Finding the chase and cutting to it

This is a bit of a departure from my normal sort of post, but with the changes going on in our place, I wanted to cover making a house a home.

Over the years, there have been many articles written in many types of publications (like this one) and TV shows talking about style, sometimes about insulation, sometimes about other considerations.

But can I be brutally honest, please?

In a bedroom, you may want some blinds for extra light control or privacy, but nothing is as cozy or insulating as a pair of curtains.

My beloved and I had to swap some light busting venetian blinds in our gable end window in our bedroom to fit a French door in a few weeks. What a difference it has made. My beloved is a wiz at putting up shelves and curtains, so having bought the pole and ready made curtains, he did the honours and he hung them yesterday (about a half hour planning task and about an hour to do).

Swapping dark blinds for “soft-white” curtains means we have a “reflective” surface when the curtains are closed. Using eyelet curtains means it’s a full and luxurious look without costing a fortune for a pair of ready made curtains. Having had them installed last night, our room felt so much warmer and the insulating properties spoke for themselves with much less power being used to retain the heat in the room.

While they are a little long currently, it is so much easier to shorten a pair of ready made curtains than start from scratch.

Curtains are one of those really time consuming things to do yourself, and really needs a dedicated workspace, if you are living with a family larger than one. To look right, they need to be perfectly made, lined for cutting out light and heat loss, and all that is very tricky to get right. The bigger the window, the harder it is. For any window with two curtains, it is at least a day of effort because you do it once in a blue moon unless that is your day job.

Eyelet curtains were our choice because we didn’t want a traditional look in our bedroom, but somehow, they look a bit more polished than tab tops. It is also significantly cheaper than traditional curtains with the heading tape. As we’re happy with the results, if I get a spare couple of weeks off next year, I will buy some fabric and make my own pair. As a quick, cheap, and easy solution pre-made, I’m a big fan.

One thing I didn’t know until this round of decorating, was that you can iron your newly bought and packaged curtains. In fact, where we bought these featured that on the youTube video forming the instructions.

I have always just let them drop. You learn something new every day.

Of course, this is a litle prep before the main work is done, so we have moved some furniture ready for the window to be turned into a French door. It will take a couple of days to do the work and another couple or so for the plaster to go off so we can rehang the curtains for the last time. Let me put it this way, we’ll sleep somewhere else in our home until the room is ready. Then I will share the final, completed look – hopefully having taken a few inches off the bottom of the curtains by then!

OK, I’ll bite, how do you shorten pre-made curtains?

This is the downside to buying pre-made if your window does not fit the “standard” sizes made. Ours didn’t, being a wide but short (comparatively, apparently) French door.

The downside to buying the eyelet curtains is that you have to shorten from the bottom, which I think is much more fiddly to get right.

If you know the curtain will need shortening, before hanging the curtains, take one down to your local haberdashery and find a suitable thread – match a shade darker than the curtain, especially if it is a plain fabric as thread always sews up lighter when the job is completed. Hold the thread against the fabric and check disappears when it is a single strand.

Hang the curtains and see how they drop (so to speak). If not ironing them, leave them to drop the creases, which takes three weeks or so for our set.

With a friendly partner, fold up the bottom of the curtains so you have 5mm or so off the ground. Pin at one end of the fold and repeat the other end of the curtain. Remove the curtain and pull the bottom of the fold tight and pin the curtain in the middle.

Press the fold into the curtain using a damp tea-towel, and pin all the way along. This gives you the line along which you will sew, I don’t tend to cut the curtains down as this makes two jobs and when someone is finished with the curtains, they make great dust sheets for decorating.

Do the sewing. If you have folded the curtains up, the original hem line will give you a straight line along which you can sew. With thicker fabric, I do this by hand, a simple running stitch, ensuring I take out the pins as I go along the line.

Rehang the curtain and do the second one. Here is the results (bear in mind, the creases need to drop out fully).

Bear in mind, anything being done by hand is going to take a while. If the window is wide, you are looking at around ninety minutes a metre, probably longer if you don’t sow regularly. Machine sowing is quicker, between fifteen and forty-five minutes a metre, mostly for the preparation, but if your curtain is thick with a lining, that is not going to be possible on a standard machine.

Hope you have a very cozy and Merry Christmas.

