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Comment by Angostura | Hacker News Reader

How expensive? I live in a old terraced house in the UK (no cavity wall, wooden floors open to cellar below). Adapting the house to be suitable for heatpumps is going to require cladding the whole of the house, redoing the floors, replacing the external front door and replacing all the radiators. It's going to cost tens of thousands of pounds.

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To me (Eastern Europe) this sounds like a standard stuff done by default when a building is renovated, due to energy savings. Done since long time ago, before heat pumps. Insulation also increases indoor comfort in the continental winters (prevents cold draft) and recently summers too. Seems both of these are coming to the UK, get used to it. For whom it's expensive either DIY or live in apartment instead.

A lot of the UK's housing stock is comprised of victorian buildings from before the advent of electricity. They have high ceilings, large windows, large gardens, traditional red brick walls and beautiful period features like carved exterior stonework.

They are also extremely badly insulated and costly to heat, having solid brick walls, large windows and high ceilings. We've already picked the low-hanging fruit like loft insulation and double glazed windows.

What's left to do is things like exterior cladding. I looked at getting external insulation applied to a victorian terraced house, and was quoted £30,000 - more than the UK's median salary.

The average annual energy bill is £1,923 so even if that insulation was so effective it dropped the energy bill to zero, it'd still be a pretty bad investment.

As someone who lives in the Nordics, I always go "heh" when people say they have "double-glazed windows" like it's something modern.

Even my grandma's summer cabin has double glazed windows and it's not liveable during winters in the least. =)

Over here triple-glazing is the minimum and has been for decades, I don't see why it wouldn't be useful everywhere else too. They keep the heat out during summers and the heat in during winter.

I recently had to replace the majority of windows in my home in the US. I was appalled at the options and gimmicks and downright shady sales tactics. I ended up having custom windows made to get what I wanted. Maybe it's a "grass is greener" thing, but I'm envious of how it seems people are just more honest in the Nordics.

I've gone through the same in Australia and the "modern double glazing" in practice meant importing windows from Poland. Literally shipping around the world was the most reasonable option a few years ago (hopefully it's better today) while really crappy houses burning energy to heat/cool every room are still being built as a default idea.

In South Africa, double glazed windows are usually imported too (the parts) but they are assembled here so that they can get your measurements exactly right.

This completely misses the point - we are talking about easy wins. There is zero point putting triple glazed windows in a 200 year old house that isn’t otherwise insulated

Meanwhile quadruple glazed window enjoyers have their laugh at your expense.

Like they said, that's the minimum. Usually those are efficient enough so you can have a single window unit with a pane in the middle, but quadruples are common too.

Unfortunately, having more panes of glass does not automatically mean you get more energy efficiency.

The triples with very good insulation and coatings (eg. heat rejection) can be better than old quadruples. My parents have quadruple windows from the 80's, and energy efficiency is much better in a modern triple single unit than with the two doubles they have.

> The average annual energy bill is £1,923 so even if that insulation was so effective it dropped the energy bill to zero, it'd still be a pretty bad investment.

That would be what, like 7% return on investment? We just had a period of ~0% interest rates and <2% mortgage rates.

It is not realistic to expect ROI of only a few years for upgrades to buildings or infrastructure. Lifespan of these things is like half a century or more.

Coming from eastern Europe, the age and condition of housing here was a bit shocking.

There used to be a grant in UK for insulating housing, and it was cut by conservative government. Our rate of insulating homes dropped form 2 million houses a year to basically zero. Without favourable credit, maybe zero interest credit, avaliable, of course individual homeowners will find it difficult to afford.

This seems to be an outcome of cheap energy, or mispriced energy.

I have a heat pump in such a house, even worse actually since it is a semi-detached. I did not need to do any extra work, and it works fine. My savings are not great, but that is also mostly because I don't have a hot water tank so I still need gas for my hot water. We just replaced 3 radiators, one of which is actually still permanently shut and I am still doubtful about the need for the other twos.

For the walls, it can become quite expensive to insulate it. But at least for the wooden floor, you have a cheap option: lay a new laminate flooring with proper underlay. It will cost typically less than £1000, you'll avoid damaging your wooden flooring, and also improve the thermal confort by removing the air leaks and insulating more.

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