The Observer’s Property section had a sad but interesting story last Sunday:
‘They encouraged us to insulate our home. Now it’s unmortgageable’
Householders are angered by the discovery they cannot remortgage or sell their homes after installing spray-foam insulation to cut energy use.
Jim Bunce thought he was doing the right thing for his purse and the planet: in 2022, as fuel costs soared, he and his wife decided to improve the energy efficiency of their house.
They discovered that the government had endorsed spray-foam insulation, a quick and unobtrusive technique by which liquid foam is spray-gunned into roof spaces and walls. Their loft was successfully treated at a cost of £2,800 and their gas bills duly fell.
Now, two years on, they have found that, by making their home more energy efficient, they have also made it unsaleable. “We are unable to borrow against it, or potentially to sell it, unless the foam is completely removed,” says Bunce.
I feel sorry for Mr and Mrs Bunce. My title was not intended to single them out as being unusually insulated from reality; until recently the great majority of the population would have assumed that taking up a scheme promoted by the government was a safe choice.
It isn’t. On the contrary, if a new type of technological product is being pushed by government in order to meet national policy targets, that means that it has not been through the filter of large numbers of people freely deciding to buy it and telling their family and friends that it benefited them as individuals.
You should never bet the farm on a government picking winners.
As this site has said for a couple decades now: the state is not your friend
This tendency of Government to give terrible advice seems particularly acute in the field of energy: encouraging car owners to buy diesels, and now EV’s, the extreme sponsorship of unreliable and inefficient solar parcs and wind turbines, pushing people into ‘smart meters’ which enable users to be shut down from the centre, the absurdly expensive and slow nuclear program, shutting down North Sea oil and gas production, heat pumps, ending gas stoves. All contributing to greater cost, lower economic efficiency and not one making a blind bit of difference to the absurd aim of reducing carbon emissions.
And millions of people are also going to learn how hard it will be to sell an electric car, of the sort that are being promoted by governments, instead of models that are sold in a free market in response to consumer demand and the tried and tested filters of a secondary market.
I get endless calls from my ‘local’ UK Energy Saving Experts selling some Govt scheme or other to insulate my loft or somesuch. It got so bad I had to put my number on the TPS. It doesn’t matter how many times you say you are not interested or how many numbers you block. the calls keep coming. My favourite response now is ‘if you are local to me, then tell me, what is my post code?’. Always stumps them.
Toby and Jonathan, EVs are a particular hobby horse of mine, as I’ve posted on here before. (Semi retired automotive engineer.) I could go on at length about how useless EVs are and the many impossible to overcome design problems. And I could bang on about where the electricity comes from and how it is distributed. However, the crunch is coming soon because private buyers don’t want them and only fleets/business user are leasing because of tax incentives.
Thus the financials are simply not working. Massive depreciation of used EVs means leasing costs will increase dramatically. Insurance could also become impossibly expensive because EV fires are hugely damaging. It will only take one EV fire in a car park below some flats that kills dozens of people above, and insurers will not touch them.
So, will the government back down when the financials blow up? Will the mandate be binned, and will Ed Milliband abandon the 2030 order to cease sales of petrol/diesel? That is, will there be a u-turn?
I’m not going to read the Guardian. Can someone take a bullet for me and explain WHY the spray foam insulation impacts the marketability of the home so badly? One would assume an energy efficient home would be more desireable.
JB. Apparently it’s something to do with condensation gathering between the spray foam and the rafters/roof felt.
JB, despite appearances, this article did not come from the Guardian but from its Sunday sister, the Observer – which admittedly is usually rather similar in terms of editorial line, but it has had its moments of independence, e.g. supporting the Iraq war. Anyway, here are the next few paragraphs of the article:
If the government is telling you to do something, then by default it is something you should not do. See, for example, heat pumps. Expensive and don’t work. EVs expensive and don’t work. If the government says something is true, then the inverse usually applies.
My understanding of the problem (at least on the US insurer side) is that the foam is a great insulator, and doesn’t increase condensation issues – it doesn’t actually cause any damage – but it does make it impossible to inspect the roof rafters. A proper structural inspection can’t be done once the foam is in place.
bobby b,
That chimes with me. I mean it sounds right.
They really are idiots to not even consider this.
See also mRNA vaccines!
It also seals all the roof’s ventilation. If a tiled/slated roof was meant to be sealed, it would have been built sealed, like in Scandinavia. You need “loose” insulation within a roof, such as fibre glass or polystyrene chips.
I think it was Dr Jordan Peterson who said that in normal times believing what those in authority was a good thing, a survival trait – both for society and for the ordinary individuals and families, doubting everything the leadership said could lead to chaos, the radical dysfunction of society.
But it was also Dr Jordan Peterson who accepted that times are now not normal – that the leadership of Western societies had become radically dysfunctional, endless lying about and wildly distorting, vital matters.
Why would they, when it won’t affect them in any significant way?
They get to tick a Net Zero box, and the gullible homeowner takes the risk.
This was an entirely forseeable disaster, but inevitable given the deep ignorance of politicos and their ‘advisors’. The consequences of interstital condensation (internal mold, external saturation…) attendant on deploying this un”new technology” follow from basic physics and were expounded in (some) architecture courses several generations ago (as for now, I this suspect not so). One could expand this analysis to the power distribution system (balancing the grid, how?), air-source heat pump technology (thermodynamics, how?)… ad nauseam. We are truly ruled by morons advised by incompetents.