I’ve taken a day off, what with all the work to get the house ready for the photos we promised the window company, to get the house clean for guests over Christmas.

The house is deserted as Jon is working in the office today, so I also need to look after myself. Not a problem with the trusty microwave.

My unit has a “programmable” feature – I can combine 3 steps to a function. As I am reheating a meal later, I can plan a stop at noon. Set the first stage of the cooking for a couple of hour’s time, then the time to reheat the meal (about 4 minutes) then a minute to stand the food. Now I can clean, knowing there is a tasty and nutrious lunch waiting for me at noon on a warm plate, all economically cooked in the microwave…

I love when people say this, because the thing I’m interested in is the total cost of ownership.

Since lockdown, we’ve kept up many of the dishes and techniques we learnt when we had more time. And when you are doing the cost, you really should take your time into consideration. When you are money rich but time poor, that sum may come in favour of buying pre-made food (aka ready-meals).

Some things we do, we do regardless of what we’re earning. I have never bought a batter mix, or premade yorkshire pudding. Or a white or bread sauce mix. Because they do not cost in if you own a pair of scales – when you set up home you need a means of weighing out ingredients! That one investment will pay itself back in no time.

Really?

Yes. You need a pair of scales and a 500ml jug as a minimum. Some just use volumes to combine ingredients in the right proportions (many American recipes give everything in cups and spoons. I don’t, I often use metric units, and kilograms and grams are the scientific units for mass.

Let’s have a look at the total cost of ownership for a cheese soufflé. I’ve chosen this recipe because it is often a choice in the ready meal section and it is deemed an tricky meal to get right, using techniques many believe are difficult to master. It is easy to see why you would choose this ready meal over making it yourself.

Ingredients.

Ingredients	Quantity in recipe	Unit size	Cost per unit	Cost of item in recipe
Cheese	40g	150g	£2.00	£0.53
Cornflour	14g	250g	£1.30	£0.07
Butter	14g	200g	£2.95	£0.21
Eggs	2	6	£3.40	£1.13
Milk	75ml	1136ml	£1.25	£0.08

This makes the ingredients worth £2.03.

The cooking takes me 30 minutes. I use my hand blender, and either a manual cheese grater or a food processor attachment for my hand blender. Every utensil cooking this item goes in the dishwasher – I have included packing the dishwasher in this calculation.

The microwave is used to make the roux for the soufflé. It is used for 90seconds at 1000W => 0.025kWh at £0.25 per kWh, that’s £0.01.

We’ve also got 18 minutes in the oven function for the microwave. My combination oven uses 1.38 kW when it is used as an oven. I’m going to add the 7 minutes to warm the oven up – essential for a soufflé. So our power cost is (25/60)*1.38 kWh => £0.14.

So our total is the cost of the power and the cost of the ingredients. That’s £0.15 + £2.03 = £2.18. Excluding our time.

A cheese soufflé from Waitrose is £4.50 for the same quantity. It takes 18 minutes in the oven – we tend to use the microwave for the job. So the power is (18/60)*1.38 kWh = £0.10. Giving a total of £4.60, excluding our time (about 5 minutes).

Basically the question is, is my time worth £2.42?

Yes, that really is the question. The washing up or running the dishwasher happens what-ever meal you have. I would also put to you that the ingredients used here can be used for many different meals, where as the cheese soufflé from Waitrose can only really be a cheese soufflé.

Sometimes, it is really good to have some nutrition that isn’t made from involved recipes like a cheese soufflé. Beans on toast, a sandwich or piece of toast that is so simple you can do it with both hands tied behind your back.

Some say that you can have such emergency food through batch cooking. This needs planning – I am not sure I have ever been that into planning my meals in advance! Some food works well being reheated: some does not.

It takes more than planning. Containers for storing the food well, and somewhere to put the containers. Washing up and storage when there is no food in the container.

Then you have to eat the food before it goes past its best. We try not to cook more than we need for the vast majority of our meals.

Roast dinner and Christmas dinner are the exceptions. Mostly because we cook meat. An animal died to feed us – not eating all of it is wasteful.

How do you run things?

Today is Saturday 20^th December, and I have plans.

