News - Rising house prices force owners into their lofts

Rising house prices and increased stamp duty have made life very difficult for anyone who wants to own a bigger home. So if moving house is ruled out and there’s no room for an extension, then moving up may be the option you’re looking for.

Research by GE Money Home Lending shows that loft conversions add value of your home: anything from £22,000 to £45,000, depending on where you live.

But how do you go about it? The Federation of Master Builders (FMB) says converting loft space typically takes about 12 weeks, with disruption kept to a minimum until the builders break through to build the new stairs.

And the Loft Shop, a chain of loft accessories showrooms, calculates the cost of a conversion at anything from £16,000 for a one-room extension to £40,000 for two bedrooms and a bathroom.

A stand-up idea
The first thing to do when considering a loft conversion is to stand up, according to John Longworth, managing director of loft specialist Sashtec. He advises checking that you can stand upright at your loft’s highest point, as this needs to be at least 2.3m high to comply with current planning requirements.

If you can stand up and are keen to go ahead, you need to apply for planning consent and building control approval from your local authority, both of which will incur a fee. This will vary depending on the size of the project and your particular authority. Contact your local authority or consult the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG).

Currently, most loft conversions come under what is called permitted development, which means you don’t have to go through the more lengthy formal planning application process a new building is subject to. However, a government white paper on planning published in May could potentially mean big changes in this area.

The government claims the white paper reforms will mean a simpler and quicker application and appeal processes. However, Brian Berry, external affairs director at the FMB, advises those currently considering a loft conversion to “get on and do it quickly,” as the changes may actually make the process more difficult.

He adds that if the proposals do become a reality, homeowners in built-up areas may have to go through the more traditional planning process, which can take up to eight weeks, rather than qualifying for permitted development.

“It could mean that 90% of planning applications would need to go through the planning application process,” says Berry.

“Last year, 126,000 loft conversions were allowed under permitted development in the UK. If the majority of these need to go through the planning application process there would be an avalanche of applications to local authorities.”

Although the proposed changes are subject to consultation until mid-August, it’s worth checking on their progress with your local authority before embarking on your loft conversion.

Permission granted
Once you have permission you can get on with the work. Finding the right professionals for the job will save a lot of time, money and hassle. An architect will manage the whole project from planning and design to selecting a builder and supervising the work. The Loft Shop says you should expect fees ranging from £1,500 to £3,000, in addition to building and material costs.

Alternatively, you could get a builder who specialises in loft conversions. The FMB advises homeowners to get at least three quotes before starting any work.

Funding for your loft conversion shouldn’t be a problem, especially if your property has increased in value and you have equity in it. Many mortgage lenders are prepared to provide loans for home improvements, which are added to the mortgage, or let you release equity by remortgaging.

James Cotton, mortgage specialist at broker London & Country Mortgages, says mortgage rates are lower than personal loan and credit-card rates, but warns that the debt will usually be spread over a longer period of time. This means you will ultimately pay more in interest.

Cotton suggests personal loans are suitable for smaller jobs, but for more substantial projects a flexible mortgage may be the answer. These allow you to withdraw funds as and when you need them.

Going green
A loft extension could also boost your green credentials, which means you might be able to turn to a specialist to help raise funds to pay for the work.

Jenny Irwin, from the Ecology Building Society, says: “We want to encourage borrowers to use existing resources to meet their needs, and this is why we lend for renovations and conversions - we see it as a form of recycling.”

Whatever work you get done, you will need to inform your mortgage lender and insurer; adding an extra room to your property could result in a higher buildings insurance premium. Failing to do so is inadvisable, as Vicky Emmott from Halifax Home Insurance warns: “If you make any changes to your property and don’t tell your insurer, you could invalidate your home insurance policy.”

A loft conversion could help you sidestep the property ladder, add value to your home, and ease your ethical conscience - but only if you take the time to do things properly.

source: Times

Going Green News planning

Gadgets - Future proofing our house

One of the questions I’ll need to answer is the cabling of the house. I’m a believer that you should plan as far ahead as possible but not take too much of a technological leap so as to make all your existing gizmos behind.

