Home retrofitting: Costs, grants available and work involved

ATTIC INSULATION

Investment: Low
Return: High
Grant: Improved
Cost: Dependent on attic/roof size, chosen materials and scope of the work. An intelligent low spend for a very high return in terms of warming up the envelope of the home
SEAI grant aid: A whopping 80% of the ticket through the One-Stop-Shop grant aid for deep (comprehensive) retrofit, and through individual grants. It is graded on home type.

€800-€1500 for attic insulation (the floor of the attic). Rafter insulation grant aid is offered as part of One-Stop-Shop installations only, and comes in at €1,500-€3,000.

All homeowners, including landlords, whose homes were built and occupied before 2011 can apply. It is defined as the date your electricity meter was installed.

What you need to do

For individual insulation grants to the attic, it’s up to you to apply and manage this grant, which will be paid back to you on completion of the work and the carrying out of an obligatory BER survey which will be published becoming part of your home’s energy profile (once-off BER grant of €50). First find your supplier. Ensure they are on the SEAI Registered Contractors List. Your supplier/installer can often help with the application. With the One-Stop-Shop mechanism your project manager will assign a contractor. The installation must reach the SEAI required U-values of 0.16 W/m2 K for ceiling level insulation or 0.20 W/m2 K for rafter insulation.

Hassle

Minimal but with the thumping around in the attic and a lively team indoors, you might want to clear off for a few hours. Likely to take half a day to a full day to complete with the insulation of pipework, covering of hatches and improvement to the existing blanket. In a deep-retrofit, the impact of the simultaneous renovations is likely to have driven you out of the house already. Insulating pitched ceilings from the plasterboard side can be invasive, expensive, and a headache on par with internal dry lining.

PV INSTALLATION (PV)

Investment: Significant capital outlay
Return: Steady but slow
Grant: Reduced; battery grant removed
Cost: Balanced against the slow 8-10 year payback period, photovoltaic panels have a high capital outlay in the area of €80000-€12000 after grant aid, for a 3.2kWp-5kWp array inc VAT, married to suitably sized storage battery and hot water diverter. Consider a green-loan mechanism with monthly payments and a low-interest rate from your credit union or bank. Solar Thermal offers a less costly alternative if you are simply after free hot water; €1200 grant aid.
SEAI grant aid: Total grant aid is graded by kWp (the battery grant has gone). €900 per kWp for the first 2kWp, 300 for every additional kWp, capped at €2,400 for 4kWp. The independent grant is retroactive, so your supplier must be paid in full. With all the required receipts and certification required of your supplier (evidence of works) filed, you then recover the SEAI grant award directly to your bank — this can take up to eight weeks after install.

What you need to do

The full on the ground survey that forms part of your PV project is a vital moment. Without a deep-retrofit, project manager, there is no SEAI led technical assessment, so you are relying on the skill of your supplier to design and detail your system. In most cases, if the aspect is willing, a standard domestic roof can take PV and a flat roof can support frames. You should have an idea of your monthly electricity use to guide a PV technical survey. Think about where you would like the inverter and any battery to be sited indoors.

Hassle

Planning permission is currently required if you have more than 12sq m of panels or take up more than 50% of the area of the entire roof — whichever figure is smaller. A bill is progressing through The Oireachtas to squash permission for domestic arrays. Surprisingly low hassle, with many installations complete in one day. Expect exterior scaffolding towers, workers in your attic space and some minimal household invasion. The power will of course be off for extended periods, so if you’re working from home, choose a nearby digital spot and rattle out your work there. Get a full lesson in every aspect of your system and monitoring software, to become truly reactive — the early days can be stress soaked as you monitor the gain feverishly.

HEATING CONTROLS

Investment: Small
Return: High
Grant: Unchanged
Cost: Highly dependent on the branding and system you choose, but you’re unlikely to get much change from €1,500-€2,000 for a home without the basics of two zones with heating and domestic hot water control. Ultimately you need the basics that will improve your comfort levels and increase the energy efficiency of your existing heating system. The speed of payback in a time of soaring energy costs is potentially excellent for the spend with new, economical habits.

SEAI grant aid: €700. Your property will not be eligible if you are applying for, or have previously claimed, a Heat Pump System grant or the house is younger than 2011.

What you need to do

The SEAI suggests you ask yourself the following: Can you heat your domestic hot water without switching on your radiators or an electric immersion heater? Can you turn on your heating without heating your domestic hot water?