My beloved is doing his turn stewarding a game at our local football club, and I am aiming to achieve the following:

1. Get some food in, to finish off Christmas dinner but also something tasty for me to have for lunch.
2. Shorten the premade curtains in our bedroom.
3. Bake some tea cakes for my beloved’s return from stewarding – in December it can be a little chilly out there.

Ideally, the aim was to do a little more, but those were the big three. So, how did I do?

Well, I woke up at 5:30 am and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I had breakfast, grabbed the bottles and glassware to recycle and headed for the supermarket by 07:22. What a game changer – the shelves were stocked (ours is not a 24 hour store), and few customers were about. So much room in the carpark! Even being as inefficient as I was, I was out and home by 08:25. By 08:45, everything was stowed away and I was enjoying a cup of tea.

While in the supermarket, I realised I didn’t have any thread to shorten the curtains – so my beloved drove me to the haberdashery’s as soon as it opened with the un-pinned curtain and I got some colour matched thread.

We got home, and Jon finished off shortening the pole enough to put the end caps on and I started sewing. Not trivial, not least because it had to be done by hand, so I had to relearn how to do a back-stitch and thread a needle, and cast on… In the end the 2m28 curtain took nearly four hours to finish and get back on the pole. These were not fun filled times and I have to say, I should have set timers for breaks rather than distance marks – when I got tired, I made far more mistakes being a beginner.

Jon went off to the football and I stopped for lunch at 12:30. I took an hour’s break, not least because the low sun was causing visibility issues and until the curtains are hung, I have no means of blocking the light!

While doing this, I laid out the ingredients for the tea cakes and generally prepped by setting an alarm – Jon was due back around 18:00, and it would be good to have them ready for him to have when he had changed out of his uniform.

Started the third round of sewing – by which time muscle memory is kicking in, and finally I am making some progress. The alarm goes off to make the dough for the tea cakes.

Fourth stint of sewing and I am done – it is now 16:45 and I have 27 minutes before the dough needs to be put in the oven for the first raising.

I have a cup of tea and watch some TV. Which inspires me to make use of some ingredients that are in the fridge into a tasty cheese soufllé. Which is not the best bit of planning.

For a start, I rarely make either the tea cakes or the soufflé. It is not an elegant display of culinary skill those both dishes rise well and taste delicious.

I am also, by this point, seriously knackered. Thank goodness for the dishwasher to lift the load off our shoulders by sorting out the mess.

Tomorrow is Christmas Ham day. But this is a well practiced affair. Today was one of those days when I remember why I am a professional worker and not a full time home maker.

For many, the costs of producing energy efficient good, thermal insulation, or green power consumption, far outweighs the benefits. In the past, Number crunching part 1 has examined how much carbon was used in producing our batteries and solar cells, and whether that effort made a return – is the juice worth the squeeze? – so to speak.

We should look at the same numbers for the replacement windows. Although, can I put a caveat here that the windows were failing, whatever we did to preserve our thermal envelop was necessary. We just took the opportunity to go the full way with triple glazing.

We replaced twelve windows with triple glazing at 110-140 kg CO₂, let’s call that 125 kg CO₂ a pop => 1,500 kg CO₂. And one double glazed window, coming in at 110kg CO₂, so our total is 1,610 kg CO₂ for the windows.

We then have 3 UPVC French doors, two triple glazed and one double glazed. The triple glazed ones are 140 kg CO₂/m², so that’s 5.4 m² * 140 kg CO₂/m² = 768.18 kg CO₂. The double glazed unit is 110 kg CO₂/m², so 301.785 kg CO₂. French doors in total is 1,069.965 kg of CO₂.

The aluminum patio door is harder to judge, because it depends on how the aluminum was sourced, but 140 kg CO₂/m² is probably fair. So, that one cost is 743.4 kg in terms of CO₂. So all the doors contributed 1,813.365 kg of CO₂.

The total for the windows and doors was 1,610+1,813.365 kg CO₂ or 3,423.37 kg CO₂. Or 3.423 Mg CO₂.

In the UK, 124g CO₂ (or 0.124 kg CO₂) is generated per 1 kWh of electricity produced. That means to break even, our windows need to save 27.6 MWh of electricity.

Given our pre-window expenditure of 3.9 MWh on heating, we can expect it to be 3.25 MWh, (an estimated save of 650 kWh over the year), they should break even in their life-time, hopefully within 10½ years.

