My Cleanest Greenest Home
Cleanest Greenest Home
My Cleanest Greenest Home is my retrofit renovation to show that a healthier, happier, more sustainable home is possible for everyone. What’s the difference between retrofit and renovation you ask? Good question, as the two terms are often confused.
A renovation generally concerns the improvement or restoration of a building’s appearance, layout, or usability. Think updating kitchens/bathrooms, redecorating, and replacing finishes, fittings, or furnishings. Retrofitting on the other hand is primarily about upgrading the performance of an existing building — particularly its energy efficiency. Works might involve adding insulation (internal/external walls, roof, floors), replacing windows/doors with higher-performance models, installing ventilation with heat recovery (MVHR), installing a heat pump, improving airtightness and moisture management aka combatting condensation to mould.
I explain this because retrofitting the homes we already have is essential — the UK has some of the oldest housing stock in Europe, but it’s the least energy efficient as well. Thus nearly 9.6m households live in cold, poorly insulated homes, paying over the odds for their heating, and contributing to health issues that cost the NHS about £540m/year.
I want to show how to work with what we have and make it more energy efficient alongside following the #happyinside way. I’ll be learning as I go on the eco side, and I promise to share the pitfalls and disasters (for there will inevitably be some) as well as the successes. What was harder than I thought? Messier? Or just wrong. I want to demystify the affordable, practical choices that we could all potentially make to enable our homes to sit at the centre of the journey towards a more sustainable future.
After all, we’re customarily told that the answer to our housing crisis is more: more space, new homes, total overhauls, but that mindset is financially out of reach for many. Environmentally unsustainable. Emotionally overwhelming. And not practical. At the same time…
- Eco upgrades feel daunting, and costly
- Energy saving measures seem complex and out of reach
- Retrofitting appears impossibly complicated
- People feel trapped by their space and stuff
- No-one has time to do the research
- But 34% of UK carbon emissions come from the home
- 21% of UK homes were built before 1919, 52% before 1965: periods when energy efficiency was not a design consideration
- UK homes are therefore the least energy-efficient in Europe
