Cavity insulation or Cavity wall insulation is a home insulation technique that can help you save energy, cut carbon emissions and save money on utility bills.

One of the major forms of heat loss in a house is through the walls. Approximately a third of all heat is lost through a building’s walls and cavity wall insulation can stop this heat escaping, which will save money on utility bills by about £115 a year in the average home, as well as reducing your carbon footprint. The other major home heat loss is lost through the roof, which can be limited through the installation of Loft Insulation.

A large proportion of homes in the UK are without cavity wall insulation. Homes built from the 1920’s onwards

usually have cavity walls, which are often not insulated with cavity insulation. This means that houses are built using two layers of external walls with a gap or ‘cavity’ in the middle of the two walls. Cavity insulation or cavity wall insulation involves filling the gap or ‘cavity’ in order to insulate the building or home to save money on utility bills and in turn reduce carbon emissions.

Cavity wall insulation, like Loft Insulation is a very economically worthwhile and one of a number of simple energy saving techniques that can be easily employed in most homes, allowing anyone to save money on utility bills and reduce their carbon footprint relatively easily. On average, cavity wall insulation costs around £250 to install with the 50% subsidy available under the Carbon Emissions Reduction Target scheme, and with savings on utility bills and heating bill approximately £135 a year with the installation of cavity wall insulation, it means you will have made your money back on utility bill saving in less than two years. Having cavity wall insulation is also beneficial if you are looking at selling your home, as you will do better in your HIPS report, and your house will become more desirable to potential buyers. Having cavity wall insulation installed can also reduce carbon emissions produced by your house by 610kg a year for an average sized semi detached home. This is a great way to combat climate change, and if everyone in the UK took simple measures like this, a huge difference could be made. It is estimated that if every household who could install cavity wall insulation in the UK did, it would save the £690 million a year, and reduce CO2 emissions by a massive 4 million tonnes. This truly shows that every little bit people do can make a big difference overall.

Below is a basic diagram of how cavity wall insulation works:

Cavity Wall Insulation

Installing double glazing or energy saving UPVC windows can considerably save money on utility bills, save energy, and reduce your carbon footprint.

Double glazing works by trapping air between two window panes; this creates in insulating barrier that reduces heat loss in homes, therefore saving energy and allowing you to save money on utility bills with double glazing. Installing double glazing also lowers noise and reduces condensation, which can cause damp in buildings.

When choosing double glazing you should check for the Energy Saving Recommended double glazing badge. This ensures that the windows are to a high energy saving standard and will make sure you save money on heating bills as expected. 20% of a home’s heat is lost through its windows and energy saving double glazing can cut the heat lost out of windows by 50% and can give you considerable savings of £135 a year on your heating bills. This equates to a saving of 720kg of CO2 emissions a year.

Most double glazing windows are now certified with the energy efficiency rating of A-G by the British Fenestration Ratings Council. When buying energy saving double glazing windows, in order to save most money on heating bills in the long run you should always try to buy A rating are the closest to A rated windows as possible.

Double glazing can be expensive to install, if you are on a budget there is an alternative available called secondary glazing, this is cheaper than UPVC double glazing, but can still save energy and make considerable savings on your heating bills.

Secondary glazing is similar to double glazing as it involves fitting a second pane of glass or plastic to an existing window frame in order to reduce noise and heat loss, saving you money on utility bills and allowing you to reduce your carbon footprint. Secondary glazing isn’t as effective as double glazing, but could make heating bill savings of around £65 a year, and reducing your carbon footprint by nearly half a tonne. This is the same as not using plastic bags for a whole year!

Double glazing is not the most effective energy saving technique and will not save money on utility bills as much as other Energy Saving Techniques like Loft Insulation and Cavity Wall Insulation, but if you are considering installing UPVC double glazing, or secondary glazing as an aesthetic or as another energy saving technique then it’s a great idea, just make sure the UPVC double glazing windows and secondary glazing products you buy are Energy Saving Recommended and have a high ‘A Rating’ by the British Fenestration Ratings Council.

Feed In Tarriffs or a Feed in Tariff is an incentive structure brought in by government to encourage the uptake of renewable sources of energy. Feed in tariffs are also known as renewable energy payments, renewable tariffs and FiT’s.

The way feed in tariffs work is by passing legislation that obligate’s electricity utility companies to buy electricity from producers of renewable energy at a premium price, above market rates set by government in the legislation. This renewable electricity bought at a premium price is usually produced by homeowners and businesses who are generating on a small to medium scale.