So it’s a difficult decision. It’s obvious that the way we will store and use our music, videos and communications will change from the shelves of dusty cd/dvd cases to a discrete media server tucked away in a cupboard some where. So this will require cabling that will allow high-definition (HD) video to be transferred quickly as well networking the laptops, printers and storage servers. I realise that if I’m to do this correctly, I’m probably going to have to call in an expert. I’ve been told of the Custom Electronic Design and Installation Association which can be found on 01480 213 744 or www.cedia.co.uk.

More investigation into the subject has shown that Cat6 network cabling, even though 25% more expensive is to ‘nerds’ choice over the old Cat5E cabling. This will allow the audio/ video transfer that will be required as mentioned before.

Wireless is also an option, but my wife does worry about the health implications with 2 young children are running around. If she had it all her way, she’d have them wearing tin foil hats all day to protect them from the ‘harmful’ rays. Even though I mock, I can’t help but be concerned that there could be a risk and until it’s proven to be nonsense, I’ll bow to her whims. There’s also the problem that we are going to insulate our renovated house as much as our budget will allow. This will, in turn hinder the idea of having everything wireless as having dropped packets of data when watching our favourite film won’t be acceptable.

Optical fibre products could be an option but until the cost has come down considerably, I won’t be looking to install this.

So with the plans fixed and an idea of what I will like to have, it’s time to get the experts in, if only to help me budget and prioritise for the future.

Future Gadgets planning smart homes technology

News - Parents’ DIY skills boost house prices

British parents have used their Renovation skills to add £33bn to the value of their children’s homes over the past five years, a survey claimed today.

Mums and dads have donated an average of eight days’ labour to their offspring since 2001, with 30% of those questioned admitting they would ask their parents for help to avoid paying for work to be done, Halifax Home Insurance said.

The company said that as a nation parents had donated 167m days in total, saving their children £14bn in labour costs.

Parents were most likely to get a call from offspring aged between 18-24, with 84% of that group saying they had drafted in their mums and dads to help with home improvements in the past five years.

Perhaps surprisingly, one in five 55-64-year-olds said they had turned to their mum or dad for assistance.

Almost half (43%) of those surveyed said they asked their families to help because they didn’t have the skills to do the work themselves, a figure that increased to 53% among 18-35-year-olds.

Only 31% of this age group rated their renovation skills as being better than their parents’, compared with 42% of 35-54-year-olds and 63% of over 55s.

Despite a lack of skills being revealed as the top reason for people to bring in their mum and dad, most of the jobs they gave them were pretty straightforward.

The top parental task was painting and wallpapering, followed by gardening, general renovation and building furniture.

On average these jobs added £2,390 to the value of the property, or a total of £33.4bn across the nation as a whole, the insurer said.

Martyn Foulds, senior claims manager at Halifax Home Insurance, said: “It’s no secret that, if done well, even basic cosmetic tasks such as redecorating can add significant value to a property.

“It would be great to see more young people taking an interest in renovation as their parents won’t always be able to help them out. Being able to complete even simple tasks alone can save money.”
source: Guardian

News

Going Green - Reducing your Carbon Footprint

Whether it’s a tentative step or one giant leap, we all need to start reducing our home’s carbon footprint.

How exactly do our day-to-day lives affect the global environment and what can we do to reduce our impact? The amount of electricity we consume and waste we produce all add up to create a carbon footprint and it’s this that we should be looking at reducing. Like charity, being environmentally friendly begins at home.

What is a carbon footprint?
A carbon footprint is a measure of the impact that we have on the environment in terms of greenhouse gases, typically measured in units of carbon dioxide (CO2). CO2 is probably the most widely known and is generated through the burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil and also deforestation. Other greenhouse gases include: methane, generated from landfills and agriculture; Nitrous oxide, produced by industry and the burning of fossil fuels; Tropospheric ozone, created by the reaction between sunlight and pollutants such as those from vehicles; and Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs)– chemicals used in refrigeration and air conditioning. Most of these gases are naturally occurring, but due to our lifestyles over the last 100 years or so, have increased at worryingly high levels causing global warming. According to research by the Met Office, last year was the warmest since records began and experts are blaming this largely on the increase in these gases.

