The other day I studied my Energy Performance Certificate. I didn’t even know I had one. It’s on gov.uk and all you have to do is look up your address (find energy performance certificate).
We’re in Band D it turns out. Roughly in the middle. Of course we are. It’s an 18th Century solid wall stone house with an oil-fired boiler. All we’ve done is lag the attic, install double-glazing, and solar panels and batteries. How the Government knew we had solar panels I have no idea.
The certificate also treats me to a list of suggested improvements so that we can reach that planet-saving, JSO-appeasing Band A score. Totting them up, taking the average cost cited for each, means us shelling out £39,625. And if we did that right now, we’d save (allegedly) £1,629 per annum.
That’s great, isn’t it? It’ll take 25 years to recover the outlay by which time I’ll be 91 or dead. Either way I won’t be living here. And in any case you can bet your bottom dollar I’d still be told my house was woefully inefficient by 2048 standards.
I have no objection whatsoever to replacing or upgrading any part of my life with something cheaper, less polluting, and more efficient, but the closer I looked, the more unsatisfactory the financial prospects seem to be.
Half of that £39,625 is for a wind turbine which saves only £569 per annum. In theory. On its own, that’ll take 35 years to pay back, not 25. I’d be 101. What that means in practice is that the other ‘energy-saving’ initiatives will be having to compensate for the lethargic (and theoretical) benefits of the wind turbine.
But since we have solar panels and batteries our electricity bills are already almost nil. So, we won’t save the £569 anyway. We might save £150 but only if it’s windy in mid-winter when we need it to be. The wind turbine is thus a non-starter. It’s also mechanical so how long will it last? Not 35 years I’ll bet.
I could make the most of that £569 annual saving if I bought an electric car. £20,000 for a wind turbine to save some of the power I’d need to charge an electric car for which I’d have to pay out at least another £20,000? Forget it.
The bigger saving is supposed to come from wall insulation. This would cost £9,000 and save us £702 per annum (13 years to pay off). It could cost us £14,000. Good idea? Not really. I thought it was common knowledge that sealing up old stone walls can cause terrible problems with damp. Not only that, every one of our deep window bays would need redesigning and almost every one of our radiators would have to be repositioned. All the fitted cupboards would have to be removed. The house would have to be gutted. And we’d still have a solid stone floor.
The funny thing is, there is no mention of a heat pump. Why would that be? Oh! I know – because it would cost a great deal of money and result in no savings at all, not even theoretical ones. There’s a simple explanation for that. Electricity costs three-to-four times as much per kWh as oil, wiping out the supposed greater 1:3 or 4 efficiency of a heat pump with energy transfer.
None of these calculations factors in the environmental impact of manufacturing all the ‘improvements’, maintenance, or their replacements.
Yes, I know you can fiddle about with the various options, look for the best deals, and hunt down grants. But it’s all a colossal amount of effort. And in my experience, whatever you thought something was going to cost, it will turn out to cost a great deal more. The argument of course is that I’ll have to pay out the £39,625 anyway because of my inefficient old house. Assuming I live till 91! That doesn’t alter the fact that I’d still only see the benefit in 2048.
Fact remains: the only way to live in an ultra energy-efficient house is to build a new one. You can’t stick a 1.21 gW flux capacitor in a Morris Minor and head up to 88mph into the future. It’s just set dressing.
You might wonder why I bothered with solar panels. That’s easy. The system paid for itself (we had no grants incidentally) within about seven, not 27, years, reduced our grid electricity bill, which is now £15 per month, AND pays us a feed-in-tariff (no longer available of course). Not one of these other energy efficiency initiatives comes close.
I keep thinking of Neil Oliver and his weekly monologues on GB News. His catchphrase is: “Just how stupid do they think we are?”
Am I living in a madhouse? Am I missing something? When I was a kid, I read a book called The Magic Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton (no doubt it’s been cancelled now). A cloud would appear at the top of the tree and the characters would climb the tree and enter the world so long as it was there. We seem to be trapped in one of those clouds – temporarily, I hope.
I found this quote in a Carl Sagan book (The Demon-Haunted World) but I bought the 1841 title it originally came from. Nothing could better describe our present insanity:
Every age has its peculiar folly; some scheme, project, or phantasy into which it plunges, spurred on by the love of gain, the necessity of excitement, or the mere force of imitation. Failing in these, it has some madness, to which it is goaded by political or religious causes, or both combined.
Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841)
So am I going to spend £39,625 so I can rake in the supposed savings in 2048? Not a chance. As a futile gesture it would take some beating. Six of my female neighbours have been widowed in the last three years (no Covid – all cancers and heart disease). Some of their husbands were older than me. Some younger. I’ve lost several friends to lymphoma, bladder cancer, and a brain tumour. My wife had breast cancer last year.
We’re going to enjoy the money or spend it on our various grandchildren. And luckily we have a son who lives in Mexico. If this country goes down the pan in pursuit of its absurd virtue-signalling crusade, we’ll join him there.
See you at the departure gate in Terminal 5.
Stop Press: 10 Downing Street has been placed in Band F for energy efficiency. If the Prime Minister won’t spend money to make his home more energy efficient, why should we?
