Build to save money

Five things that reduce a bill rather than promising to. They are ordered as they pay back: the cheapest first, and none of them needs anything special about your house.

• Draught-proofing an existing house: Sealing the gaps air already moves through in a house that stands: around window and door frames, at skirtings and floor edges, around pipe and cable penetratio — Why this one: The cheapest heat you will ever save is the heat that was leaking out. Do this before insulating, not after.
• Secondary glazing (retrofit inner pane): Traps a still-air layer against an existing window instead of replacing the window. The considered version is a second pane held in a frame inside the reveal, i — Why this one: Keeps the heat you already paid for, without replacing a single window. The bubble-wrap version costs almost nothing.
• Rocket mass heater: High-efficiency biomass combustion chamber feeding a large thermal-mass bench that slow-releases heat over many hours from a short, hot burn. — Why this one: Burns a fraction of the wood an open fire does, and stores the heat in mass so it keeps giving after the fire is out.
• Micro-gasifier (TLUD) cookstove: Top-lit updraft gasifier: pyrolyzes wood or pellets in a low-oxygen chamber to release combustible syngas, then burns that gas in a secondary combustion zone ab — Why this one: Takes cooking off the gas bill entirely, on fuel you can gather. It also leaves charcoal behind rather than ash.
• Line or rack drying for clothes: Drying washing on a line, a rotary airer or an indoor rack instead of in a tumble dryer. The dryer is usually the larger of the two laundry loads, and this remo — Why this one: Removes one of the largest electrical loads in the house outright, instead of making it more efficient.

This is a short list, not the whole catalogue

These are a handful of picks to get started. The full set of options for every need is in the catalogue, compared on the same axes and filterable.

Browse every need