Can you easily adjust the heat output from radiators in the rooms you use most often? Do you have temperature control on your boiler? Have you time control on your boiler that you can set for different days of the week? Have you a separate temperature control for your hot water cylinder? Have you a separate time control on your hot water cylinder? If you’re uncomfortable now you probably need new controls.

Hassle

Low, once you are assured with a detailed quotation covering associated costs.

EV CHARGER INSTALLATION

Investment: Low, vital for BEV adopters and PHEV drivers
Cost: Reliant on complexity; €1000-€1500 before grant aid. Prices can go way up if you fancy some facial recognition technology, touch screens and elaborate Wi-fi smarts

SEAI grant aid: Around 50%, for a full battery-charged, electric vehicle (BEV) and approved PHEV: €600. The rub is you need to have a BEV or PHEV from the approved SEAI list, or have proof that it’s ordered and you are the registered owner, don’t jump too soon.

Your charger must be installed and certified by a RECI registered sparks. Grant payment after installation and full paperwork returned — around six weeks. A new EV Apartment Charger Grant Support Scheme is now out of consultation and on the way for apartment dwellers in Q2.

What you need to do

Decide on a position for your charger and supply a few images to your chosen installer. These will generally show the charger position, an image of the fuse box on the wall in your home showing where it is in relation to the outside wall, and a description and approximate distance of its position in relation to your charger position. Your supplier will talk you through the complexities of Type 1 and two tethered connectors, whether you require a 5m or 10m cables.

Hassle

Minimal, with installation from as little as two hours following an on-site survey. A virtual survey will smooth and accelerate the experience. ESB Meter Box connection is possible in some cases, and your charger may be attached to a dedicated post. Extras take more time.

Allow a good half hour for your installer to explain how to use your charger. If you are building or extending, include cabling for a future EV charging position.

CAVITY INSULATION

Investment: Moderate
Return: High
Grant: Improved
Cost: From €700 to over €2,000 depending on volume of product and labour, for pumped foam or polystyrene beads injected into the wall along with a bonding agent to stabilise them. The cavity must be to NSAI standards and specifications. The wall must reach a target U-value of 0.27 W/ m2 K to qualify for the grant

SEAI grant aid: €700-€1700 depending on house type. Payment time to your bank account from the SEAI — four to six weeks.

Apply for the grant using the online SEAI Wizard. Cavity insulation and all sorts of contentious foam fill, are not suited to timber-framed homes. Check out internal insulation choices for stud homes.

What you need to do

If you don’t have any certification, check if you have cavity fill or not. The area around the cable or meter boxes attached to the outside of the house may show signs of the former install. Filling the cavity will not cure damp, but it can regulate it. It will have no influence on rising damp, which should be addressed independently.

On the day, Windows should be kept closed. Your installer will put sleeves on any vents and should clear up any dust and stray beads on completion, adding mortar to the injection sites. Keep all certification for the works safe

Hassle

Small holes around 23 millimetres in size must be drilled in the mortar joints of your walls, but at 1.5m spacings, these are easily disguised.

Very low hassle on the day, as all outside work. Due to the vibration, nervous pets are best moved out of the house.

CASE STUDY

Installing a heat pump was ‘transformational’

Cormac Madden contracted Electric Ireland Superhomes to manage his heat pump installation and solar PV at his County Dublin home.

Superhomes provided a project manager who oversaw all the works and managed third-party contractors.

A BER assessor inspected the house to recommend what further works were needed to improve the BER and make the home heat-pump ready, and Cormac availed of all the relevant SEAI grants to help finance the project.

The house has now achieved an A3 energy rating.

“The house doesn’t cool down, it stays at that constant, comfortable temperature, and there is abundant hot water available,” says Cormac.

“It’s transformational. It’s the appliance of choice for me. I would often say that in the future it won’t be a new kitchen that will be the object of desire in a home, it will be a heat pump.”

The brand-new National Energy Security Framework put together in April by the Irish Government in response to the crisis in Ukraine and the following energy crisis, will assign €20 million towards the installation of solar photovoltaic panels for free for some families with very special needs.

It’s projected that 3000 homes with medical equipment or necessary household devices that draw an especially high degree of power will have plug-and-play systems installed to cut the download of units drawn from the grid.

The details of the scheme are still being finalised for launch in Q2, and will be managed by the SEAI. See www.seai.ie