Green Deal or No Deal?

Green Deal Basics

As detailed in a blog post last year, my home energy use and a thermal imaging survey I had done show very clearly that my house is in need of serious energy efficiency work. I was intending to do this last year but working out how to finance the work proved to be a bit of a problem as I had depleted my savings to minimise the size of the mortgage. So when the Green Deal came along, I thought it would be the ideal opportunity to get the work done.

The way the Green Deal work is meant to be extremely simple:

1. Get an assessment done via an accredited Green Deal Assessor,
2. Find a Green Deal Provider,
3. Get the work done via a the provider and a Green Deal Installer,
4. Pay back the money via your electricity bill.

As an aside on the last step, considering that the Green Deal is meant to improve energy efficiency and that most of the housing stock in the UK suffers from poor insulation, the energy use that is most likely to be affected is heating, which in turn would primarily affect gas bills. Therefore paying back via your electricity bill sounds slightly counter-intuitive.

As another aside on the last step, you pay back the money with interest (you didn't think it'd be free credit, did you?) and the interest rate on Green Deal loans is around 7.5% as explained by Which? in their guide. This is not a great rate and you may have cheaper options at your disposal, as explained by Which? as you can choose to finance the works differently. The main advantage of Green Deal loans compared to any other option is that they are attached to the property rather than yourself. The way I understand it, it means that if you sell the property, the next owners will repay the remainder of the loan on their electricity bill as they benefit from the improvements and the loan will not be subject to any credit checks against you. However, don't take my word as gospel, check with an accredited adviser, which brings me to the next step.

Finding an Assessor

The first step in the Green Deal is to find an assessor. The best way to do this is to peruse the search facility on the Green Deal Oversight & Registration Body's web site: you can search by name or postcode, residential, non-residential or both. If you search by postcode, results will be ordered based on proximity, which is very handy.

I did just that and am going down the list, calling each one of them in turn based on the assumption that I will get a much better feel for the company if I have them on the phone than if fill in an online form. I added a small tweak to this, I will not call British Gas for two reasons: I called them last year so I know what their offering is like and will actually use them as a benchmark to compare the other guys against, and I am all for giving my money to smaller businesses rather than large incumbents. So far I called five of them and got fairly varied answers, little of it being promising.

1. When I called the first company, I got to speak to a nice lady who had an accent that was quite hard to understand. She understood what I was looking for but failed to adequately answer my questions. In particular when I asked her how they could justify charging me £150 for an assessment when British Gas was charging £99, she told me that they would not require me to go forward with them as a Provider, contrary to British Gas that would. This sounded a bit off as I seemed to remember there wasn't any condition to the British Gas assessment. Anyway, the whole conversation felt a bit dodgy and she completely failed to take any of my details or to tell me how to organise an assessment with them. In fact, I positively had the impression she wanted me off the phone.
2. The second company was a bit more promising as the lady I spoke to knew what I wanted and said that I had to fill in their online survey and that someone would call me back. I felt that their survey was more geared towards working out how much cashback I could get on the deal than actually taking meaningful information from me but I filled it in nonetheless. Nobody has called back yet. Note that even though the cashback option is nice, this is not the primary reason I want to go through the Green Deal so I'm not sensitive to any advertising that focuses on that. Others may be.
3. The third company I called was the first one that is a generic green energy company and that does not focus solely on the Green Deal. To the point that not only does their web site fail to display the Green Deal Approved logo, it also fails to mention the Green Deal altogether and the lady I had on the phone had no idea what I was talking about but promised to forward my details to the man who did know about this. He hasn't called me back yet. This is a shame because as far as I am concerned I may take the opportunity to have other improvements done that are not covered by the Green Deal so working with a company that has a wider scope could have been good.
4. The fourth company I called knew what I was talking about but said that they couldn't take any booking for now because they were still waiting for some software from the government. Now, I do understand that if the government promised assessors some software or other to do their work and they are late to provide it, it will put a fly in the ointment but my understanding of the assessment is that the first thing to do is a site visit that doesn't need any special software, just someone who knows what they're talking about. Besides, based on past experience, basing your ability to take on new customers on having some software delivered by the government is not a predictable way to run your business so if you don't have a plan B it doesn't inspire much confidence: conditions are never perfect in business, deal with it or you won't have a business very long.
5. The last company I called so far was by far the best of the lot. The lady on the phone knew what I wanted, was very knowledgeable about the Green Deal, acknowledged that I could finance the deal in different ways and that even after I had done the assessment with them I could go to a different provider. She took all my details and said that an assessor would call me to arrange a convenient time for a site visit. Nobody has called yet but it's still a lot more than any of the others were able to do.

