Canned heat

Of the 22 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions in 1997, 30% came directly from heating homes and offices and 60% of emissions in the home come from the boiler system.

Heating is therefore a hot issue in global warming debates. Do we switch to green sources that are more expensive and at the moment not as efficient as they can be? Or do we try to use standard energy sources such as gas, less and more efficiently? The answer is probably both.

At the moment, in the UK, most of our energy comes from natural gas. Natural gas is a more efficient and less polluting source of energy than coal or oil used to produce electricity. However, like coal and oil, it is a fossil fuel and therefore a finite source of energy. In other words, currently known reserves are rapidly being depleted to extinction. This is where we need to introduce renewable energy sources such as wind, solar and wave power. However, at current development levels, they are not converting enough energy and therefore are not that efficient.

This makes it imperative that we invest in making renewable sources more efficient and we use less energy. We throw away hundreds of pounds each year through leaving electrical items on standby, forgetting to turn the light off when we leave a room, having too thin insulation so heat is lost through walls, doors, windows and roofs and using boilers that waste over 1000kg a year of CO2.

We can instantly save on our bills by insulating properly. The savings could be as much as £115 with proper cavity wall insulation, £380 on internal wall insulation and £400 on external wall insulation each year. Whilst external wall insulation wall insulation is around £10,000 cavity wall insulation is only £250 so you can make the money back in just over two years. If you were to upgrade all your insulation you can prevent almost five tonnes of CO2 from being emitted into the atmosphere.

If we all switched to a new energy efficient condensing boiler we can save 6.7 million tonnes of CO2 and enough energy to heat 1.9 million homes for a whole year. This works out to up to 1,260kg each. These so-called condensing boilers work by reusing the heat that is normally lost through the exhaust flue to turn the water vapour back into usable water to pump through the heating system. British Gas currently has some great offers on a whole range of heating options on their website, so you can start doing your bit for the planet in 2010 without having to worry too much about the strain on your bank balance.

(Submitted article)

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