On the day Simon Buck exchanged on his home in New Malden, south-west London, he stood across the road with a notepad and started to draw.
“I literally sketched the design of a new house that was in my head,” he says. “Then I spent the next two years going about researching and working out how I was going to do it.”
He had a clear goal: to upgrade the property into the ultimate eco-home that could generate more energy than it consumed.
This would be no easy feat. The house – which was built in the early 1950s – had an energy performance certificate (EPC) rating of ‘E’, placing it within the bottom 14% of English homes for energy efficiency.
EPCs aim to measure the energy efficiency of a property and are calculated based on the amount of energy used per square metre. Not only are more energy-efficient properties cheaper to run, they can also command higher house prices and may be eligible for ‘green mortgages’, which can come with preferential rates.
For Buck, it took almost two years from buying the home for a “bargain” £1 million in July 2023 before work on the project could begin.
“We ended up blowing the budget massively in pursuit of the best possible score,” says Buck, who spent £900,000 on the renovation. “There’s £100,000 worth of tech sitting in the plant room. I went over the top with everything.
“I could’ve built the house for a third of the price but it wouldn’t be the house that we have.”
Included in the exorbitant price were the solar panels, which – alongside a 20-kilowatt battery to store some of the electricity they produce – cost around £15,000.
Buck also installed a £30,000 state-of-the-art heat pump.
His home remains at a steady temperature throughout the year, with the thermostat hovering at a pleasant 23 degrees Celsius. The 46 year-old says he is able to walk around the house in the winter wearing only shorts and a T-shirt.
Obviously, that was well worth the £900,000 price tag. Buck is 46. Assuming he lives at least another 40 years that works out at £22,500 per annum to be able to wear shorts indoors in the winter. That’s roughly 10 times or more than the average household energy costs in the UK according to British Gas.
Unfortunately for the Government and its plans, Buck’s project only serves to demonstrate that the Net Zero dream is just that, way beyond the means of both most of the population and the public purse, especially given the age of most of Britain’s housing stock. As for Buck, he plans to sell up and start on a new-build project to create an even more efficient home. Whatever lights his fire, so to speak....<<<Read More>>>....
