed inferior to be used anywhere else in the EU region. Think of it like the taxation on workers, it is a kind of competition, to stay at parity with other countries. Not a little above, or a little below parity with other EU states. Otherwise all kinds of market distortions begin to happen with regards to materials, services, standards and so on. But even trying to establish what ‘standards’ other EU members states work to is hard, because they collect data differently sometimes, and have different regulations. You see?

As a comment, I would observe, that Ireland introduced energy conservation in building regulations 20 years ago, and since then the fuel consumption of buildings has gone down by almost 10%. In other words, a lot of the benefits from energy conservation have already been drawn down through improved construction methods. There is still a way to go, but there is a law of diminishing returns. Bear in mind also, the homes in the 1970s were uncomfortably cold compared to today. People simply put on more layers of clothing in the old days to keep themselves warm. When insulation regulations were introduced, society decided not to conserve fuel so much as enjoy increased set point temperatures in their living rooms and home in general. But even with shedding the clothes when indoors in the last 20 years, and turning up the heating temperature, Ireland still consumes less fuel per house than it did in the 1970s.

Look at the low carbon house standard for instance – the Americans have a version of that. The Americans really rubbed the German institute up the wrong way recently, when it conspired the Americans were using software which curtailed expenditure on insulation, when it met a critical threshold, where the price of Photo voltaic panels was cheaper. This horrified the Germans who were working, not with a low carbon yard stick, but rather the comfort dimension of sustainable construction. The Americans would point out, that PV panels will get cheaper the more large LCD televisions that are manufactured and developed. Because it is basically the same technology for both applications. Lets not forget of course, that computers improved in leaps and bounds because of the global gaming industry’s development. One was able to piggy back on the other.

To my mind, an apartment built in Dublin’s docklands, for someone who works there or somewhere in Dublin city centre, is a low carbon dwelling. But many who study building standards might say the insulation levels of those apartment developments is far, far beneath where it should be. David MacKay, a British professor has done studies to proof that even a journey to the supermarket adds to a persons carbon footprint. Similarly all of the public buildings and offices that we use throughout our daily lives. I mean, realistically, how much time does the average city dweller spend in their apartment? From a carbon saving point of view, it is much to do with transportation to work, and lifestyles. It is wrong to look at the dwelling alone. I blogged something about shopping centres a while back. Link below. Kathleen Barrington wrote in the Sunday Business Post on March 14th 2010 about lease agreements for high street retailers. I think it sums up the problem with regards to peoples’ carbon footprint. They are travelling further to shop and also demand a tropical kind of environment with bright lights etc inside of large regional SC’s.

Secondary high streets, shopping centres and retail parks are already vulnerable because people are travelling further to dominant regional centres rather than the grotty, tired precinct down the road.

BOH.

http://designcomment.blogspot.com/2010/03/foot-traffic-part-three.html

@ Holbrook fields,

Thanks, but I don’t see why that should negate the positive effects of the scheme? Some people couldn’t afford the improvements so the government paid for them to help reduce fuel poverty.

My observation is as follows, instead of spreading the €11.0 million over 17,600 homes, which only contributes €625 per home, we should be spending say €10 million on €7,000 homes. That would amount to a subsidy of €1,400 per home. Say if the occupier was able to put in €600 of their own money, paid in installments at low interest rate. And say, the €2,000 total was ‘stretched’ a lot further by innovative means. I.e. Vacating a whole terrace of houses at the same time and housing them temporarily someplace else. Then you could contract a builder to do a large chunk of work together for a more competitive price. I mean, what I am describing is the business model of Zoe developments. But applied to a situation where the occupants are already in place. But one moves them temporarily, gets a blitz team in to do all the work at lowest per unit price, and then moves all the people back in again. If we stay chipping away with roof insulation at €1,000 per house, then the budget gets used up in no time. You get no where in terms of Co2 emission reduction and no very far either in terms of comfort level improvement. In other words, unless we start using ‘shoe box’ kind type of techniques in this, it is a waste of time. I agree with Richard Tol. BOH.

@ denis,

The best system is the insulated blind, and insulated roller curtain that I have invented and installed in my own house—–but that is another story!

Google video has a one hour length piece, Free Heat for Life: Fundamentals of Affordable Passive Solar Design – Dan Chiras. Now here is the problem. Chiras and his excellent book, The solar house: passive heating and cooling, are packed full of trial and error, common sense logic and learning over decades of real building experience. Chiras and others like him, as I mentioned above have developed knowledge of energy efficiency to apply to projects in all sorts of different climatic conditions across the continent of the USA. Like car manufacture, social networking web technology, telephones, the US market is large within its own borders and tends to do its own thing, have its own standards etc. Here in Europe we are full of little nation states. Each has its own set of rules and standards, its own bureaucracy and ways of doing things. If you were to show Dan Chiras’s ideas to anyone in Ireland, working with any of the various schemes to do with energy conservation in buildings, they would be horrified. For instance, Chiras sets forth some basic rules with regard to building orientation. On the other hand, if you believe the German Passivhaus institute, you need an Excel spreadsheet with about 14 million variables to know which way to orient you dwelling and how much, and where to do glazing. I don’t know. Maybe someone can answer this for me. But we seem to have too many different standards, programs, calculation techniques and voices in the debate with regards to buildings and energy conservation in Ireland. The end result is, a lack of clarity and focus. That is my opinion having looked at it, for what it is worth. The Deutsche bank report that Ahura Mazda linked to above got that much right. The market cannot make up its mind, it is getting way too many mixed signals at the moment. BOH.

