Anyone who has considered beefing up the environmental credentials of their house will know just how hard it is. Knowing what it is worthwhile doing, where to start, and how to do it is very difficult. Although some of the information is out there it's very scattered and hard-to-find. It's crazy that it should be so - in order to acheive the Kyoto target of reducing CO2 emissions by 60% over the 1990 levels by 2050 (what we need to do so avoid a likelihood of catastrophe), we need to tackle the emissions caused by housing. Housing makes up about 30% of all CO2 emissions in the UK, and with less than 0.7% of the stock replaced each year we are not going to solve the problem just by making new homes 'zero carbon'.
Last night we went to an excellent presentation by Russell Smith of Parity Eco Solutions which was hosted by Sustainable Redhill. Russell set out with the aim of simplifying the solution, and by means of demonstrating the technologies on his own house being able to quantify the benefits or otherwise of different techniques. Technologies covered include insultation, solar heating, rainwater harvesting, grey water recycling and others.
For example, he has managed to reduce CO2 emissions caused by heating the pretty ordinary 3 bed semi by about 80%. Through experimenting with different insulation techniques on the same house, and measuring their thermal performance, he has has generated data upon which to base recommendations.
Through this project and other commercial projects he is able to offer a service such that your house can be surveyed, and proprietary software then used to give you a personal highly detailed report detailing individual recommendations and payback times. For example, it might turn out that the first thing for you to do is to install cavity wall insulation, or perhaps install solar thermal heating - it all depends on your house.
Then if you decide to take on any project he can help through the actual mechanics.
I recommend approaching him.
His presentation was very interesting; if you know of a group who might be interested in seeing it I'm sure Russell would be only too pleased to present it.