For the past six years, I have been a customer of green electricity supplier Good Energy. Today I abandoned ship and signed up to nPower’s low price tariff. Why?
One. Good Energy kept putting their prices up. It’s the most expensive electricity supplier in the country. At home, we use around 8500 kilowatt hours of electricity every year and their latest price hike, to over 11p per kWh, when taking standing charge into account, will bring our annual electricity bill to nearly a grand. Good Energy used to go out at a premium of around 10% to the mainstream suppliers. Now the premium has grown to 35%. The nPower offering will save us £350 a year. A kWh at nPower is still less than 8p. Good Energy keep saying that everyone else is about to put their prices up, but you can buy electricity now at 9p per kWh with the price fixed until 2009.
Two. I have gradually lost faith in the concept of green electricity and I now think that the extra £350 a year I would be paying to Good Energy will make little difference to the UK energy scene. Of course, I always accepted that green electrons, delivered over the National Grid, were never going to be anything more than an accounting nicety, but I bought into the idea that Good Energy would match everything I paid over to them with renewable supplies. And indeed I accept that they do this. I have interviewed several of them over the years, including Juliet Davenport, the chief executive, and I have no doubt that their intentions are entirely honourable. This is a feelgood business par excellance and it trades on this factor.
But it turns out that the realities of the renewable energy market are a little different to how I first imagined. Which was that you put up a windfarm, which cost a shedload of money, but then you sold the generated electricity in perpetuity and all you had to do to cover your costs was to recoup enough money to pay off the loans. I couldn’t see why the price should change at all from year to year, so it came as quite a shock when Good Energy started passing on price rises every few months and the price paid per unit shot up from 7p to 11p.
What really drives the renewable electricity market is government intervention. The government has a commitment to produce ever greater quantities of renewables and, in order to do this, they set purchase targets for the big suppliers. Each year, they raise the targets thus ensuring there is a growing demand for renewables. The renewable electricity actually changes hands by way of an auction and the price has become artificially inflated because the targets set by government are always a little ahead of the supply. This is good news for renewable suppliers because they see a rapidly increasing market and a healthy premium price paid for their product. But it’s awful news for a boutique supplier like Good Energy because they are committed to purchasing 100% from renewables so they have to pay a premium price at auction in order to get hold of the stuff.
What’s also apparent in all this is that the market is being driven forward by government subsidy, not by any well-meaning consumer purchasing power. So the way the market is set up (or should that be rigged?), buying green electricity is an entirely pointless gesture.
So today, I voted with my direct debit. Went online to UK Power and switched over all within the space of ten minutes.
Now to reduce that 8500 kWhs per annum.
One of the less commentated about but nevertheless interesting aspects of living in a house you built yourself is that you can monitor and muse on just how long it takes to start falling apart. We have been living in this house in Cambridgeshire for over 13 years and its long since passed the point where it can be thought of as a new house. The superstructure has lasted pretty well but internally all manner of things have started to fail or drop off and have had to be replaced.
On Monday, the garage door-opening device went kaput. Having operated flawlessly since installation back in 1992, it jammed halfway through an opening manoeuvre and suddenly started making a high-pitched wailing noise. Oh dear. It didn’t sound like the sort of fault that could be cured with WD40 or a tap with a hammer.
I called up Chris Brown of Cambridge Garage Doors. He appeared on Thursday and took one look at it and told me it had done well. “It’s a Stanley Slave Door. American. Very good too, but they have long since given up on the UK market. Too small for them, I’m afraid. They normally last around ten years so you’ve had good value out of it. It’s time you had a German one.” There are, of course, no UK manufacturers. Silly question.
Today I have his quotation to hand for fitting a Hörmann Supramatic E that is quiet and powerful with automatic lighting and a soft stop, cushioning the door during the last closing few inches. Our price to supply and install this new system is £395 plus VAT. This includes a two year warranty.
I have accepted. Back in 1992, the Stanley Slave Door cost £290 fitted, so that’s not too bad a price hoik, especially as I believe the Hörmann is superior in most respects. Gone is Stanley’s noisy old chain mechanism, to be replaced by a silent Kevlar belt. The Hörmann also comes with not one but two remote operators. Wow. Not that we ever use them. We haven’t parked a car in the double garage for ten years. But the boys always loved playing with them and doubtless this love is about to be rekindled.
Should the Hörmann Supramatic last as long as the Stanley Slave Door, it will be costing around £1 a week in depreciation. That’s a lot to open and close a garage door automatically. On the other hand, they are heavy beasts, these up-and-over double doors, so it’s hard to see just why you would want to do it manually.
The loft conversion is a thoroughly modern phenomenon. They started to appear in the 1970s and have spread across the UK from the expensive areas towards the cheaper ones. You see them most often where land prices are highest, which is where people are looking to make their footprints sweat a bit. In an era of low rates of house replacement rates and with 3% stamp duty cutting in on house sales above £250,000, it’s a wonder there aren’t more loft conversions being carried out.
One of the factors stopping lofts being converted is the prevalence of fink roof trusses. This little innovation was widely taken up in the 1960s by British housebuilders because it was cheaper and quicker than building roofs on site in the time-honoured method. A fink truss roof is not easily converted because the integrity of the roof depends on the truss loadings being left in tact and the loadings typically run from wallplate to wallplate across the house. I would guess that around 98% of individual house roofs built between 1970 and 2000 used fink trusses so there must be four or five million homes in the UK (out of a total of 25 million) which have these roofs. They are not impossible to convert into living space but they do present difficulties that are enough to put off the average builder.
The demand for loft conversions has led to one of two innovative businesses setting up which specialise in turning fink roof truss roofs into habitable rooms. One such is Ripon-based Truss Loft which undertakes around 150 conversions a year across the whole country. They thread steel through the loft from gable to gable and build up a floor and roof support off these steels.
At the HomeBuilding & Renovating show at the NEC show last weekend, there was another business looking to crack this lucrative market. Telebeam was started by Digby Rowsell (pictured), a house designer from Wiltshire, who had oft pondered the madness of building all these fink trussed roofs. He hit on the idea of using a telescopic aluminium beam, which could be thread through the roofspace from side to side, thus creating a new floor strong, enough both to support activity in the loftspace and the weight of the roof above it. Rowsell has worked through the prototype stages and had the beams passed by LABC, the Local Authority Building Control body that should mean that it is acceptable to all local authorities.
The cost is around £300 a beam: each truss requires a beam either side, so effectively this means £600 per truss. Trusses conventionally sit 600mm apart, so an 8m long roof would have 13 trusses and the cost of supplying 26 Telebeams would be just under £8,000 (+VAT). That sounds like a lot for a loft conversion but bear in mind that most loft floors require strengthening in any event and that this cost is in for nothing with Telebeam. It’s also not far removed from the extra cost charged by companies like TrussLoft for their services: there is simply no cheap way of converting fink-trussed roofs.