Retrofit- external insulation/attic and heat pump

T

thedaddyman

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4 bed 1970's semi and looking to do so insulation and other works to it. Finding it very hard to get good independent advice as most in the trade are incredibly busy and don't want to waste their time on the "what about" conversations.

We did have a visit from Airtricity however and he gave us a ballpark cost of €67k before the grants (€47k afterwards) for an upgrade to attic insulation (€3k), heat pump and whatever else is needed for that installation (€18k) and the external insulation wrap around (€36k) and solar panels €10k). They would PM it all the way through, external insulation provided by Kingspan, heat pump is Mitsubishi

More inclined to go with the single shop approach as I've seen some external insulation done by some local guys, some looked fine, some looked like a cowboy job and seemed to take an age to get finished. Airtricity do a more detailed assessment which we've verbally agreed to do as we need to understand where to start from. Price of that is €775. Once that is done, we can decide what elements of the list above, or all that we go through. My questions

  • Has anyone gone through this assessment with Airtricity (or some other single shop) and is it worth the effort?
  • Is there anything we need to think about specifically on the external insulation or anything we should be asking?
  • Has anyone got an air heat pump installed and how do they feel about them? Are they worth it?
  • Likewise on solar panels?
 
If your with SSE they have recently teamed up with Activ8 for solar panel installation for SSE clients.
Might be worth a look.
 
We've a heat pump + very small solar panel array, A2 rated 3 bed terraced house (1930s)

We were using about 5-6000KwHr of Gas and 1000KwHr of Electricity a year (house was D rated and both working out of the house during the day). We now use about 600KwHr of gas (cooking) and 2200-2600KwHr for electricity with someone working from home everyday. So our energy use has gone down, but gas is a lot cheaper than electricity, so not a dramatic difference in bills. **We're low energy users, so figures may be very different for another family.

We went with a one stop shop as i knew it would take us forever to do it piece meal. It will never pay for itself in terms of reducing bills, but we can use all rooms comfortably now (1 was cold in winter previously with heating on ). A lot of the money we spent, we'd have to have done regardless - the windows/doors were over due being replaced and we knew we needed to upgrade the insulation / airtightness.

We'd have gotten the same comfort with a bit more control doing all of the insulation (some internal at front of house/external at back of house /attic/underfloor). But given age / life expectancy, figured do it now and get all of the benefit from it, my figuring is when retired that I'll be grateful for the heat/steady temperature during the day - Can't tell if this is a good call or not.
 
Pinoy adventure said:
If your with SSE they have recently teamed up with Activ8 for solar panel installation for SSE clients.
Might be worth a look.
Click to expand...
FWIW Activ8 are generally very very very expensive. There are a number of threads on AAM giving examples of what you should be paying and somebody has put together this online tool where you can stick in your quote and see if it is in the ballpark of what should be good value - http://davidhunt.ie/solar/
 
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