The conclusion of all this is that if the Green Deal is to take off, the first thing would be to have companies ready to initiate new business when it comes knocking on their door. Apart from British Gas who were already eager to book me for an assessment back in November, only one of the smaller companies I called came remotely close to doing the same thing. Note to companies out there: being Green Deal Approved does not mean you can be completely devoid of business sense, get your act together and train your sales team!

Next Step

Call the next 5 companies on the list.

Energy Use

I've been using iMeasure roughly since I moved into the new house and here's what the graphs look like so far:

iMeasure Energy Usage Graph

There are two immediate observations on this graph:

• electricity use is not seasonnal,
• gas use definitely is!

The first observation tells me that my main electricity usage is probably not lighting as it doesn't change with the amount of daylight. So it's probably down to the big electrical items such as the washing machine and the fridge. I should be able to reduce that usage the day I replace them with new efficient models. One additional tidbit of trivia: the spike at the beginning of the graph is down to the sanding machines used when I had the wooden floors of the house sanded and varnished.

The second observation tells me that I need to work on insulating the house. In fact, I had thermal imaging done recently by the excellent Sustainable Lifestyles and it showed me very clearly that I have some low hanging fruit to pick first, in particular the loft insulation (or partial lack thereof) that results in very cold spots above the bay window in the master bedroom:

Cold Spot Above Bay Window

And at the junction points between walls and roof, the fact that whoever fitted the insulation in the loft didn't bother to fit it properly at the bottom causes cold spots underneath:

Cold Spots Where Wall Meets Roof

All this should be reasonably easy to fix so that will be my project for the summer and hopefully it should shave some of that spike off the graph for next year.

Silent Server

A few months ago I set up a home server using an old box. Unfortunately that old box died shortly afterwards. Furthermore, it was quite noisy as it had been originally spec'ed as a high end workstation. So I went in search of a replacement, with a view to have a server that would be as silent and energy efficient at possible.

In this quest, I came across VIA, a Taiwanese company that specialises in low power x86 compatible processors and motherboards. You can get most of their hardware in the UK from mini-itx.com. But I'm not good at building a box from scratch so I really needed something already assembled. I found that at Tranquil PC, a small company based in Manchester. Here is the configuration I ordered from them:

• An entry T2e chassis with DVD-R drive, colour black.
• A VIA EN15000 motherboard. I choose this one as it is the only one that they offer that comes with a Gigabit Ethernet port and the new 1.5GHz VIA C7 processor, which is one of the most power-efficient.
• 1GB RAM. Experience tells me that this is more than I need but having extra RAM should enable the machine to take on more tasks in the future.
• A 100GB 2.5" HDD. I could have gone for a larger 3.5" HDD but I don't currently need the extra space and laptop drives are significantly more energy efficient and silent than desktop ones.

I received my T2e a week or so later. Unfortunately, it had been damaged in transit and the DVD drive was not working properly anymore. The support people at Tranquil PC were very nice and very efficient and arranged for the machine to be collected and sent back to them. It came back a week later in full working order.

I replicated the original install that I had done on the old server. Having done it once, it went very smoothly, everything working first time. The obvious difference from the start was how little noise the T2e makes. In fact, the only audible noise came from the DVD drive spinning the installation CD. Otherwise, it's as if the machine was switched off. Impressive! And it looks really cool with the blue glow coming out of the front panel. As I have a plug-in energy meter, I decided to check how much power this machine drew. So, once the installation was finished and the machine was up and running, I restarted everything with the meter in between the wall socket and the PC's plug. Results:

• Max power consumption when starting up: 30 Watts.
• Standard power consumption once in operation: 25 Watts.

In other words, this machine consumes about the same as a small standard light bulb without ACPI enabled. Once I've enabled ACPI and tweaked it somewhat, I should manage to make it consume even less.

This proves that a server doesn't have to be a big power hungry and noisy box, it can be a small machine that is so silent you forget it's switched on. There are currently few suppliers for that sort of hardware but my guess is that it will become more common. In the meantime, head to Tranquil PC to find one of those.