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House is an eco-friendly way to blow public cash
• I WENT to see the “eco-friendly Victorian home of the future” in St Augustine’s Road on an open day (Victorian house is home of the future, July 31). There is less to this house than Camden Council claims.
The alleged Ventaxia heat recovery units in the bathrooms were no such thing, they were standard cheap extractor fans.
The photo-voltaic panels on the roof may be working, but as Camden couldn’t get the house a feed-in tariff and it apparently has no reverse flow meter, any electricity generated is being donated free to the utility. John Doggart claimed in the article “you could find yourself sending your electricity company a bill” – not this way, you won’t.
Thermal solar panels on the roof didn’t seem to be working either, as the water tank was at 41 degrees on a fine afternoon with no hot water being used. In addition, either the council or its tenant will be paying to have the condensing boiler expensively serviced twice a year, unlike traditional boilers which work for decades with minimal attention.
The article states that Camden spent £300,000 on this conversion, and indeed it’s a neat job. Great fun when you’re spending taxpayers’ money, but what are private homeowners supposed to make of it? Even if only half the spend was on improvements rather than repairs, a homeowner would need to find £150,000 from grants (hardly any available now), from their eco-conscience, or from energy savings.
A traditional house of similar size costs us around £1,600 a year to heat and light. Say 17 St Augustine’s Road will cost £600, that’s a saving of £1,000 a year to put against a spend of £150,000 (plus interest if, unlike Camden, we borrowed the money). I should live so long...
Pretty though this experiment may be, it’s a distraction. What Camden should be doing is working to get us proper feed-in tariffs from the utilities, as in Germany, which is covered in windmills and photo-voltaics because consumers get back more for the kilowatts they sell utilities than they pay to buy them. Every house in our street has a flat-topped roof with access hatch, perfect for photo-voltaics, but without a feed-in tariff why bother?
Similarly, a big element of the spend was on remaking all the windows with custom frames and double-glazed sashes. As London has streets of houses with identical-sized windows, our council could arrange to refit entire streets at vastly reduced cost. Not one house at a time.
Mr Doggart and other eco-professionals are doing nicely out of public enthusiasm, Brussels targets and so on, but all this house really proves is that’s it’s easy to blow public money. What’s needed is real leadership and more joined-up thinking.
MIKE WELLS
Laurier Road, NW5
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