For a comfier home this winter cosy up to SEAI’s hottest ever energy grants
A house loses around 30 per cent of its heat through the roof, with roughly another third of our valuable heat escaping through poorly insulated walls. Picture: Maskot/Getty Images.
With colder weather approaching, now is a good time to think about making your home warmer and more comfortable.
With increased Home Energy Upgrade grants available from the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI), there is significant support available to help make your home warmer, more comfortable, and more energy efficient.
You do not have to upgrade your whole home at once. SEAI’s individual grants allow you to start with one or more measures and take further steps when you are ready.
For many homes, attic and wall insulation is a good first step. It’s quick and easy, and you’ll see immediate benefits in terms of increased comfort and reduced heating bills.
“If you want to get a grant just for attic insulation on its own, or for wall insulation, you can do that. Or you can bundle them together. They are all individual grants,” explains SEAI’s Brian McIntyre, programme manager for high-performance building technologies.
Unlike a complete home energy upgrade through a One Stop Shop, individual grants do not require the home to achieve a minimum BER rating. Each individual grant does however have its own requirements, and the SEAI website goes into this in more detail.
Euro for euro, attic insulation will give you the biggest bang for your buck in terms of heat retention. That’s because a house loses around 30 per cent of its heat through the roof.
SEAI increased its attic insulation grants earlier this year which significantly reduces the cost for homeowners.
For a detached home, attic insulation grants are now worth up to €2,000, a sizeable chunk of change compared with the current median cost of works coming in at approximately €2,700.
Roughly another third of our valuable heat goes out through poorly insulated walls. Depending on the type of home, the available grant options are for cavity, internal and external wall insulation. Significant individual grants are available for all three measures. Homeowners who previously received a grant for either cavity or internal wall insulation can now apply for a grant to undertake a second wall insulation measure.
For a detached house, grants range from €1,800 for cavity wall insulation and €4,500 for internal wall insulation, to €8,000 for external wall insulation. Actual costs will vary and we encourage homeowners to obtain at least three quotes for their own property – shopping around is recommended.
“Attic and cavity walls are the most straightforward and easy things you can do. While nothing is cheap, and everyone is a bit squeezed right now, they are relatively inexpensive and the impact they can have, for the level of work that’s being done, is enormous,” says McIntyre.
The Warmer Homes Scheme provides free home energy upgrades to eligible low-income households. As of this year, to guard against fuel poverty, homeowners in receipt of certain welfare payments can apply for even higher individual grants to help pay for attic and wall insulation while keeping their position on the Warmer Homes scheme.
Many Irish homes don’t have enough attic insulation, particularly those built before 2011, before better building regulations were introduced.
“Around 30 per cent of homes, about 280,000, were built before 2011 and do not have good levels of insulation,” says McIntyre.
“They typically have four inches of yellow insulation, instead of 12 inches now, which means they are losing about three times the amount of heat through their attic than they would do if they just got their attic insulated properly.” If a home has poorly performing windows and doors, replacing them may be worth considering once you’ve achieved the right levels of insulation.
New individual grants for energy-efficient windows and doors were introduced by SEAI in March.
For a typical Irish detached home, the current median cost for replacement windows is around €10,453, and there is an SEAI grant of up to €4,000 to help with these costs. The median cost for replacing doors is around €4,300, with an SEAI grant of €800 available per door (up to a maximum of two doors).
If you’re unsure where to begin, “getting a BER assessment will give you a clearer picture of your home’s current energy performance and what areas need improvement,” he adds.
Now that your home is well insulated, the next step is to move from fossil-fuel heating to a more energy efficient heat pump system to keep your home at a constantly comfortable temperature. The typical price for our sample detached householder to switch to install a heat pump is €17,000. For comparison’s sake, the grant available, at up to €14,500 makes the net cost comparable to an oil or gas boiler.
However, if your current oil or gas boiler is working well and you are not yet ready to replace it, there is an interim step you can take which will also save you money and reduce your carbon footprint – smart heating controls.
These help you to match your heating and hot water schedules to the way you live, for example, ensuring the radiators upstairs aren’t belting out heat when everyone is downstairs.
By eliminating inefficiencies these smart controls will save you money. They currently cost around €3,700 for our sample house but there is a grant worth €700 for them.
Once you have invested in your insulation and improved the energy efficiency of your heating system, the next step is to consider solar PV. This is where rooftop panels capture light from the sun and convert it into electricity to power your home.
For a typical detached house, SEAI estimates the median cost of installing solar PV is €11,100, for which there is a grant of up to €1,800.
The benefits of a home energy upgrade are about far more than saving money.
“In a well-insulated house, the temperature is much more stable and comfortable,” says McIntyre.
SEAI studies, undertaken with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, also show that living in a warmer home provides a greater sense of wellbeing and comfort and, especially for people with more acute respiratory illnesses, fewer doctors’ visits and prescriptions. “People are also more likely to want others to visit,” he adds.
Of course, if you are keen to complete a full home energy upgrade in one go, an SEAI registered One Stop Shop can manage the entire project for you and deduct all grants from the cost of the work upfront.
“It often occurs when people’s options are to move house or stay where they are and to extend and renovate at the same time instead, turning the house they have into their forever home,” he explains.
For everyone else, the Home Energy Upgrade grants mean “you can essentially do a lot of the same work through the individual grants as you can do with the One Stop Shop,” says McIntyre.
“Not everybody has the money to do the full job in one go. So now you can say ‘Right, I’m doing the attic insulation now and maybe in a year’s time, I’ll get the walls done and look at getting the heating systems done after that’, as your finances allow.” SEAI’s individual grants will support you at every step. “It’s a longer journey, but it gives you greater flexibility to suit your needs, and ultimately you will still get to the same destination in the end,” he says.
Whether you start with one or more upgrades or plan a complete home energy upgrade in one go, SEAI has significant grants to support you with your home energy upgrades. Saving energy, saves money. Search SEAI Home Energy Upgrades now.