P.S. I think Richard Tol would get a giggle or two, from Chiras’s other google video, Re-Energizing America: Rescuing America from its Costly Fossil Fuel Addiction.

I have not seen a proper solution of how to prevent heat loss through double glazed windows through the use of well insulated and proper fitting blinds and curtains by Duncan or anyone else on the web.
This technology is essential to the optimum functioning of any passive solar house, and could actually lead to a reduction in the insulation thickness of the passive house, as to get a overall acceptable U value, due to the lowering of the average value by the loss through the glazing, one has to over engineer the insulation in the wall component of the house.

@Richard

About veering off-topic, point taken, apologies.

@BOH

Thanks for the info you provided – will have to return to this when I have more time to explore the topic further.

@Richard,

Point taken. “He started it” is my excuse.

Given that two interesting articles on climate science/ “green” economics hve been published recently, perhaps you could start a new thread by delivering you opinion on either, or both?

1. Paul Krugman’s article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/magazine/11Economy-t.html?hp=&pagewanted=all

2. The Economist

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15720419

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15719298

Good man toby, put it up to that Richard fella. Now, Richard. What’s your opinion? BOH.

@Richard.
On the study itself…if I read it correctly the one area with positive outcome was hospitalization cost, which reduced for the intervention group. Is it possible that this was impacted by a low number of cases? Hospitalization can have very high cost, so a few cases could distort all the averages. For the other parameters it’s indeed surprising that they had such wishy-washy outcomes, and a tribute to creative writing when you compare the exec summary to the detail.

Anyway, I read most (but I confess I didn’t read all) of the documents and didn’t see any commentary on them removing outliers that might confirm my suspicion about the hospitalization costs distorting the averages… is that a possible explanation for the single positive result?

@ Al,

check out the document published by dept. of Environment some time. It is kind of the best reference around at the moment, which speaks a lot of the difficulties and challenges you describe in doing the job correctly. The document was compiled by several experts in the industry, with experience over many years trying to achieve the highest thermal efficiency standards. Perhaps veering more towards the ‘super house’, but still with some application to many daily situations (where you rightly point out, the constraints of time come into play hugely).

http://www.environ.ie/en/Publications/DevelopmentandHousing/BuildingStandards/FileDownLoad,18749,en.pdf

Thats a good link
Thanks

@ Gregory Connor,

So the economic value of improved insulation has to take account of the fact that well-insulated houses are more comfortable places given rational budgeting. Is this accounted for in these metrics?

A couple of random comments. I believe as peoples’ livestyles and work practices change in the coming years, heck, even as the age of society in Ireland changes over the coming years, the comfort factor in a house will change in ‘weight’. As I mentioned above, in the 1970s people were frozen in their houses and society accepted it. If you go back further, in the late 19th century and first half of the 20th century, people used to wrap up in woolen garments all day long inside their homes. You only have to look at the old photographs. I remember reading Peter Schewe’s book, The Grid, where the tsars in Moscow used to import coal from Wales to power a few Edison light bulbs in the emperial palace around the turn of the 19th and 20th century. Clearly, Lenin couldn’t keep importing coal from Wales to run light bulbs. There is a very interesting account of the Soviet electrification program given in Schewe’s book. In Denmark, they do use a lot of their wind generated electricity in simple room heaters. But that is made feasible by the fact their apartments are constructed to such high standards, and the heating load is so small. In Denmark also, they have community heating systems, where they used electricity from wind generation to power heat pumps to take thermal energy out of lakes and water courses and pump it around villages and towns. Denmark is expanding that kind of idea.

But back in the 1970s or earlier, there was no idea to have young entrepreneurs, there was no telecommuting, no broadband service. All there was, was a boat or plane ticket out of the country. When I grew up in the 1980s in rural west Limerick, you would see some localities, where houses had simply been abandoned as whole families left and moved to another country. There simply wasn’t the value put on properties there was later on. In the Celtic Tiger years, the opposite happened, those same houses became valuable all of a sudden, because planning permission for a dwelling in the countryside was a non-trivial matter, and there was demand in the market. But the problem was, in the Celtic Tiger, people began to look at property as a savings plan, a pension plan, an investment plan in itself. There were dozens of TV programs explaining to people that if you retrofitted the property to look nice, it would add value to the house, and therefore you could become rich. So all the old houses in rural west Limerick (and many other locations around the country) were subjected to what I call ‘bling retrofits’. Now that the capital in the tens of thousands of euro for ‘bling retrofits’ has been spent, the weird thing is, there is a second wave coming, where the same houses are expected to be eco-retrofitted. My only question is, where is the next wave going to come from? It seems to me, to find the most effective deployment of scarce capital, Ireland needs a joined up housing retrofit policy. It was auctioneers and a sales/speculative culture that drove the first wave of ‘bling’ retrofitting. We need all of these people to talk to one another. Ideally speaking, the architectural profession is meant to be the joined up thinker in all of this. But heck, in Ireland who listens to architects? BOH.

@Gregory Connor

It’s great to see another professor wade into this debate on the merits of the Warmer Homes Scheme.