A Tour Of Robert Llewellyn’s Ultra-Efficient Eco Home

in an integral part of the house that we don't even think about, you know, you know, we will always have hot water, yeah, that's as far as I can go. Have you ever taken a shower and it's cold? No so you know it works yeah it's working yeah and I don't really have anything to do with it so this is still a little bit new and I'm kind of excited about my yeah. my foreign tapio, so what other energy devices do you have to reduce your carbon footprint in your

home

? Well I guess the most obvious one is LED lights and that was very early.

The difference when we had that was because we had halogen bulbs that I was always replacing because they always broke, since we had LED lights they just work and use a lot less energy and It's a truly notable reduction in an energy-

efficient

refrigerator. I don't know what that means but it just keeps things fresh and then behind me was the one that replaced a gas Argo that we inherited, yeah and that used to drive me crazy but everyone that came to the house really loved it , so "I have an always hot electric stove which is lovely and it's made just down the road in Stroud so it's locally produced equipment and also I just want to say this to ease my guilt because it's definitely the most We have something indulgent that is made using renewable energy so it is made in an old water mill and they produce their own electricity in the old water mill and use it to help build and weld all their metal stoves so that's it .I'm supporting a local business.

We're looking at Dan because you know everything we've done is very self indulgent and a little bit unnecessary. We could have gotten a really cheap stove that used a lot less energy, so that's a bit. borgy, but other than that, it's the infrared heaters in the studio and my office, which are Herschel infrared heaters and they're weird because they're like very thin sheets that you have to screw to the wall and I just plug them in. I walk into them and then they have glowing thermostats and control things, but they don't feel like radiators, but when you're in the room you're warm, it's a different heat, yeah, and I'm still getting used to those.

So all of this has happened, a lot of the stuff has happened this year, so the last arc of getting rid of gas was getting rid of all those sort of old-fashioned gas boilers and everything, so infrared replaced radiators I guess. We have things like wall cavity insulation. Loft insulation has all those kinds of things, yeah, and we did it a long time ago, so about 20 or 20 years ago when we rebuilt the house, that was the only thing we did at the time, we did a lot of errors and a lot of things. I wish we had done better and all that, but we insulated the house very well, so the whole house is extremely well insulated, except for these old doors, yes, they are not perfect, so they have shutters so that helps, but you know in due course I could replace them with really properly designed doors that won't win the wording, yeah that's our only weak point, everything else is really good so it's actually always been a cheap house for everyone's sake ways and what I've tried to do is make it even cheaper and more

efficient

, but we started with the insulation, so that's absolutely you know if you're going to say what should I do to make my house more energy efficient.

It's absolutely number one, it should be fair, Robert, and you have more technologies in this house than are strictly necessary, but you have to admit that you have invested your own money, yes, in them, but I'm interested to know how you feel about that. payback yes, I have mixed feelings about payback because in a sense there is the annoying thing when you know someone might buy a new kitchen and no one asks them what the payback is for that kitchen or buy a new car, what is the payback of the car there. Isn't it just paying and then there is that side that goes well?

You know, I didn't do it to recoup the investment. I did it to reduce our energy bills. What you've done, it's going to take some time, so, buddy. at Oxford he suggested who is a statistician and smarter and can do sums very well in mathematics and he suggested to me that I would have to live to be 102 and maybe that was about three years ago. Since then he commented that you said and as a joke. in the way he said, now you have to live 2072, which for me is six years, so the payback is much less and I would have invested more, but it is over such a long period of time, it is more than 12 years that I have been doing.

All these things didn't happen overnight, do you have an intuition? So, what things have the most economical value? Because we were talking about thermostatic radiator valves at the beginning, they are quite cheap and make a big difference. I love it. The fact that I have thermostatic valves on the radiator and I didn't know that, yeah, that shows how focused I am on the case, but you have an idea of ​​the things that you've done, whether it's the battery or the solar, what you think which is actually. the weather, it's infrared or tapio, things that could have made the biggest difference.

I mean, I think now, if I were to do something now, what matters is absolute insulation and that's when I remember what some of the builders said when we were doing this. house upstairs and the builder said he had insulation in The Loft and he didn't so we felt good so I knew it was a sensible thing to do and particularly as this house is timber it was very easy. It's not a challenge to do so we were able to fill the walls with really good insulation without much, it's not like having an old stone house or a brick house, it was easy to do so it wasn't a big challenge but I think First I would choose the batteries and I don't know if it makes that sense.

Well, I mean, you would know a lot better than me, but in some ways, the experience I've had with charging batteries at peak times is a lot cheaper and then using that energy. when energy is more expensive is a really simple logical thing, you can understand it very easily. I know that last night I paid five now seven pence per kilowatt hour for this electricity and I'm using it now during the day, where it would cost. Me 55. So that's pretty obvious, yeah, huge savings and that payback. I think I think the batteries have paid for themselves faster than anything else, although they are a cheap installation to begin with, so it can be difficult to talk about payback because you've added.

A lot of things have accumulated over the years, but you have to have some kind of income of what you've used and what you've been saving so that I can see as soon as I open the app, I can see what I'm going through. Now 6.4 kilowatts coming out of the solar panels, of which 1.3 are being used in the house, which means that right now 5.1 are going to the grid, so all my neighbors' appliances work with clean electricity and I feel very satisfied and proud. and I'm virtually signaling like crazy to do that, but then if I look, this is what's shocking, so if I look at the year so far, I never do this, so I check what's happening now and make sure. oh, I can charge a car, you know, that's what I would think about it, so 11.57 megawatt hours this year we've used in this house, which seems incredibly high to me, yeah, that's because of two electric cars, I guess that's the thing, so because that's what's so hard to judge and where you need a statistician and someone with spreadsheets and who can remember the numbers is how much we would have spent on gas in the same period.

Much is very obvious. We have produced 7.7 megawatt hours of this with solar energy. year so far which is also because I never look at this when you say I look at the day but I never looked at the whole year 7.7 and it's only August so that's a lot of battery I don't know what. that means the power wall has discharged 4.14 megawatt hours, so obviously it was installed and discharged and then, yes, the grid that we have, we take 4.46 megawatts, but we deliver 0.28 megawatt hours, so they are 2,800 kilowatt hours, yeah, yeah, so the standard two-bedroom house type in the UK for gas panels, it would probably be about a year, okay, so we've supported the whole house, yeah, plus Of everything else we've done, oh, that's it. extraordinary yes, that's it, yes, that's it, I mean, I don't look at those things that I'm going to do from now on.

I'm going to be obsessed. Do you know how much I've done this year? How many megawatt hours? But yes, but. it's also the usage, I think you don't look at it as a daily or monthly bill, you don't look at the whole year, but I mean, 11 megawatt hours sounds crazy, all we have to say then is thank you. you for letting us into your house, you are not a normal person, although your house is not normal, so we will make more normal houses, but yeah, what a great place to take a look at all the different technologies in one place.

Foreign for showing us their house today and if you like this episode don't forget to follow us on our everything electric show and if you liked it, thank you for watching.