Episode 02

(Eco Eye s4/e1)

Home Energy Special:

How we make our homes in Ireland warm, ecological and energy efficient.

Energy appraisal of an average Irish house
With huge increases in the cost of oil and gas and future uncertainties looming – regarding how we’ll be able to afford to heat our homes, and with fossil fuel heating creating huge CO2 emissions – our homes need to be re-appraised to ensure cost effective, comfortable and healthy homes with low emissions – to future-proof!

We visit a typical Irish home and discover major and uncontrolled heat losses through poor insulation, drafts and inefficient heating systems. We carry out an energy audit and show how practical improvements can be made to most of the existing 1.4 million houses in Ireland.

Passive homes in Austria
We then visit the new state-of-the-art “passive” homes in Austria, where with a much colder winter climate, they don’t need any boilers or conventional heating sources. This is achieved with very high levels of insulation, air-tightness, heat-recovery ventilation and solar collectors. These high performing new houses operate at about 5% of the heat energy demand of a typical Irish house. We see how these energy-conserving principles can be adopted to our homes.

Cost-effective ecological fuels
We also explore Austria’s solution to replacing dirty and costly oil, coal and gas with cost effective and ecologically sound wood pellet heating systems. We show how these technologies are taking off in Ireland in places like Kinsale and Inchadoney Hotel using wood pellets now manufactured in Fermanagh. Once the boiler is installed the cost of heat energy from wood pellet is only 50% of the cost of oil, so we’re going to see a rapid shift to these CO2 neutral, homegrown fuels which is very important for our Kyoto commitments. We also show how thermal-solar collectors can be integrated into these heating systems.