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“covid ravaged care homes”. That should be neglect ravaged “care” homes. These care providers need to develop a spine and tell the government where to shove their “vaccine” mandate.
My sister-in-law, a qualified nurse, had worked at the same care home for seventeen years. In April she and three other care staff resigned on the same day, due to the owners introducing their own vaccine mandate. Since then the government has shoved its big fat nose into the sector and will no doubt be making a bad situation worse.
Indeed, that is the only viable response.
If Care Homes don’t refuse the industry will collapse anyway. Of course this has always been part of the plan. The devastation in the wider population as care homes start to close for good will be immense.
Possibly some might, but I suspect that many are terrified of the prospect of losing any insurance cover or being sued to bankruptcy by the usual flocks of ambulance-chasing legal vultures.
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I’m sure that’s true. But we know the “vaccines” don’t work anyway, and staff will still test positive (as many vaccinated people are doing now). And the deaths of elderly residents will still be classed as covid deaths even if they’re not, by lazy, frightened GPs who haven’t even clapped eyes on the patient. I doubt any lessons will have been learned from lockdowns #1 and #2.
It’s not that lessons aren’t been learned. It’s that the same people with the same agenda are still running our show.
So, mandatory jabbing for the relatives then?
Oh yes. And will they be paid for their services? Or get a discount on care home fees? Doubt it.
Indeed they should be! It would be a turn up to be allowed more that a 45 minute visit anyway.
Just say no.
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I’m going to say a dreadful thing.
I’m glad my father’s dead.
I’m glad, because he spent his last two years in a care home that was as good as a care home can be, and it was still bloody awful.
The thought of him in a short-staffed killing home is so utterly, utterly dreadful that the reality would have driven me mad.
Because it would be no use my volunteering to help out, would it? Better for them to watch my father dying amidst neglect and chaos than to allow an unvaxxer near him.
If you have a God, pray hard for the victims of this savagery,
I felt the same about my father, who fortunately died before this shitshow began. It would have killed my mother not to have been able to visit him and knowing he was being neglected by a skeleton staff, PPE’d up to the max.
I’m sorry about your experience with your father. But if his care was ‘bloody awful’, then it wasn’t ‘as good as a care home can be’, speaking from my personal knowledge.
And that is the point – this sort of provision is demanding at the best of times, and depends upon the skills of the staff and management. If the government goes poncing around with this idiocy, it can only make the achievement of high standards more and more difficult.
It would be bad enough even if the clams about the snake oil were based in reality. Given the known problems with provision, the only rational conclusion is that the government are intent on destroying the sector and forcing care responsibility back onto relatives.
It wasn’t the staff’s fault really. He was in the dementia wing with other demented people (much worse than he was), and that’s what convinced me that dementia is worse than death. The staff were in an impossible situation.
What it’s lime now I really, really can’t bear to imagine.
The owners of care homes will appreciate some free labour. Just as firms appreciate those working-from-home saving on their office costs, all that electricity and water…
Just as the councils welcome all the people litter-picking….
You mean the residents’ families who weren’t allowed to see their loved one’s for 18 months?
During the first lockdown, the care package providers for my m-i-l told us that if the family continued to visit her at home then they would withdraw the care package for her. This was in spite of the fact that we were following the government guidelines on supporting vulnerable people (and even wearing masks). As a result, we didn’t see my m-i-l for six weeks. The care providers then experienced a staffing problem so we were called in to help put my m-i-l to bed at night. One day we were called to ask if we could help get her up at 7 o’clock the next morning.
It appears that the rules could be ignored when it suited.
Yes, but if the relatives haven’t been double jabbed themselves, they won’t be able to contribute voluntary care, will they?
Well thats another way of achieving the world Governments aim of reducing the population. Well done to Boris Johnson and all his supporters
vaccine mandates are irrelevant not least because the vaccines don’t stop people catching and spreading the virus. why not just sanitise the air within the care homes with UV, heat treatment or other within the ventilation ducting – no viral load = no spread
Oh and give the inmates ivermectin or HCQ or whatever protection treatments recommended by real doctors like Kory or McCullough – for more effective than the theatre of ineffective but ”look we are doing something” vax mandates
sanitised air = no/low viral load build up
Because more would live?
This presupposes that the relatives will all be double vaccinated though.
How is that going to work?
I bet almost all have been forced into that already.
The huge rise in deaths at home running for many months now suggests
i. More people choosing to die at home of terminal diseases because of the heartless rules in homes and hospices.
ii. More keeping the elderly at home until it is absolutely impossible to continue, or eschewing homes entirely because of heartless rules there.
iii. A possible/probable link to jab linked heart events, mirrored in the rise of ambulance call outs for heart attacks. It is going to be interesting to see what rises in which conditions have happened over the year ending when jabs began.
iv Perhaps suicides, though inquests lag badly and that’s more doubtful.
If the government wanted to help it could offer to pay the heating bills for all care homes, and for all old folks, over the next winter, thus allowing them to keep the windows open to ensure adequate ventilation. But I guess that’s too simple for them.
Bit of a CO2 emissions dilemma for them there.