By measuring your individual or family’s carbon footprint, you can assess your lifestyle and highlight areas that need to be improved. It may simply be a case of washing clothes on a cooler setting or as dramatic as ditching the car and walking to work. Research carried out by the Energy Saving Trust shows that as a nation we waste a huge amount of energy. 71% of us are guilty of leaving appliances on standby and 63% of us forget to turn lights off in unoccupied rooms. So simply by breaking our bad habits we could easily reduce our carbon footprint. Philip Selwood, Chief Executive of the Energy Saving Trust, says, “Unless we curb our energy wasting habits by 2010 we could have wasted around 43m tons of carbon dioxide.”

There are plenty of carbon footprint calculators available online, try http://www.carbonneutral.com/.

There are three main areas that a carbon footprint calculator covers: home energy, waste disposal and travel. The Carbon Trust, a government-funded organisation that works with businesses and the public sector to cut carbon emissions, puts the annual carbon footprint of an average person living in Britain at around 10 tons of CO2 per year. A large proportion of this is generated through space heating in the home and household wastage.
It’s soon going to be necessary for us all to reduce our carbon footprints, not just out of guilt for damaging the planet but because of various
measures introduced by the government. One proposal currently being considered is a carbon ‘credit card’ to ration the amount of carbon each household uses. Allowances would be allocated for travel, energy and food and any surplus could be sold to those who require more. The scheme was unveiled by Environment Secretary, David Miliband, who says, “We all need to curb our carbon output - after all households constitute 44% of the UK’s emissions.” MoI

HOW TO REDUCE YOUR CARBON FOOTPRINT - A SIMPLE 10-STEP GUIDE
With a few simple lifestyle changes and improvements to our homes it should be possible for us all to reduce our carbon footprint:

1) Insulation
Poorly insulated homes can cost up to £200 more per year to heat. Loft insulation should be around 250mm and there are grants to help with the cost of making improvements (get in touch with the Energy Saving Trust - http://www.est.org.uk/ or you energy supplier).

2) Windows
Where possible opt for double glazing to keep out the draughts. If you can’t replace every window then at least upgrade those in rooms that are heated the most or opt for secondary glazing. ECO FACT:
Online holiday company, lastminute.com, offsets carbon emissions for every flight it sells

3) Recycling
Visit http://www.recyclenow.com/ for a list all the recycling centres in your area.

4) Composting
Invest in a compost bin and put veggie peelings to good use on the garden.
http://www.rhs.org.uk/ 5) Get some exercise
We all complain about not having time for the gym, so ditch the car for short journeys and walk to the shops.

6) Switch energy supplier
From companies who supply renewable energy or those that offset emissions through ‘green’ projects, visit http://www.uswitch.com/.

7) Experiment with renewable energy
Many affordable technologies are now available from major DIY chains like B&Q to generate your own electricity via the sun or wind. http://www.diy.com/

Think before you throw
Would someone else find a use for your old junk? If so take it to a charity shop or sell it on Ebay.

9) Shop locally
Locally produced food and household items cuts down on transportation emissions and helps the local economy.

10) Don’t holiday abroad
Planes are the worst culprits in terms of transport emissions so forget short flights to Europe, make the most of what the UK has to offer.

Going Green

Facts - Solar panels, money saver?

A power player in an unfair game
Ashley Seager splashed out £17,000 on solar panels in an effort to cut his fuel bills. So now he’s saving the planet, but will he save a fortune at the same time?

There can be few things more satisfying, in these days of sky-high energy prices, than watching one’s electricity meter turning backwards. If you are lucky enough to have one of those older meters with a series of small dials , it will go into reverse during the day if you fit a photovoltaic solar panel system on your house - as I have.
The panels cost £17,000 to buy and install, helped along by an £8,500 government grant. They are already generating more electricity than our family uses, and over the year I’m confident they will net enough to cover all our needs, even on gloomy winter days. I’ll soon be waving goodbye to my annual electric bill of around £350.

The environmental benefits are obvious. But will the investment pay off in hard financial terms? It all depends on whether you can get a grant, and an electricity supplier to pay you a fair rate for what you generate.

