More Than Living

Discovering how to balance energy efficiency and style in a Victorian house

In part two of his invest­ig­a­tions into how to make his Vic­torian ter­raced house more energy-​​efficient without com­prom­ising its fea­tures and char­ac­ter, our guest blog­ger, Simon Mustoe, finds a few sur­prises cour­tesy of the Energy Saving Trust (EST).

Last week, I went public with a homeowner dilemma: I whole­heartedly sub­scribe to energy-​​saving prin­ciples but am not really pre­pared to do any­thing that com­prom­ises the char­ac­ter of my Victorian-​​era house. I lit­er­ally couldn’t bear to watch someone rip­ping out the ori­ginal wooden sash win­dows in favour of double-​​glazing, or cov­er­ing up a beau­ti­ful ori­ginal wooden floor with carpet. In fact, I think I had uncon­sciously decided that there really wasn’t much I could do to con­serve energy in a house that was built over 100 years too early to bene­fit from environmentally-​​conscious build­ing prin­ciples. Appar­ently, the first step in beat­ing a prob­lem is to admit that one exists, so I’m facing up to my pre­vi­ous assump­tion and put­ting it to the test.

Given that the Energy Saving Trust is host­ing Energy Saving Week I made it my first port of call. A little dig­ging around its web­site led me to a list of ways to insu­late the walls and floors of a house. I was pleas­antly sur­prised by what I found. For instance, I hadn’t real­ised that I could actu­ally insu­late solid walls, a fea­ture typ­ical of Victorian-​​era houses. Appar­ently I can – both inside and out, although doing both would count as excess­ive. What’s more, each option would save in the region of two tonnes of carbon diox­ide (CO2) emis­sions each year, which equates to around ?

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Ori­gin­ally posted 2009-​​10-​​22 01:51:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

Tags: Energy, Energy conservation, Energy Saving Trust, Environment, Insulated glazing, Sash window, Terraced house, Victorian architecture
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