'Housing Retrofit: Necessity & Avoiding Unintended Consequences' Talk by Dr Sofie Pelsmakers

[@patriot7586]

Question: she said brexit Has happened! And a video is 5 years old,from 2017...

[@ukrytykrytyk8477]

Very good presentation. I find it interesting how reluctant the UK is to replace old housing stock with something newer and built better. Improving liveability of the cities in the process.

[@seanmatten9297]

This is an excellent brief which highlights some of the realities of retrofitting our housing stock. It is far more complex than simply chucking a few more layers of insulation in the roof and converting from a gas combi boiler to an air-source heat pump. Get it wrong and we destroy our housing stock. The costs are eye watering and this is anything but easy. It would be refreshing for politicians and environmentalists on all sides to stop grand-standing and have a proper informed debate about the costs, benefits and pitfalls.

[@martinkellerman3497]

Very interesting lecture. My question is: why must renewables be the last thing we think about? For example, why shouldn't I replace my has boiler with a heat pump and self generate half the electricity I need with solar panels. This will also result in a 75% energy use reduction without extensive retrofit of the house.

[@aaade1121]

The primary purpose of prioritising retrofits over the adoption of renewables is to first reduce the amount of energy demand. This way, the energy required from the renewables also drastically reduces. So in theory, it's important to improve the building envelope to avoid heat loss especially during the colder months (by using natural/low-carbon materials) so that you only require reduced amount of energy to keep warm. In practice, you may find that you do not need to adopt any renewables for heating at all because of your 'warm' building envelope (blanket).

[@enemyofthestatewearein7945]

There are two answers to your question Firstly, heat pumps work best at a lower temperature (vs gas boilers) so do not work efficiently in poorly insulated homes, so it is necessary to first well insulate a home, in order for the heat pump to operate in a way that will be cost competitive with gas heating. Secondly, as was mentioned in the lecture, at times when the sun is not shining to give you solar electricity, the UK electrical power grid today simply does not have even half the capacity required, to heat every house in the UK, at current consumption levels, even using efficient heat pumps. It will be much cheaper overall, for both homeowners and the UK as a whole, to reduce heating energy consumption by insulating our homes, than to at least double the capacity of the electrical grid, and build many new power stations, as ultimately we would all have to pay for this grid upgrade, in our electricity bills. So it's not a case of do we fit insulation or heat pumps, we need to do both together or it doesn't work, either for the individual homeowner or the UK as a whole. Solar is a bonus but not a solution on it's own.

[@malcolm8564]

I think you should name the names of denier politicians as all voters should have this information.