This is a reasonable estimate, we may do better, it’s hard to tell until we start to see it in action. It also takes into account we had to replace our existing windows either this year or next and took the opportunity to upgrade the performance. If we’d gone for double glazing everywhere and retained our layout, the cost would have been less both in terms of money and CO₂ produced, but the efficiency gains would have been much less too, so the returns would have possibly come in during the life-time of the product.

There’s so much to take into account here, not least because of when we’re doing the replacement. It meant we got a great price on the windows, but losing our thermal envelop in each and every room of the house meant we had to use electricity to restore the thermal levels – the temperature in each and every room.

This means I may have to play about with November’s numbers to get a blended estimate, if I want to do an annual comparision pre- and post- replacement windows. Or I may just exclude November. Both would be reasonable approaches, the later probably being much more meaningful and understandable. In the rooms where the windows had already failed, it is already much easier to get the rooms up to temperature and to maintain them there.

Hopefully, this article gives you the means to work out if it is worth the replacement for you and your carbon footprint!

NB: Stephen Hawking’s editor said Prof Hawking lost sales for every mathematical formula published in his book. Please be forgiving, as this is the easiest way to explain what is happening regarding payback.

Also, Number crunching part two is coming in the first week of January, when the numbers are all in for the year.

We take how warm our houses are for granted, but as someone who took advantage of a cheap deal if we got our windows replaced during the “autumn” (autumn my #@!£$), it is interesting to see why we keep windows and doors closed while it is 5°C outside!

Our Tado radiator valves and thermostats all tell you the temperature in your individual rooms…

Our super-controllable house is in “frost protection” mode during the fitting times, because the heat is just leaching out of holes in the walls where the old windows used to be. Our bedroom was 19°C this morning but with the front door open and a window missing in the spare room, the temperatures soon start to drop. The internal doors are thankfully insulating, but there is no point heating a couple of rooms when the corridors are dropping in temperature this quickly every time you open the room’s door.

We can see the drop in one of the last to still be heated, my beloved’s office:

We can see from the readings from the smart radiator valve thermostat that the heating came on this morning for his office about 06:30. Even with the heat pump, the temperature rose to its setting of 19°C. All the cold air rushing past his office door then brought that temperature down to 18°C.

In a room with the actual window out, that is exacerbated. I switched off that room’s thermostat before the work started, naïvely thinking that would be enough. Obviously, it wasn’t, and the impact has been huge.

Why go to all this bother, then? You had double glazing!

Our double glazing was failing after 16 years. This first window to go was the one I had repaired (remember the extra caulking), because it had a 3mm gap between the window pane and the frame!

This one is having a tilt and turn window, which is more popular in Europe according to our window fitter and our son, respectively, for pretty much the reasons the Europeans have them installed. Our south face of the house bakes in the summer sun. Having a window upstairs we can open inwards means we can fit external shutters, allowing us to shield during the summer heat and recover during the night. Instead of opening the window to vent, we can tilt it at night with the shutter shielding us from moths and other insects.

We don’t need this downstairs, because we can walk to the outside of the window and pull a shutter closed, but upstairs, we need to do something different.

The triple glazing is to reduce our u-value further – vital for the north face of the property during the winter. U-values are the rate at which heat is lost from a surface and is dependent on a few things such as materials, air gaps, and is measured in Watts per square meter a degree Kelvin or W/m²K. (Kelvin’s are used here as they are the scientific unit (also known as the SI unit) for temperature, unlike the Celsius unit and you then don’t need a pesky ° symbol when typing this out). The lower the u-value, the better. It’s one of the things measured on an EPC (Energy Performance Certificate) report.

Our old units, were starting to fail (apparently they were made in 2009 and installed later that year, looking at Google Map’s “see other dates”). No-one lived in the house until late 2011, early 2012. By the time we had moved in May 2013, some of the fixings and hinges had begun to rust. The vaccum units started to fail last year – but with the boiler failing, we had other priorities!

Windows are never as good as brick at keeping a house warm. But on top of good units, having them fitted by someone who knows what they are doing is essential. Any gaps round the windows will let any heat poured into the room find an escape route. I know people who moved into a house that had had the windows (not UPC ones, just wooden frames) installed upside down. When a window is installed upside down, rain pours into closed windows from the top. A good fitter is vital otherwise it can all go horribly wrong.

