Hi bill h,

Thanks for your interest. Firstly, there's no way I am getting external thermal cladding, it costs far more than I can possibly afford, and I think I am fairly typical of terraced home owners in not having thousands of pounds to spend on thermal cladding. You may well be right about thermal mass, but fortunately or unfortunately that is what I am stuck with. You have to remember that this is an eco-renovation, not a new build. I could be guilty of 'looking on the bright side', possibly. As for demolition, that is certainly an option that many councils have taken in many cases across the country - but I doubt it would be resource efficient to extend it to every single Victorian terrace in the country, to be honest.

I have not written much about insulation because what I have written contains all the salient facts for my particular house. This isn't a 'best practice' paper, it is about what I myself have done! Although obviously it could be replicable. The insulation scheme I took advantage of is subsidised by the energy companies, a route which most people in my situation would go down, and which I have mentioned in the article. I could certainly have super-insulated the loft with 500mm+, but I would not have been able to take advantage of the subsidised scheme, and I think many people in my situation would probably do the same. As such it's probably a good case study of what the UK government thinks is satisfactory in terms of insulation, rather than 'best practice' - if you see what I mean.

Regarding your other points, they are fair points. When I posted a link to this article on another website, I included the following 'disclaimer':-

"There are a few caveats here, not everyone could use wood fuel heating as there isn't enough of it. But for terraced houses it might be OK, as they have chimneys and are suited to solid fuel heating. Bigger homes would probably benefit from heat pumps or similar, which just need a bit of electricity to drive them.

It's not a perfect solution either - my PV system is undersized and I will need to add more panels to give me enough power to run the things I need to run, which will mean more cost. And electric cooking is not the most carbon-efficient, although you can get induction hobs which are more efficient than normal ones and we're on a 100% 'green' tarriff for the grid electricity we do use.

If the sun doesn't shine, that means tepid showers rather than a nice hot bath when you feel like it - not something everyone would want."

I would add to this that my supply of logs comes from a local tree surgeon for whom it is waste wood - I have done a little research into this and there is a lot of slack yet to be taken up in this area, including huge quantities of waste wood from council operations - something which is true of pretty much every borough. An alternative to wood heating could possibly have been an air source heat pump, something which National Energy Action (UK fuel poverty organisation) have recently successfully tested in terraced homes, but I would then have needed either underfloor heating or a new set of convecting radiators. In any case, when I was doing the renovation there were no domestic size air source heat pumps on the market so it wasn't an option. So logs we have.

We do go through a LOT of logs though - if I was eco-renovating a terrace for sale, I think I would do it differently - I would keep the gas central heating and just install a room heater wood stove. There is anecdotal evidence of people reducing their gas heating bill by up to 2/3 just through the use of a room heater stove (which of course works in a power cut).

I could have kept my hob connected to my original gas supply (which would have been more carbon efficient than moving to electricity, and would still have worked in a power cut unlike my eventual set-up), but I didn't really want a gas supply coming into the house for just a hob and nothing else, especially in view of the fact that I use solid fuel heating in winter. During power cuts we have cooked on the wood stove though.

It would probably be a more efficient use of the energy my small amount of PV generates to have a grid-connected inverter, although that wouldn't have given me the security from power cuts that my current set-up with a few batteries has. Some people I have spoken to are unconvinced of my need for batteries - we shall see. They will run such things as the solar pump, central heating pump, all my desk lamps, internet, TV etc etc during a power cut though, so life could be a bit more bearable if we start getting them regularly.

I'm sure there are plenty more things wrong which could be better, but I can't think of any more just at the minute!

Oh, except our bath, which is a big and comfortable corner bath, and as such takes a lot of water to fill. We always say it's a water-saving bath though - even though it takes more water, you can get 2 people in it, so per person it's probably quite efficient! :-)

Back in the mid 1990's I rennovated a victorian terrace. If you strip the old plaster back to the brickwork and then fix insulated plasterboard the space loss is minimal. I worked in 700 square feet of plasterboard with 40mm polyurethene insulation. As for thermal mass the internal walls and chimney blocks provided sufficient heat capacity

And history shows that big thick walls are just what people choose if they build their own homes in cold areas unhampered by planning regulations. Often to save on wall material they'd build the house half into the ground, so that the ground would act as a "large thermal mass".

For example, below is an Iron Age hut in Britain, similar ones were built in Germany, Scandanavia and Russia right up until the Middle Ages. You can see it has quite a thick wall, in

They didn't live on an earthern floor, they had a wooden floor a couple of feet above it, between the wood and the earth they had straw, which as it decayed over winter helped heat the place.

If you ever camp out overnight, what you find is that the earth itself doesn't change much in temperature. It warms up a bit during the day, and then slowly releases this heat overnight. It takes some months of winter and snow before the earth will freeze.

However, if this earth is associated with a house, it won't freeze. In Germany with their "passivhaus" design, what they've found is that if you insulate the thing enough, just the heat from the bodies of the people in it is enough to keep it at an even temperature. Adults radiate about 100W of heat. That's not a lot, but it's enough if the place is very well-insulated. Designers of shopping malls and cinemas have to account for the people in buildings and rooms in terms of keeping an even temperature in the places. A typical cinema seating 400 people has the equivalent of 40,000W of heating, that's like 40 of these,

It's possible to use this in our favour as well as have to accomodate for it. If you can insulate your home sufficiently, human body heat will go a long way to reducing how much artificial heating you need.

You can believe large thermal masses help in this, or not, as you wish. But the fact is that people built homes in cold climates with large thermal masses for thousands of years and managed to survive. You can learn from history, or deny it as you wish.

Hello, as with everything else, looking at just one element doesn't tell you much. Think of a log home with clay between the logs, not well fitted. In summer, this is probably not a bad configuration, but winters would likely be cold any distance from the fire due to drafts, etc.

Now, take that same home and have finished, tongue-in-groove, 4x4 beams then you've got the beginnings of a different story. Use some kind of glue or other sealant, compress the logs together like they do straw bales, seal the corners well and have a well-designed, sealed roof, passive solar front to the structure and - viola! - you just might have quite a little home.

Cheers