|
The green deal has been a flop IMO. I think pretty much anyone can sign up if they need some kind of energy saving measure. In a nutshell, your house is made more energy efficient by various means (insulation, new boilers, green energy etc.) and the savings made to your energy bills are used to pay back a loan taken against your property at about 7% interest.
So your bills don't go down and you get a tie on your property at a not particularly good interest rate.
If you can afford it, get the work done yourself with a cheaper loan.
We looked into it because we have (had) some knackered and non-double glazed windows, two very old boilers and no green measures. We already replaced a leaky roof with one with OTT insulation, and put a new kitchen window and back door in replacing rotting old ones.
January we are replacing the most important of the 5 single glazed (inconveniently) triangular windows in the house.
2014 we intend to get solar, but we need to have an EPC in band D first to get the feed-in-tariff, so we have to do something about the boilers also. We're seriously looking at a biomass boiler. If the RHI (renewable heat incentive) happens as anticipated, we may be looking at getting a cheaper loan than the green deal and with the RHI payments on the biomass boiler paying back the loan, we should be able to get a loan big enough to have solar installed as well and have the whole thing paid off in 7 years. I.e. a free biomass boiler and solar panels. We just have to have enough good credit to get a fairly large loan.
The RHI is worth investigating if you are thinking about this kind of thing. It's coming in for domestic in April 2014.
Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) - Increasing the use of low-carbon technologies - Policies - GOV.UK |
|