A well-heeled homeowner, who no longer has to work, has spent £900,000 converting his home so that it could achieve an Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) with an ‘A’ rating. This effectively means it generates more energy than it uses. The Telegraph has the story.
On the day Simon Buck exchanged on his home in New Malden, south-west London, he stood across the road with a notepad and started to draw.
“I literally sketched the design of a new house that was in my head,” he says. “Then I spent the next two years going about researching and working out how I was going to do it.”
He had a clear goal: to upgrade the property into the ultimate eco-home that could generate more energy than it consumed.
This would be no easy feat. The house – which was built in the early 1950s – had an energy performance certificate (EPC) rating of ‘E’, placing it within the bottom 14% of English homes for energy efficiency.
EPCs aim to measure the energy efficiency of a property and are calculated based on the amount of energy used per square metre. Not only are more energy-efficient properties cheaper to run, they can also command higher house prices and may be eligible for ‘green mortgages’, which can come with preferential rates.
For Buck, it took almost two years from buying the home for a “bargain” £1 million in July 2023 before work on the project could begin.
“We ended up blowing the budget massively in pursuit of the best possible score,” says Buck, who spent £900,000 on the renovation. “There’s £100,000 worth of tech sitting in the plant room. I went over the top with everything.
“I could’ve built the house for a third of the price but it wouldn’t be the house that we have.”
Included in the exorbitant price were the solar panels, which – alongside a 20-kilowatt battery to store some of the electricity they produce – cost around £15,000.
Buck also installed a £30,000 state-of-the-art heat pump.
His home remains at a steady temperature throughout the year, with the thermostat hovering at a pleasant 23 degrees Celsius. The 46 year-old says he is able to walk around the house in the winter wearing only shorts and a T-shirt.
Obviously, that was well worth the £900,000 price tag. Buck is 46. Assuming he lives at least another 40 years that works out at £22,500 per annum to be able to wear shorts indoors in the winter. That’s roughly 10 times or more than the average household energy costs in the UK according to British Gas.
Unfortunately for the Government and its plans, Buck’s project only serves to demonstrate that the Net Zero dream is just that, way beyond the means of both most of the population and the public purse, especially given the age of most of Britain’s housing stock. As for Buck, he plans to sell up and start on a new-build project to create an even more efficient home. Whatever lights his fire, so to speak.
The Telegraph’s story is worth reading in full.
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On a not unrelated issue, has anyone heard the government’s heat pump advert on Classic FM (and presumably other commercial stations)? It’s a simulated VoxPop with actors demonstrating their range of regional accents and who are very enthusiastic about their £7,000 heat pump subsidy from the government (get it while you can, the money-go-round ends soon! Eligibility Criteria apply, etc.). One of the punters tells us how, since he applied for the grant, the entire street has done so (why are they advertising then?) and yet another implies that they are saving money and the environment. Has anyone ever saved money on energy bills with a heat pump? How are they allowed to get away with this kind of propaganda?
EPCs are a complete joke. The assessors have minimal qualifications. The article says they are based on the amount of energy used per square metre. When my 1850’s terraced cottage was assessed a year ago (AFTER I had installed double glazed windows and doors).it was downgraded from D to E. When I queried this, the assessor said I had no hope of a rating better than E so long as I had an oil boiler, so that was a waste of money all round, Fortunately my buyer was not at all interested in the rating, but did sensibly ask how much oil I used a year, on average.
23 Celsius all year round? To me that sounds awful – way too warm!
When calculating the annual cost the author seems to have forgotten that components will need to be replaced every few years and replacement is always more expensive than initial installation, for obvious reasons.
The claimed annual savings are tiny compared with the return needed on £900,000 for any viable investment decision.
It looks like the DT has fallen for another press release.
Are you sure the 30k heat pump and the 100k control system will not need replacing within your 40 year horizon?
The tech will become old and obsolete in a trice, impossible to repair and need expensive replacements.
“Assuming he lives at least another 40 years that works out at £22,500 per annum to be able to wear shorts indoors in the winter.”
Don’t forget opportunity cost. If you put £900,000 into an annuity, it will be way more than £22,500. Or even gilts will be significantly more, let alone equities.
The items costed, in the article amount to £145k… where did the rest of the £900k go?
Virtually rebuilding the house i guess!
“Professional fees and planning applications”
Radiators need to be doubled in size since the water from the heat pump is not as hot.
Imagine the upheaval!
Plus, if the previous installation had a combi boiler, wouldn’t you need to add a hot water cylinder to provide hot water to the taps, and guarantee your hot water could regularly be heated above the safety threshold for Legionella?
