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What can £10,000 buy within the Green Deal?
How to Spend £10,000 Improving Your Property
As a homeowner you will be able to get access to 10,000 for installing Green measures into your property. But what will 10,000 actually buy you? Here are some ideas of what you could spend your investment on.
As part of the qualification process a Green Deal Advisor will visit your property and advise on the best measures to install for your particular needs. Here’s the tricky bit, each property is going to have different needs, some will already have double glazing and loft insulation and so might be looking at micro power generation where as others might need to think about insulation first. It seems logical to assume that the advisors will all look at insulating a property first and then look at the other measures afterward.
For an example let’s look at a three bedroom semi-detached house built in the 1930’s, Loft insulation is a fast effective way to save money instantly and any advisor worth talking to would have this at the top of their list. Depending on the size of the loft it would cost between £100 and £250, based on someone doing it on their own and with their own money.
So that’s the loft done, what next? Supposing the house is of a normal construction internal walls will be either be single brick or already insulated so there would be little savings to be made. Again this is based on an average house built in the 1930’s. The next area would be the windows and external doors. The average cost of double glazing a property that has 11 windows (£400 a unit), 2 external doors (£800 per door) and some sliding patio doors (£1500) could run into a figure of £7500.
Our running total is £7750 and we can move onto the external walls, homes of this type would have a cavity wall that can be filled with a number of different types of insulation. Average cost would be around the £250-£350 mark let’s take the higher number to be on the safe side. Cavity wall insulation is pretty cheap and quick to do and can usually be done in a day. Total is now £8150 so we have £1850 left to play with.
Our virtual house is now properly insulated up to the latest specification and the savings will start to roll in but what to do with the remaining £1850, well you could spend it on a new boiler. An average family home could just squeeze a new boiler out of the remaining money.
There is of course a couple of glaring caveats with all of the above, one being: we haven’t even mentioned the Golden Rule of the Green Deal, which states that the savings made must be more than the initial costs over the repayment period. This could be tricky with the double glazing, usual recouping of costs can take up to 30 or 40 years.
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