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> It costs £640 to insulate the roof of an average semi-detached house

What?! How cheap are contractors in the UK?? I would've expected this to be in the 10s of thousands.

> Households could save £195 a year by installing double glazing, the EST found.

The real benefit of double/triple glazing is instant quality of life, though. Much better noise reduction from street sounds and also none of that pesky cold draft feeling near windows at night.

>What?! How cheap are contractors in the UK?? I would've expected this to be in the 10s of thousands.

The whole article is nonsensical, they use absolute values for something that depends on surface and always reference the EST (i.e. the Energy Savings Trust) for the data they provide without linking to the source.

The site:

https://energysavingtrust.org.uk/

seems like one of those "explanation to the masses" ones with no actual practical value.

Personally I do not even understand what they do or are supposed to do, it all seems to me like a lot of "fluff":

https://energysavingtrust.org.uk/about-us/

(i.e. are they government backed or are a sort of lobbyist for green building energy saving?)

The 640 comes from a graphic here:

https://energysavingtrust.org.uk/advice/roof-and-loft-insula...

27 cm (what?) of mineral wool, and it seems like they propose a DIY job.

Of all the possible ways this is the cheapest one (and only can be done in a specific type of house/roof/loft) and if it is unused.

In the UK, the material only should be (roughly) around 0.40 per cm of thickness per square meter, so 0.40x27= 10.7 pounds/sqm, installation is very fast, according to them you just unroll the mattresses, but there is transport anyway, so the cost is likely to be more like 15 pounds/square meter, that gives us around 42 square meters of the loft in a semi-detached house, it is plausible, but can apply to (say) 1% of houses, all the others will require professionals and much, much more money.

And the "If you want to use your loft as a living space, or it is already being used as a living space ..." is a good example of British humour, so you have a loft used as living space and you lower its ceiling 27 cm (actually 28+ because of the plasterboard) and make it narrower and shorter 28 cm on each side ...

I looked on the Home Depot website and the cheapest (R13) mineral/rock wool insulation is about $47 for the standard size, which seems to be 15x47in. (I suppose 15in is close to the mentioned 27cm.) The calculator there suggests I can get about 30ft by 10ft for $650. I suppose that could insulate a single small room, but an entire building's roof? And yea this is w/o any labor and tool cost.
I don’t think we should measure all of our individual environmental choices in a pure monetary cost/benefit anyway!

If you’re rich enough to afford to insulate your house and buy a heat pump you’re likely in the richest 5% of the global population and arguably have a duty to ‘green’ your life with these high-impact purchase decisions (given that the world’s poorest are already and will continue to be the most affected by climate change)