The house is a 1930s end of terrace with solid brick walls. It has an extension to the rear built around 1990.
It was draughty, got very cold in winter as soon as the heating went off, and was expensive to run. Cold walls meant condensation and unhealthy mould. We bought it in October 2012.
The typical emissions for an old house like this are about 5 tonnes of carbon dioxide pollution a year, many times what could be considered sustainable.
So where is all that energy going?
As we have a better understanding of £1 than 1kWh, or kg/CO2, I’ve used £ currency as the units.
Note: This website was written around 2014, based on the energy costs at the time. As you will have noticed, they’ve increased a bit since. So the typical ratios are the same, but the £amounts rather higher.
In 2014, electricity was about 14p a unit, and gas 4p. In mid 2022 the price per unit of gas has doubled, and electricity nearly trebled, and they’re still rising.
So, we don’t need to worry too much about the energy for cooking; but we really need to deal with the heat loss.
The heat losses for an old house look something like this:
You can see how dramatically this energy use changes in the results graphs.