Having feed in tariffs therefore encourages the introduction of renewable energy products by the mass population, as it brings a steady income after the initial installation. This makes feed in tariffs a sound investment option if somebody wishes to invest in the technology. In these unstable economic times, this view of feed in tariffs being a sound investment is heightened. With bank interest rates low globally and the stock market very volatile, feed in tariffs are seen by many as a safe and sound investment, as well as it being an etchical one.

Feed in tariffs have been adopted in since 1990 Germany with great success. The scheme has increased solar power production in Germany to 200 times Britain’s current capacity, and has increased wind renewable energy production to 10 times Britain’s level, despite Great Britain getting 40% of the whole of Europe’s wind capacity to produce renewable energy. Even though a premium feed in tariff price has to be paid for the renewable energy, this does not really get passed onto consumers, the average monthly bill in Germany has only increased by 1 Euro a month.

Feed in tariffs are currently being lobbied in Britain and are expected to be introduced next year once legislation has been passed. This could revolutionise the renewable energy and microgeneration industry, making renewable energy more accessible to the general public, and feed in tariffs may be viewed as a strong long term investment. If feed in tariffs are introduced, there is an estimated 100,000 jobs that will be created through the industry, including jobs like installers, manufacturing jobs and consultancy jobs.

Britain is currently behind on its renewable energy targets, and this could be the ideal way to catch up and meet its national and international renewable energy targets for wind, solar and hydro renewable energy production.

Feed in tariffs are a fantastic way to encourage investment into renewable technologies, and could help generate a great deal of power in the UK from renewable energy. Even though we see the UK as a dark and overcast place with no sunlight, the absolute potential production capacity for solar PV in the UK is actually higher than the current UK’s electricity demands; meaning Britain could be run purely by solar power alone if it wished. Let’s hope MP’s pass what could be a truly revolutionary step on the road to carbon free energy production.

Following previous posts examining Solar Panels and what different types of solar panels are, we move on to looking at some popular uses for solar panels. One of the most widely used techniques to save money on utility bills and reduce your carbon footprint is by using solar panels as part of a solar water heating system.

In the UK, solar panels have been the renewable energy product of choice for consumers, with 70% of all renewable energy products being solar panels or solar water heating systems.

Solar Water Heating systems take heat from the sun and use it to heat water. This makes domestic solar water heating systems a kind of Solar Thermal Collector system. Solar hot water heating systems heat water in domestic hot water cylinder’s to a higher temperature than it would normally sit at in the tank so that when you want to take a bath or shower, your domestic boiler only has to give a boost to heat water to a hot enough temperature for a bath or shower. On hot and sunny days, your solar water heating system can often heat to a high enough temperature so that your conventional boiler doesn’t have to do any work, saving you money on utility bills and reduce your carbon emissions and carbon footprint.

Solar water heating panels are usually installed on people’s house roof’s. On larger solar water heating systems these can often be twinned with Photovoltaic Panels to heat and provide free electricity for homes and businesses by harnessing the power of renewable solar energy.

Solar water heating brings a number of benefits:

Free Hot Water- All year round, your water will be heated for free, cutting your utility bills considerably. It is estimated that a solar water heating system can cut gas bills by 50%-70% anually.

Cut Your Carbon Footprint- As well as a solar hot water heating system being kind to your wallets, it is also great for the environment, cutting carrbon emissions and allowing you to reduce your carbon footprint considerably. An average system saves around 580kg of CO2 a year, that’s enough to fill 1000 cubic metres full of CO2!

The second type of Solar Panels are Solar thermal collectors are devices designed to collect and use the heat given off by the sun to create renewable energy. This technique of using the suns heat to heat something else in order to create renewable energy is used on a smaller domestic scale with solar water heating, but the term ‘Solar Thermal Collectors’ is generally reserved for describing large civil projects that use solar thermal collectors as a means to generate renewable energy by heating water to create steam that spins turbines. Solar thermal collectors are most commonly used in Solar Power Plants, these come in many different varieties and will be looked at in greater detail in the future.

There are numerous kinds of solar thermal collectors ranging from simple flat plate systems and evacuated tubes that heat water running through them to warm people’s bath water on homes. To large civil power generation plants that use parabolic dishes to direct sunlight onto an absorber tube in the centre that heats a steam turbine and ‘Power Towers’ that stand aloft like great sun gods in front of hundreds of mirrors that rotate with the sunlight in order to point their rays at a boiler on top of the tower that spins a steam turbine. There is a parabolic dish solar power plant in Nevada that covers 500 acres of desert and is due to be expanded even further, and there is huge a power tower is Spain. We will look at these and others in greater detail when we study solar power plants.