One of my pet peeves is trickle vents. Required by building regulations, they poke a hole through your sealed units. Doh! The idea of them is to “let hot damp air vent when you can’t open a window” but all they do is chill the windows allowing said damp air to condense on your glass panes. Eight months of the year, in the UK, they are just causing more issues than they solve, and the other four months of the year, we can just open the window!

That aside, it’s really exciting to be fixing our window problems for the next 25-30 years.

By the time you read this, all the work will be complete and you’ll only have to wait a week to see the finished result. We’re at the point now with 80% of the upstairs windows fitted though not completely fixed and finished.

What about the temperature inside your house at this point?

Good question. Let’s have a look at that.

The kitchen and Jon’s office have kept their temperatures up – the benefits of a closed door, good insulation, and windows not being messed around with. The spare room is, frankly, a bit parky. As is the landing – having dual aspects and open doors here. My office has lost a few degrees too, but is looking great with its new window. Our main bathroom has also been done but it’s thermostat isn’t a smart one, so isn’t showing the 12°C on the room’s thermometer.

Most of the removal and refitting has been done today, so I am gently starting up the heating. Upstairs that means the ensuite and bathroom in our spare room – our home from tomorrow night for a few days – will start to get warm again.

Sounds like hell.

But it should be worth it. I will do a deep dive analysis on the figures at a later date.

Though, as hinted, this is about more than just improving the u-values. Our house was completed in 2012. Yet, “cottage-style” windows were installed. By choosing modern style windows, we should be improving the aesthetic too and allowing light to fill the rooms.

Converting our bedroom’s window to a French door (with balustrade initially) will let in more light and allow the courtyard to be see from anywhere in the room.

The same goes for the large patio door in the lounge. It shares the same view, albeit from the ground floor. Only, the small French door and window the other corner of the room meant the courtyard could only be enjoyed from a few points in the room. The window area is increased but so too is the wall area – and corners, we will gain two big corners in the room.

It’s hard to describe the benefits of walled corners in a room. A place to put a cabinet or a chair, a set of shelves, or just a piece of wall. The 1960s architecture in the UK often featured wall to wall windows. Why, oh why?

There are some wonderful rooms that have round the corner windows, with a great view, this can be stunning. But it needs really careful thought about how you enjoy those views.

We’re lucky in that our lounge is really open, a basic rectangle that can be divided into zones. A reading zone, TV zone, small table for a snack in the evening and a music listening zone. With the new patio door, the courtyard is now a feature against all these activities.

One of my favourite things about the courtyard is the fact there is a flower in bloom at every stage of the year. Whether chrysanthemums and a clemetis in October, November, December, a Christmas rose or snow drops in January and February, bluebells in March and April, Wisteria in June and July, honeysuckle and weigela in July and August, clemetis in July, August, and September. Something is happening somewhere for you to look at. Whether in the garden or in the lounge.

Motives are what define us. They allow us to get up in the morning and get a boogie on rather than languish in bed – and believe me, we have all had those mornings where staying in bed and pulling the covers over our heads makes the most sense!

For many, their jobs allow them to live. They do not enjoy what they do, it is simply a means to an end. When I was growing up, my parents allowed me to see that if I wanted them, I had options.

It doesn’t mean there haven’t been impossible days at work (or in real life), but even then, I have had choices about what I do with those days, how I act and carry myself. Hopefully, I have always done that to the best of my ability.

Is this going anywhere? Or is it just a 50+ person being a boomer?

Firstly, I’m a Gen-X person, not a boomer, but whatever my age, our motives are what drives us. Secondly, I got to go to a Christmas fair yesterday and met some amazing people living their dreams. That is always inspiring: indeed, the experience inspired me to write this piece, as we have spent the past couple of weeks achieving a bit of a dream of ours. Albeit, nearly at the end of what seemed a long journey while we where travelling!

We’re coming to the end of our window installation, well, it was a replacement window exercise for all but three of our windows, which were radically transformed.

We got a bit of a bargin because of the time of year we did it, but it was still a big job and once the building work is done, our bit of the story will begin.

