LSLGuy has been reading my thread about plugging in at 4 am and the temps mentioned seem sub-arctic to his Florida sensitivities.
Which UK property market? There are enormous ranges. Prices and salaries vary enormously simply between “London” and “rest of the country”.
The same as many people living in poorly insulated housing* in too-that-hot areas of other countries. “I can afford that one”.
- Bonus points for white shag carpet.
It’s cheap and easy, when building a new house, to properly insulate it. It is not cheap nor easy, given an old house, to properly insulate it. The difficulty is that where you need the upgrades the most are precisely the places where it’s hardest to add. Sure, you can fill the space between the joists in the exterior walls with foam… but that’s probably already the best-insulated part of the house. That won’t do anything to seal out drafts, for instance, or to stop heat flow through windows. And have you ever seen the price for replacing all of the windows in a house? Plus, modern houses not only have better windows than old ones, they often have fewer, because electric light is ubiquitous now.
Exactly. It’s the windows in our house that are the heat suckers, and they’re pricey to fix. Sure, I could spend a lot of money on that and have a much more efficient house, but then I’d have to stay in it for a couple of years, with no vacations to warm weather spots like London and Paris. (Trust me, they count as warm weather vacations for the Piper Clan.)
Now, every so often the federal and provincial governments offer retrofit subsidies, for just the reasons suggested by **LSLGuy, **but they’re usually time limited. We missed out on the last one because we’d just done some other major renos and didn’t want to incur even more debt. I’ve been waiting for one of those programs again, but I may just bite the bullet and start the new window installation. (And of course, as soon as that’s done, the government will likely announce a new retrofit subsidy starting the next month. :smack:)
A couple years ago I replaced all the single pane windows in my place here with double pane high R value windows. Cost a hunk-o-cash. Mine were extra expensive compared to windows for northern climes because they’re also impact / hurricane-proof. They’re not quite bulletproof, but they’re going that way.
Despite that extra cost the time to payback in reduced AC costs is 5 years. That’s 20-ish percent APR. I wish like heck the rest of my portfolio did that well with a guaranteed rate of return. It’d still have been profitable to borrow the money to do the work.
I get that it can be a tough problem. It’s easy to be tight on budget and trapped behind the power curve: if you didn’t have to pay exorbitant power bills you’d have the free cashflow to finance the windows.
If you’re short of cash, this is easier said than done. It’s a typical working-poverty trap.
Properly insulating a leaky old house absolutely will not pay back in a month. IF your windows are crap, that’s not a cheap fix. Even if your current home is badly insulated the payback period is years. If your insulation isn’t THAT bad, and you have a relatively efficient gas furnace, the payback period can be infinity.
In fact, new or remodelled homes have extremely strict insulation regulations. If you get a permit to do the work, which you’re supposed to (and as Mike Holmes will remind you, are insane not to) the municipality will insist on a heat loss diagram and there are highly specific rules on the minimum insulation necessary. But if your home was built in 1971, there is no rule that says you have to improve the insulation, and it probably sucks.
As Chronos points out, proper insulation on new construction is easily installed and isn’t very expensive, relative to everything else. Retrofitting an existing house can be ludicrously expensive and hard, and if your heat is electricity, there is really only so much you can do; your heating bills in Ontario will be astronomical.
These stories are relatively new here, because of the incredible disaster the Ontario electricity system is (I am a weird holdout in that I refuse to call electricity “hydro.” I admit I am just stubborn on this; everyone I know in Ontario calls it hydro.) If I wrote 2,000 words in this post explaining the history of it I could not do the subject justice. It might be the most expensive example of pure government incompetence I can think of in any jurisdiction in North America that does not involve an actual war or natural disaster.
This problem is absolutely not due to “Carbon taxes.” The provincial carbon tax is sure not a welcome sight for a struggling family, but it’s a small part of this $1000-a-month-on-power woman’s problem (her story is highly believable; I know people on my street with electric heat paying incredible power bills.) The idea of a carbon tax is economically a good one, actually, provided you provide people with an offsetting reduction in, say, their income taxes. But the Ontario power generation and distribution system is a disastrous mess and we’re going to be paying for it for a really, really long time, no matter how you slice it.
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For those of you not in Ontario any longer, the government has gone to time-of-day pricing and the highest rate, which is evenings, when she’d be using the most electricity has been increased by 80% in the last 10 years.
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Er, that’s not exactly how it works. Just to clarify, in winter, the highest rate is paid only in the morning from 7 to 11 AM and in the two hours between 5 and 7 PM. Everything from 8 PM to 7 AM is lowest possible rate in all seasons. Presumably, one’s heating are working hardest overnight, when it’s coldest, but that’s the lowest possible rate. (This applies only on weekdays; weekends and statutory holidays are always lowest rate.)
What will further murder a person using electric heat is that past a certain consumption level, which varies on season, you get charged a premium. If you’re heating your house with electricity you will blow past that level every month.
I have a leaky old house in a sub-arctic climate. It was built in 1929, though insulation has been added (especially in the attic which is ~R28). It doesn’t even approach current code on insulation, but it’s not horrible. The windows are about half original and half updated a few decades ago with double-glaze casement. I think the old windows are actually slightly better sealed, as they all have storm windows painted into the frames. Heat is the original 1929 boiler, originally coal-fired but with a gas burner retrofit, and hot water radiators.
