If your home’s bleeding heat, you’re basically warming the street. Here’s how to stop the escape with a practical guide to energy loss at home, and how you can fix it.
Energy bills are a worry for most households, but you can reduce them significantly by reducing sources of energy loss in your home.
The best way to get started with this is by performing an energy audit of your home. This might sound complicated, but you’ll quickly see that simply checking for factors such as air leaks can start the process of saving money on your energy bills.
While a professional energy audit will always be the best way to be as thorough as possible, we’ve created this guide to help you do your own DIY home energy audit. We’ll give you the information you’ll need on how to spot and stop energy waste in your home. We’ve included the most common sources of energy waste and how to fix them as well.
Key Points:
Factors such as air leaks and some forms of insulation can be quickly and cheaply fixed yourself.
More serious sources of energy loss, such as poor wall insulation, will likely need a professional to spot.
Making just small changes to your home could save you hundreds of pounds on your energy bills.
Replacing an old boiler can be one of the best steps in reducing energy waste at home.
What is a Home Energy Audit Anyway?
A home energy audit is where you assess your home’s energy consumption, and figure out what energy efficiency measures you can take to improve efficiency. Doing an audit is an important step in lowering your energy bills and making your home more comfortable to live in at the same time.
You can cut down on costs by doing the audit yourself, though a professional audit will always be more thorough, will produce more detailed results, and will help you more precisely target energy loss.
Professional audits involve steps such as using thermal imaging to identify cold spots, manometers to check for minute leaks, and combustion analysers to measure boiler efficiency.
There are loads of steps you can take yourself before thinking about getting a professional home energy audit done. Let’s take a look at the most common sources of energy waste in the home and how you get started fixing them.
The Most Common Sources of Energy Waste at Home
When you start your energy audit, a good place to begin is by making a list of the sources of energy waste in your home. Thankfully, some of the most common sources of energy loss are easy to identify:
Old Heating Systems
Heating your home and water accounts for more than half of what you spend on energy bills, according to the Energy Saving Trust (EST). This rises even more when you have an old, inefficient boiler that’s just barely managing to keep your water and radiators warm.
In fact, an old boiler can have an efficiency rating as low as 60% (G rating), which means you’ll be throwing away 40p for every £1 you spend on fuel.
This really adds up over time and can make getting a new boiler a priority to stopping energy waste at home.
It might not be the cheapest step to take, but installing a new boiler is one of the most effective ways to reduce your energy bills.
Poor Insulation
Poor insulation is one of the biggest sources of wasted energy in a home, which is why generally, we advise a “fabric-first” approach when it comes to reducing energy bills.
Breaking it down by parts of the house, you’ll lose the following percentages of heat through poor insulation:
Walls: Having poorly insulated walls can result in a heat loss of 35%.
Lofts: If you haven’t insulated your loft, you’ll lose around 25% of your home’s heat through the roof.
Floors: Not having enough or the right type of insulation in your floors will see roughly 15% of the heat in your home being wasted.
Windows and doors: Having draughty windows and doors can cause heat loss of 25-30% (see further down for more information).
Other insulation to think about is the insulation on your pipes and water tanks (if you have a system boiler).
How to Fix
Your first step in fixing poor insulation for your home is by insulating your roof, typically with fibreglass. It’s the most cost-effective insulation at £10 per square metre (for fibreglass boards), and you can do it yourself (though as with many home improvements, it’s usually safer to hire a professional, if a little more expensive).
Also, you should avoid spray foam insulation, because frankly it’s got too many downsides (despite the fact it’s a better insulator).
Insulating your walls can be a lot more expensive and difficult, but if you can afford it, it’s worth it - solid wall insulation can save you £410 per year, and cavity wall insulation can save £210 annually.
If you don’t want to spend the thousands needed for most wall insulation, you can always grab some cheap radiator reflectors. These aluminium foil sheets are placed behind a radiator and work to reflect heat back into the room, rather than leaking through the wall and being wasted.
For insulating your pipes and water tanks, you’ll spend just £7 per metre for pipes, and around £16 for an 80mm water tank jacket.
The savings over time more than justify this small outlay – you’ll save around £318 an year (according to The Eco Experts).
Be aware that the bulk of savings definitely come from insulating your water tank compared to your pipes – £315 per year versus £3.
Draughty Windows and Doors
Draughty windows and doors are the source of much frustration on those cold, blustery days. You think you’re safe indoors, when whoosh, a chilly air leak sneaks in to ruin your day and essentially, waste your money.
Windows and doors with draughts can cause heat loss of 25-30%, so spotting air leaks is an important part of an energy audit.
Identifying these leaks can sometimes be as simple as just feeling around your windows and doors for a draught. Other times, you need to get creative.
One way is to make sure all of your windows and doors are closed, then light an incense stick or candle and walk with it around the window borders and doors. You’ll easily spot an air leak by noticing how it blows against the smoke coming from the incense, or the candle flame.