Building work is not typical in having your windows replaced. We have a bit of experience of doing this, having turned an existing window into French doors, which can be transformational. Letting more light and much more of a view into any room. It also created some corners in a room… For a modern house, it can make a feature for surprisingly little effort if you have a lintel that’s at the right height.

This time, we turned a window in our bedroom into a pair of French doors, and took a window and a pair of French doors near two corners of a wall in our lounge and turned them into a patio door in the centre of that wall opening into a courtyard garden. We thought it was an obvious thing for the architect to have done but it was never in the previous owners drawings for the house, so we had to do a bit of a rennovation and found a company willing to do it. The work went smoothly but took some planning, which always takes time.

Can I confess to something? I love painting walls. I do the prep I need to, including masking tape (a terribly stressful part of the operation), but the rhythmic dipping of a paint-pad in a tray of emulsion, smoothing the paint onto the wall, and the end result when it is finally dry. I do this without music: just me and the wall to be done. Of course, I am going to be doing two walls with two doors on them – masking tape is going to take a good hour of the prep work. There’s a ceiling to do too. It’s a big job – a good weekend’s worth. Bliss!

The balustrade for the upstairs French door is being constructed and fitted as I type this. The render will need refreshing (and some patching). But unlike previous years, we should be able to do that leaning out from our safe doorway.

Just this moment, the world feels safe and hopeful. I can see the thaw of last night’s frost steaming off the fence in the courtyard as the noon day sun hits its peak in teh sky on this crisp December day. Hope you’re having a great day where-ever you are.

OK, last weekend the clocks changed and I did have that extra hour in bed last week. But I am still working on summer time, so when I woke up early this week, I seized the day.

My beloved husband has taken up a lot of the slack since I got a bad bug last October (October 2024). It not only knocked me for six for the couple of days I was really ill (temperature, upset stomach, the works), but I have really struggled the past year. That includes much of the outdoor work: sweeping the leaves, weeding, and the other smaller jobs I tended to do.

Today, I got up and huzzled. I knew we were heading out for lunch later, but got a loaf on for this evening. Packed the dishwasher, plugged in the car to charge, and prepped for the day.

A beautiful, crisp but not freezing autumn day. I sorted out my clothing, keys, equipment, and started the leaf sweeping job that is essential this time of year. Only to find my air sourced heat pump was a perfect collector of fallen leaves. That took 15 to 20 minutes to sweep up as many as I could but it got me thinking as I did the rest of the garden.

The final bit was finishing off by the shed and I spotted the old remains of a raised bed – mostly rotted, but enough wood, I thought, that could provide a protective run around the heat pump. A physical low barrier would stop a percentage of the leaves collecting while allowing air to pass into the system, so it could work well. It would also be easy to pull apart as soon as the leaves stop dropping.

So I built it. I will have a look next week and see if it worked.

Doesn’t sound lazy at all, to me!

I’m getting to that. To support our local hospitality industry, we try to eat out two or three times a month.

Our first choice was fully booked, so we headed to our local town’s quai and had pizza watching the clouds chase across the sky, eating pizza, sharing a single glass of wine and large bottle of mineral water, and a salad. It could have been any port anywhere in the world.

We then waked back through town, looking in shop windows, soaking up the sun, basically busy doing nothing.

I’m a little tired as the sun sets today, but feel like I have made a small difference to my world, and am very relaxed and happy.

I’ve also managed to lose 7kg over the past six months and hit my target weight. I have done this by eating less, substantially less chocolate and treating hypos. Along with the energy levels, my blood glucose levels have behaved themselves far more predictably. So, that’s another boost to my feeling of contentment.

Any one who says it is easy to lose weight is making a mockery of the human condition – we are the decendents of people who had periods of starvation and feast and we live in a world of plenty.

We eat feast food every day, sugar like it is going out of fashion. So to all those others out their who are trying to lose weight too, keep up the great work. You can do it, if I can.

It’s 2.6°C at this moment in time and I don’t feel too much of a whimp saying it’s cold outside.

Today is day three of our “replacement windows, making a hole bigger, and centrering a window in an existing wall” adventure or our trek into how cold can we go in our house?

It’s going to be worth it, but I sincerely believe the gentlemen doing the work are earning what they are being paid. It is so cold, I am wearing treble layers and gloves inside.

