Transcript for the ‘Terraced’ video

Richard McPhail: I’m here at a 3-bedroomed, mid-terraced Victorian house in North London, where the homeowners want to find out how they can make their home greener.

So we’ve conducted an assessment on your property and this is the report, so I’d like to show you the first part of it.

This is a comment on the efficiency, basically, of the heating, hot water and lighting and the more efficient it is the higher up the scale you go. As you can see, yours is already quite good, it’s a C – and especially for a house of this age, being a Victorian house, that’s a very good result.

This is the environmental impact. That’s the carbon dioxide. It’s actually 3.4 tonnes of CO2 (carbon dioxide) per annum which is about half the London average.

So these are the main recommendations that result from our assessment, and all of these will result in reducing your carbon emissions. The first one is to put more low energy lights in, the next is better controls on the heating system, which in this case is thermostatic radiator valves…

…oh I see on the radiators themselves…

…on the radiators themselves. And there’s one, kind of long term possibility, which is internal solid wall insulation. Obviously a house of this age doesn’t have cavity walls.

The second part of the assessment involved doing an air permeability test, and that’s essentially a way of measuring how draughty the house is. We used a fan to build the pressure up in the house, and the result we got was just over 20 which is pretty high on the scale.

The worst offenders are the windows because they’re wooden, sash-type of windows, through the floorboards and the loft hatch.

The third part of our assessment is the thermographic survey. This actually shows the heat loss and the brighter the image, the worse it is.

So what I’m going to do now is take the results of our conversation and all your requests back to our researchers at Green Homes and we’ll come up with your tailored action plan.

Obviously, it’s going to take a while to implement some of this, but the first step will be to get in touch with you about the draught-proofing and help you through the whole process and if you have any questions about anything at any stage, please do get in touch.

…That would be great, thank you very much.

OK.