You can use the same technique for any exterior-facing walls, walking along the skirting board and checking to see if hidden air leaks interact with the smoke. Obviously, be careful when walking around with an open flame!
How to Fix
For windows, you can apply latex caulk to seal any leaks, or get a window draught stopper that you can place and remove as you wish. You can save around £40 a year on your energy bills by sealing window draughts.
These are great temporary solutions, but they won’t last more than a year or so before having to be replaced again.
The best (and longest-lasting) solution is to get new windows, preferably double or triple glazed, though this can cost several thousand pounds, depending on the number of windows that need replacing.
Draughty doors can be fixed in a similar way, with applying either latex caulk or getting draught stoppers or weatherstripping. You can usually buy weatherstripping from most hardware shops, and applying it is as simple as measuring your door, cutting the strips, and attaching it to the door frame.
Inefficient Appliances
Old or inefficient appliances can be big sources of energy wastage at home, which is why there has been such a big push recently to improve appliance efficiency.
Think about appliances such as your washing machine – is it old and starting to show some real wear and tear? It might be time to replace it, and doing so could save you money on your electricity bills.
How to Fix
While it’s not always possible to fix inefficient appliances, or feasible to replace them right away, you can change your habits with them. If you’re on a time of use tariff (or any tariff that charges less for using off-peak electricity), then consider using appliances such as your washing machine when electricity is cheaper.
You can also use a smart meter to get an idea of how much electricity your most demanding appliances are using. A smart meter won’t directly save you money just by existing, but you can use the knowledge it gives you to change energy usage habits and start saving money that way.
Smaller things you can replace quickly are light bulbs. If you have old, incandescent light bulbs, consider replacing them with energy-efficient LED lighting.
About 90% of the energy used by incandescent light bulbs is converted into heat, which is incredibly inefficient!
Don’t worry if you think you’ll miss the warm glow of incandescent lighting, as nowadays, there are plenty of LED light bulbs available in warmer colours.
Turning Your Boiler or Thermostat up too High
When the weather is cold, it’s tempting to turn the thermostat up beyond what you’d normally have it at. Realistically though, as long as the temperature of a room is 18-20°C, you’ll be perfectly comfortable.
There’s generally no need to whack it up to 25°C and beyond, because you’ll only be wasting energy. A common misconception about thermostats also, is that turning them up affects the actual temperature of your radiators. What it does instead is keep the radiators running at the temperature set by your boiler for longer.
So, if your boiler is set to 60°C, this is the temperature of the water that’ll flow through your radiators. And if your boiler is constantly fighting to keep your home at 25°C or more, you’ll be spending a lot more on your energy bills.
According to the EST, turning your thermostat down by just a single degree (22°C to 21°C, for example) could save you up to £140 a year. There are also smart thermostats, which you can easily programme to switch on at certain times using your phone.
Are There Any Grants To Help With Improving Home Efficiency?
There are several grants available to UK homeowners that can help with improving home efficiency. The main ones are:
The Energy Company Obligation (ECO4)
With ECO4, you can get funding towards energy efficiency improvements, including insulation (loft insulation, cavity wall insulation, and solid wall insulation are included), solar panels, and heat pumps.
ECO4 was set up by the UK government to oblige certain energy suppliers to help UK homeowners make their homes more efficient. To be eligible for ECO4, you must meet some of the following criteria:
Your property has an Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) of D, E, F, or G.
The total income of your home is less than £31,000.
Are on certain benefits, such as Income based Jobseekers Allowance (JSA), Income Support (IS), and Universal Credit (UC).
The ECO4 scheme will run until 31 March 2026.
LA Flex
If you don’t qualify for ECO4, you could still get funding via the Local Authority Flexible Eligibility initiative, or LA Flex.
This allows local authorities to expand funding to low-income, vulnerable, and energy-inefficient households that usually just miss the ECO4 criteria. 46.1% of fuel-poor households match this description, which we discovered from government data.
Get in touch with your local authority to see if you can get funding for home improvements such as solar panels and heat pumps via LA Flex.
Boiler Upgrade Scheme
The Boiler Upgrade Scheme (BUS), which began in March 2022 and runs until March 2028, gives homeowners the chance to get up to £7,500 towards a new air or ground-source heat pump.
Around £450 million has been allocated for the BUS and the application process is relatively simple:
Firstly, find an MCS-accredited heat pump installer and instruct them to apply for the BUS scheme.
The installer will then apply for the grant (and hopefully pass the eligibility checks!).
You’ll then be contacted by Ofgem to confirm your consent to the upgrades.
Ofgem will assess the application, then once all checks are complete, they’ll allocate the grant to your chosen installer.
Hey presto, you’ll soon be heating your home with a shiny new, eco-friendly heat pump.
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