He spent £100,000 on the plant room, £15,000 on the battery and £30,000 on the heat pump.
How much is that lot going to cost to maintain or replace and is this factored into his plans?
What happens when there are power cuts, when the inverter will shut itself down, the battery won’t last long with the heat pump and other stuff running.
Would anyone else have the money to take on this technological nightmare if he wishes to sell it?
A friend of ours recently bought a house with 8kw on the roof and large Tesla battery storage, enough to run the house (carefully) for over a day. Apparently when you use battery it cuts off from the mains (apart from monitoring frequency) and doesn’t a continuous grid connection. Gawd knows what it cost the previous owner but I’m guessing 25 grand.
Their house is a bog standard 1990’s build but has extra loft insulation and original double glazing all round. Their energy bills during spring and summer is minus £30 !
In a basic setup, the connection to the grid will be active at all times, and if there’s a power cut, the inverter will shut down. Apparently it’s a safety thing, to prevent potential shocks to engineers repairing a fault on the mains power lines.
With additional switches and circuitry, you can use the battery as a backup power source, but you need to be sensible about what you use, unless the power outage has occurred at a time when your PV panels are producing a lot of power. I imagine that if you’re trying to run a heat pump you’re soon going to use up what you’ve stored. Ironically, if you’re just using the electricity to run the timer on your gas-fired central heating system and ignite the boiler you’d be able to keep warm for much longer…
EPCs on domestic appliances were changed as manufacturers improved efficiency so will we see the same here. An A rating will become A+ for those generating and exporting , generally the wealthy like this chap, then eventually those in the lower bands will be banned from selling their property effectively making it worthless. There is very little difference in energy usage in the domestic appliance bands now but domestic appliances cannot export power to lift their rating.
“His home remains at a steady temperature throughout the year, with the thermostat hovering at a pleasant 23 degrees Celsius.”
Pleasant for whom? Far too hot for me, particularly in the bedrooms.
I like my lounge to be fairly warm (19 deg C suits me) and my bedroom to be fairly cold.
I also like fresh air, not living in an airless, hermetically sealed box, so I open the windows.
I also like the aesthetic of a real fire and candles in the winter evenings.
What an idiot
Could have moved to the south of France and spend a tiny fraction (200-300k euros) of that for a house that looks a lot nicer than that ugly thing. And not spend a penny on heating for 9 months of the year. Then he could have put £1.6m in Vanguard LifeStrategy 100 and lived happily ever after on an income of £40k a year. What a total numpty, chasing a totally meaningless and absurd bit of paper.
A thoroughgoing idiot.
Did I say I think he’s an idiot?
But he would have to live at the mercy of the French government and among some people with a very unusual appearance in most of the South today.
That’s a guy with too much money.
Have you been talking to Reeves?
And very little sense
Good luck getting your money back mate. Our energy bills on a 5 bed house that is always at 21 degrees, with a hot tub in the garden all year round, and me working from home, are about £5,000 a year. Let’s be generous and say that his energy bills are zero – we will assume he doesn’t cook with gas (sad man). To get your money back would take 180 years, and that’s not counting what else you could do with the money. I might pay a bit extra for an energy efficient home, but nowhere near that much.
A million pounds property in 2023 plus whatever achieving the Class A rating might do for the sale price – he could qualify for a wealth tax if he wasn’t careful.
Perhaps he’s enjoying spending all his money before the government takes it away from him?
I can think of far better ways to keep that amount of money and make it fund a lot of exciting activities.
Expensive hobby.
“… steady temperature throughout the year, with the thermostat hovering at a pleasant 23 degrees Celsius.”
You can have that with a gas-boiler.
And why would you want it that warm anyway, especially if you’re 46?
Yes, 23 degrees is uncomfortable which, presumably, is why he has to schlep around in shorts and a t-shirt in the middle of winter?
It was 23 degrees in my bedroom last night! Far too hot to sleep!
Far too warm for night. We have our window open at night except in the coldest frosts.
and
Oops.
It would be so interesting to know what kind of return he gets on his investment when the house sells. We sold a house with solar PV panels a couple of years ago, and not one of the potential buyers who came to view it expressed any interest in the panels or the tax-free income (via the Feed-In Tariff) they were generating for the owner.
When trying to arrange a bridging loan for my son each lender was keen to get a negative response to the questions about foam under the roof tiles and solar panels on the roof.
I think in that case it would be to do with the possibility of outstanding finance, on the solar panels at least – the foam insulation was another thing the government subsidised even if completely inappropriate.
He could have had a nice open fire burning five pound notes and it would have cost less…