Grants, as readers are probably aware, are a rare creature these days as the money keeps running out. The government says this is because they are so popular. But the reality is there is too little money in the pot.

The grant system has been suspended and may be relaunched next month. If so, and if you are considering solar panels, you will need your wits about you, and a quote from an approved supplier, to apply for a grant on the DTI’s low carbon buildings programme website. The DTI cut the grants by a third just before they suspended the system, so they will no longer pay 50% of the cost.

I applied last autumn and was lucky enough to grab around £8,500 , representing half the cost of my 3kw system. That’s a pretty big system. Most people go for 2kw but I figured that cost per kilowatt falls with a bigger system because of the fixed costs of installation.

A south facing roof is best, but the efficiency losses are not large for southeast or south-west facing and even north facing roofs lose only about 15%.

The system is not intrusive. Mine is invisible from the ground. There are the panels, a small wire down the outside wall and an inverter box (which converts the panels’ direct current to alternating current to match the domestic system) in our small cellar next to the meter.

One way to look on our investment is that the £350 saving on electricity bills is equal to a 4.1% return on the £8,500 invested - respectable but not spectacular, I admit. But this figure is far from fixed. If we can get our hands on a renewable obligation certificate (ROC), worth about £120 a year, it will push the return up to about 5.5%.

It will also depend on future electricity prices and on whether we manage to keep our lovely old meter, which provides a clear indication of our generation as well as usage.

But I don’t agree with working out simple “payback” times. The house is now worth more because it costs less to run and is greener than most. The first PV systems, fitted in Japan in 1963, are still running, so they last a long time. Thus the annual return on investment is what matters to us. But people need greater certainty about their “feed-in tariffs” - jargon for what suppliers pay you for the power you supply to them - because the sums only just add up.

In Germany the government has mandated tariffs of around 30p per kilowatt hour, compared with between 4.5 and 8.5p in Britain. Small wonder that Germany has 300,000 PV systems compared with Britain’s paltry 5,000.

The reason you export electricity is that you generate power during the day when you are likely to be out. You have lights and other appliances on first thing in the morning and in the evening, requiring you to draw current from the grid because your home system is not generating at those times.

Whether you will be a net importer or exporter over a year will depend on the size of your system and how much electricity you use. Having had my system - supplied by Filsol and fitted by Aqualeq - for two weeks, I have begun exploring which company will pay the most for the power I generate. The picture is dismal. The companies are there to make money, not to help you go green at all.

They don’t like our old meter. They want to change it for a new one that won’t turn backwards. Then they want to charge us £100 to fit a separate export meter .

That would be fine if they paid the same for both. But no, they want to charge us 15.5p per kwh they sell us but pay only 8.5p for what we export. That is a fat margin and can ruin the economics of home generation. The “green” suppliers of electricity are, unfortunately, no better.

As the government seems unable to run a grant system, it should tell these generators - some of whom, ironically, are German-owned - to pay proper feed-in tariffs to make it worthwhile for people to export. Don’t hold your breath, though. In the meantime, we will defend our old meter since it makes our sums work out.

Our aim now is to cut our electricity consumption so we can generate all we consume. Our consumption in recent years has been close to the national average of 3,300 kwh per year. We will not be forcing the children to do their homework by candlelight, however. We have just swapped all lightbulbs for low energy ones, but the real difference will be a new fridge-freezer. These are the biggest consumers of electricity for most people, not because they are high wattage but because they are on 24/7. With an A+ fridge -freezer, our use will fall by around 800kwh a year - about 25% of our consumption . That will take it down to around the 2,300 kwh the panels produce, making us self-sufficient in electricity, hopefully.

We still get our heating and hot water from gas central heating. If you heat water with electricity, a PV system is unlikely to meet all needs.

We are still emitting carbon from the house, although much less than before. We have also put in extra insulation, draught proofing, etc and have cut our gas use. In fact it is crucial, and much cheaper, to do all these “non-sexy” things before you contemplate PV.

All in all, I reckon for £10,000- £12,000 (after the grant), we will have cut our domestic carbon emissions in half. It’s a considerable sum, but it hasn’t cost the earth.

source: Guardian

Facts Going Green Info