My gas bill runs about $1200/yr, of which about $300 is hot water and connection fees, so if I’m spending money on increasing heating efficiency I’m looking at a payback involving saving some percentage of $900/yr. That doesn’t make for very good ROI calculations for much of anything beyond weatherstripping and a couple cans of expanding foam. Upgrading the ~50% efficient boiler with a modern high efficiency unit would have a payback period of 20 years if I was lucky. More likely never, since the new unit would be more likely to require expensive servicing during that time.
Not, I would add, that I am in anything like energy poverty.
Incidentally at least some types of expanding foam are prohibited in Canada because they tend to out-gas formaldehyde, despite such retrofits being subsidized by the government in the 70s.
My second-year stats prof was consulted on that case and used in class as a case study in statistical vs practical significance. “Is there significantly higher levels of formaldehyde in UFFI-insulated houses?” “Yes, absolutely, p < 0.05”. “Does that mean that people living in such houses are going to have health problems?” “No idea, I’m not a biologist”.
The danger of UFFI insulation has not been demonstrated to exist at all; nonetheless, avoid buying a house with it, as you might actually have trouble getting financing and its discovery tends to make people panic and your property value can shrivel up. It’s insanely hard to get rid of.
Yes, if you can get a sane loan. But if the only loan you can convince a bank to give you is at credit card or payday check levels of interest, it’s terrible. And even aside from the price, replacing all of your windows is a big inconvenience.
Yes, around the time California had it’s Enron time with privatizing their electrical system, Ontario Hydro got roughly the same treatment. Skipping the details, it completely screwed up the implementation and results of privatization, turning a relatively normal crown corporation (government) utility into a nightmare of a disorganized bunch of money pits.
[off-topic discussion of language … but you guys started it, talking about “hydro”]
You Canadians remind me of Brits who constantly speak of “funny money.” I sometimes have to ask whether the amount is funnily large or funnily small. :smack:
[on-topic] Where I live our heating bill runs to … Zero exactly. Some winters I buy a pair of socks, but our winter (late December- early January) never came this year. 
I have a house built in 1902, and before we renovated a couple years ago, our electric bills (which include gas for our furnace) could get as high as $500 (but averaged more around $300 in the winter). Now those bills are cut amost in half. Our neighbor’s house, built in 1867 and in considerably worse repair, supposedly gets $600-$800 energy bills. Probably not too common, but I could easily see it costing over $1000 per month in the freezing lands 1000 miles north of here.
My electricity costs only about 7c/kwh reduced because we have electric heat (which about 70% of houses in Quebec have). This is until the temperature falls below -12C (about +10F), when it triples, but our heat changes automatically to oil. And we avoid running the clothes dryer. Our water is oil heated. We probably pay $700/month for oil and electricity combined. We have fairly good insulation, although it could be better. We had insulation blown into the walls and attic a few decades ago and new double-glazed windows put in maybe 15 years ago.
But I thought there was going to be tax relief to make the carbon tax revenue neutral.
As I understand it the “carbon tax” is going to be provincially driven. So if Quebec wants to do it via a tax then Quebec gathers the tax and does what it wants with it. If Manitoba opts for cap and trade then Manitoba can do what ti wants with the fees. The federal government simply baselines the rate and likely manages the inter-provincial sqwabbles.
Geez, I feel so much better about our bills. Thank Christ for natural gas. $700/month for heat and power is insane to me.
[QUOTE=Grey]
As I understand it the “carbon tax” is going to be provincially driven.
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Currently, no, the plan is for it to be both. Ontario now has a carbon tax - well, it’s a cap-and-trade thing, but you pay for it one way or another (a simple carbon tax would be a better idea, so of course, Ontario didn’t do that.) The feds will have their own starting in 2018.
Heavy blackout curtains help a lot. Also, you can get pieces of Styrofoam that will fit a window, easily 3 or 4’ thick, those block a lot. True, hardly a solution for all your windows, you want some light in.
It wasn’t 30 years ago when we bought the house. £23,000 then - £200,000 now.
I also viciously pronounce “schedule” as “SHED-ule” instead of “SKED-ule”. 
Basically the power drawn from the system, and delivery fees combined make up that number. So its possible that she is only drawing about 400 bucks worth of electricity, but because she is in a rural area, then the delivery charge can be higher.
Its worth noting, that this woman may not be the poster child for grandma poverty, as I have been following various threads on Reddit, and the house in question is a 400 k property and that she may very well have been plopped in to embarrass Trudeau, who in my opinion should have had her speak to one of his staffers and get her off his political radar screen, as she turned a provincial issue into a federal issue, when he got caught off guard and fumbled the reply.
That really does not detract from the fact that quite a few people are saying essentially the same thing, that houses built in the 70’s and 80’s, base board heating was a selling feature with dirt cheap electricity at the time, compared to the oil burners in previous decades. Now they say that its quite possible to rack up that kind of power bill, in the rural part of Ontario.
Declan