Of course, we’re doing our best to retain what heat we can. Making the most of the kitchen being completely vented, I started the automated cleaning on the cooker. Fuggy smoke from the cooker went straight through the open holes and the heating was off anyway…

The UPVC windows have three fitting stages, the last being the application of some glue to finish off the trim. The easiest way to vent this is to open the windows for 30-60 minutes, depending on the wind. Off goes the heating in the room and set a timer for when to reclose and reheat!

Even with retaining the heat, raising the temperature from 8.8°C back to 16°C is hard work. Over the build we have spent far more than our usual 8 kWh a day on heating, to put it mildly.

Our “base usage”, lighting, cooking, EV charging, etc, is typically 7 kWh a day – a little heavy but we both work from home. Our usage yesterday was 54 kWh. And we were both out for the majority of the day – 42.5kWh was on the heating, 6 kWh was spent charging the car.

You should have done the windows first – then that heat would have come from nice, cheap gas!

Not really, because that 8 kWh of electricity would have been 12 kWh of gas a day and the 42 kWh would have been over 60 kWh! We would have saved money on heating the house when we’d moved to the heat pump but the tasks would still have burnt a lot of gas to heat the house.

The multiplier effect is still making a difference – the 42.5nkWh of electricity translated to 144 kWh of heat – an SPF of 3.4 (it wasn’t that much warmer yesterday, to be honest). We generated 4.9 kWh from the roof yesteday too, which covered a 10th of that power used.

Ideally, the work would have been on a warmer day of the year. But once it’s done, it’s done 🙂

The big thing I have found with this process is how quickly the house has got back up to temperature – the image above is four hours after the previous picture. The windows vary in their u-values between 1 W/m²K and 1.1 W/m²K for the triple glazing and a pair of south facing double glazed french door who have a u-value of 1.5 W/m²K – but we have paired these with heavy duty curtains and external shutters which should help reduce our loses. The consideration with this window was its ability to make the best use of solar gain during the winter – something triple glazed windows can struggle with.

Not long now before the job is completed. Of course, that is only the begining in terms of our responsibility in getting it finished. Painting needs to be completed once the plaster is dry and I really need to hem our new curtains for that set of French doors!

The standard says,

• Space heating <= 15 kWh/m²/yr,
• an airtightness limit of 0.6ACH@50Pa (air changes per hour at 50 Pascals),
• total primary energy demand <= 60 kWh/m²/yr.

For our house, at 244m², this works out at:

• Heating <= 3,660 kWh over the year.
• Total primary energy need <= 14,640 kWh over the year.

This year is a little weird, because we had the windows replaced while it was 2.5°C. But our heating is currently 3,270 kWh and total energy use is 8,100 kWh.

So, getting close to that ideal.

Why work this out? Well, that is what EPC (energy performance certificates) work towards; they tell you how far you are from the Passivhaus standard in terms of the energy efficiency, and give you an idea of how far you have to go!

These days, it’s important information to have, not least because it is what our energy companies do to work out what your direct debit needs to be.

Because we’re only using electricity, and electricity is £0.2527 per kWh. So, so far this year we have spent £(0.2527*3,270) or £826.33 on our heating and hot water. Our total usage has been £2,046.87, so outside of our heating, we’ve spent £1,220.54.

Only we haven’t, have we? Our solar generation has taken 3.7 MWh off thia total. That means we’ve only bought 4.4 MWh or 4,400 kWh => £1,111.88. Or £92 per month, all year round – plus the standard charge at £14 per month – so a total of £106 a month.

For everything. Cutting the grass, lighting our house, driving the car, powering the bidet loo. The dishwasher, the computers, the phones, the printers, the fridge and freezer, the washing machine and tumble dryer. Cutting the hedge, drying our hair, powering the extractor fans in the kitchen and bathrooms, the ovens (bread maker, main oven, grill, microwave, induction hob).

Our lives are electric, and we’re doing our bit to keep our use down as much as possible. Which is why we’re half-way through replacing our windows.

Our focus has been reducing their heat loss capabilities and getting more natural light in. The idea is to have something that helps us in the long term. Improve our lives, not just in terms of the cash but to make us smile too.

These figures above are a snap-shot. I want to compare them to this time next year and see if we’ve made things better.