Solar Thermal Collector Advantages

Very high temperatures can be reached which is perfect for turning wind turbines. Solar thermal collectors are also more efficient than normal Photovoltaic Panels because they concentrate the heat. There are also cheaper than Photovoltaic Panels in the sense that large areas can be covered for less cost, as the mirrors needed are less expensive than solar cells.

Solar Thermal Collector Disadvantages

As with all kinds of solar panels, in diffused light conditions solar panels and especially solar thermal collectors do not work as well. In cloudy or hazy conditions, the diffused sunlight cannot be concentrated on a fixed point so the output of solar thermal collectors drops dramatically. This makes solar thermal collectors only suitable for places where sunlight is very common. Also to concentrate sunlight sun tracking systems needs to be installed to rotate the solar thermal collectors.

The term ‘Solar Panel’ refers to one of two devices that collect energy from the sun. The most commonly known and used device are called Photovoltaic Modules. These are the things that we are seeing more and more of on the rooftops of people’s houses and on rooftops of business premises. Solar Panels or Photovoltaic Modules are more common and more effective in hot sunny countries for obvious reasons; stronger and more sunshine means more electricity is produced. But that does not mean that solar panels are useless in less sunny countries like the United Kingdom for example, as solar panels do not need direct sunlight to work, even on cloudy days, electricity can be generated.

How do photovoltaic modules work?

Photovoltaic Modules or Solar Panels are panels made up of hundreds of smaller semi-conducting photovoltaic cells usually made of silicon. When light shines on these cells it creates an electric field across the layers, giving free solar energy in the form of electricity.  Greater amounts of electricity from solar panels will be generated if the sunshine is stronger.

Photovoltaic Cells or Modules now come in a wide range of shapes, sizes and varieties. Solar Panels of a blue or grey colour are the most widespread form of Photovoltaic Cells. But also varieties like grey solar tiles can be bought that resemble roof tiles and are therefore discreet if you do not want the aesthetics of your home spoilt. Other varieties like transparent panels can be put on conservatories and summer houses. These aren’t noticeable at all, and while not spoiling the aesthetic look of a property, they will generate free solar electricity for you all year round. Any number of solar panels can be attached together so you can have any size you wish for. Smaller, hand held solar panels are becoming more popular to carry on the go and charge things like ipod’s and mobile phones.

The strength of photovoltaic panels is measured in kilowatt peak (kWp). This is the amount of electricity generated by a solar panel in full sunlight.

What can solar panels be used for?

Solar panels or Photovoltaic Cells can be used to heat your hot water, this is explored in more details in ’Solar Hot Water Heating’

Photovoltaic Modules can create energy that can be used instantly to power electrical appliances, mainly DC appliances, or can be used to charge batteries that can be used at a later date, at night being the most obvious in the case of photovoltaic panels, for the obvious reason that solar panels can’t produce electricity at night

You can also sell energy generated by solar panels back to the national grid. Many electricity companies often pay a premium price for this renewable energy as well, so there is a good opportunity to make money here. We will look at this in greater detail in future posts.

The term ‘Solar Panel’ refers to the two devices used for collecting energy from the sun. The first and most common of these devices are Photovoltaic Modules. These are the more commonly seen solar panels that appear on homes, buildings and on a larger scale in fields to generate electricity. Photovoltaic Panels come in a variety of shapes and sizes and are suitable for many different uses. More can be read about what these are, how they work, and their uses in more detail in the post ‘Photovoltaic Modules– What are Photovoltaic Modules?’.

The second device or type of solar panel used to harness the suns energy to generate electricity are called Solar Thermal Collectors. Solar thermal collectors are different to Photovoltaic Cells because they concentrate on capturing the suns HEAT in order to generate electricity by using a variety of different techniques. This kind of solar panel device is generally used in larger commercial or civil projects, and is less suitable for domestic use due to the size and scale of the devices needed to generate electricity using this renewable solar energy technique. More can be read about Solar Thermal Collectors in greater detail in the post ‘Solar Thermal Collectors – What are Solar Thermal collectors?’.

We will expand into more detail with regards to solar energy in following the future when we look at the benefits of solar powered energy generation.