Join us on our journey to discover how to make a home more energy efficient.
Meet our house on Regent Road, Skipton. Nice isn’t it? Three bedrooms, two bathrooms. A decent-sized back garden. A separate dining room, kitchen and lounge. It has an EPC (Energy Performance Certificate) rating of ‘D’, which is right in line with the UK average.
We’re inviting you to join us on a learning journey, as we transform our Regent Road house. To find out what we learn from retrofitting it, so you can benefit from our experiences. Working with specialists, we’re installing better insulation, triple glazed windows, solar panels, battery storage and an air source heat pump.
We’ll tell you how it goes at every step of the way. The things we learn. The mistakes we make. The costs – and the cost savings.
Our aim is to give you a better idea of what you could do to your own home to make it cheaper to run and more sustainable. Plus help you consider how you could do your own bit to achieving Net Zero emissions.
We’ll be updating this hub regularly over 2024, so you can see our progress.
Why would you retrofit your property?
Running a home has become a lot more challenging in recent years. It’s expected that energy bills will stay high for the next decade. If it’s too expensive to keep your home warm, it could cause damp and mould issues that might impact your health.
Improving the energy efficiency of your home could also help to reduce your carbon footprint (the total amount of greenhouse gases linked to your activity and lifestyle). As recently as 2022, 25% of the UK’s overall greenhouse gas emissions came from its buildings.
The government has pledged for the UK to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, which means there’s going to be a lot more focus on the homes we own and rent. To achieve this target, two UK properties would need to be retrofitted, every minute, by 2030 according to the UK Green Building Council (UKGBC).
Taking steps to make your home more energy efficient could make your home more comfortable, lower your energy bills – and boost the value of your property by as much as 15% according to a recent Greener Homes report published by Rightmove. It’s a stronger legacy to leave to the generations who follow us, as we each do our part to tackle social and climate change challenges.
Benefits of retrofit
- Enhance a home’s insulation – keeping more heat inside the home and more of the cold out in winter, as well as keeping the property cooler during warm summers
- Improving the air quality of your home
- Lower energy bills
- Opportunity to qualify for green mortgages or green additional lending
- Potentially boost your home’s long-term value
- Reduce your carbon footprint
Let’s learn about retrofitting together
There’s a lot of different things you could do to make your home more energy efficient and sustainable. Some are reasonably cheap, some are expensive. But it can be hard to know where to start. How do you know what’s right for your home? And what difference does it actually make?
That’s what we want to find out for our members. In partnership with Leeds Beckett and Leeds universities, during 2024 we’re going to try out different kinds of retrofit measures on our Regent Road house. So you can have a better idea of the different options available.
You may have your own reasons to consider retrofitting your own home. Perhaps to reduce your carbon footprint. Or to lower your energy bills. We’re here to help you understand the full process – what works and what doesn’t. We’ll also bust some myths. That way, you’ll have a better idea of what retrofit involves.
“Retrofitting a home isn’t just better for our environment. It could make a positive difference to someone’s life. By exploring the entire process, we can understand what retrofitting involves – and provide our members with the right information.”
Annie Heaton
Skipton Building Society Interim Group Head of Sustainability