It’s not a great time to be outgrowing your home right now. With credit expensive and hard to come by, energy prices soaring again, and properties losing value and selling in record low numbers, moving home has never been so fraught with problems. All is not lost, though. On the contrary, in fact – there could be everything to gain. Converting your loft can not only add floor space and significantly increase the value of your home, it can also help save you money on energy costs and reduce your household’s carbon footprint. And there you were thinking that lofts were just for water tanks and storing Christmas decorations. 

Cash in on your attic

According to the Alliance & Leicester, loft conversions are the single most profitable home improvement that homeowners can carry out. Research conducted by the bank revealed that a loft conversion costs £23k on average, and they estimate that a top spec conversion could add up to a staggering £100k to the value of a detached home. And ‘greening up’ a loft conversion with extra insulation, solar panels, and even a domestic wind turbine can bring additional cost benefits, through increased efficiency and subsequent lower long-term energy costs.

The benefits don’t stop there either, because you can also choose responsibly produced raw materials for your loft conversion, such as lightweight timber sourced from sustainable forests, which causes less of an environmental impact during production than alternative materials like aluminium and steel. According to the woodforgood campaign, using one cubic metre of timber instead of steel saves an average of 0.8 tonnes of Carbon Dioxide being released into the atmosphere. They state that it takes 750 Megajoules of energy to create one cubic metre of sawn timber, compared to nearly 270,000 Megajoules for a cubic metre of steel and a mindblowing 1.1m Megajoules for a cubic metre of finished aluminium.   

Green domestic technology – the backlash

As with anything though, the idea of going green is not without its detractors. Green technology has attracted criticism in recent years for allegedly not being as environmentally friendly as is often claimed. For many people, ‘going green’ is just a politically correct gesture, or simply the next expensive con to get us to part with our hard-earned. In the media green technologies have come under heavy fire from unlikely sources, with perhaps the most notable being David Bellamy’s attack on the ‘blot on the landscape’ that are wind farms, with the time-served environmentalist instead advocating a more grass roots approach to conserving energy in the home. So is incorporating mainstream green technology in your loft conversion really going to make it as eco-friendly as you’d hoped? 

A few white lies about green technology... 

Solar panels take more energy to manufacture than they’ll ever create in their service life

It’s true that modern solar panel production is an energy-intensive process, but typically a solar panel will generate back the equivalent energy used during its manufacture within 3 or 4 years of being installed. Considering that solar panels are guaranteed for 25 years (but often last much longer), then there’s no real argument to be made about their value. They are truly green, and if you can incorporate one into your loft conversion project, then you’ll be literally feeling the benefits in your home immediately, and then in your bank balance within just a few short years. 

Wind turbines just don’t work in urban areas

This isn’t true. It’s a popular misconception born from the simple fact that wind turbines work better in open spaces – but that doesn’t mean that they don’t perform at all in an urban setting. Provided the roofline of your house is clear of any major obstructions in the immediate vicinity, then placing a wind turbine atop your loft conversion gives it the best possible opportunity of tapping into a laminar airflow. They’re not suited to every home, but nor are they completely unsuitable for domestic use as some nay sayers will have us believe. More and more households are harnessing wind energy as a contribution to their overall energy consumption. 

Eco friendly loft insulation is expensive

All insulation is eco friendly – it’s just that some types are more eco friendly than others, by virtue of the lower levels of energy consumed during the production process. If you can’t afford the premium products, then just go for the cheap stuff. Having a choice of products that all benefit the environment to varying degrees isn’t a bad situation to be in really, is it? No matter what type of insulation you use around your loft conversion though, make sure to lay it no less than 28 to 30cm deep, otherwise you’ll still be needlessly wasting energy. According to the Energy Savings Trust if everyone in the topped up their loft insulation to 270mm, around £520m would be saved each year! 

Greening up your home is expensive and not worth it if you move within a few years

Investing in domestic green technology can be quite an outlay, and things like solar panels, wind turbines, and triple glazed windows and skylights are particularly expensive, but when installed correctly and utilised to their optimum benefit, they can start recouping their costs in a relatively short space of time. Greening up your loft and the rest of your home is a long-sighted approach to saving money and reducing environmental impact, but even if you move on before your investment has paid real dividends, the very presence of the technology will help you sell your property for more than you’d otherwise get. Homebuyers are becoming increasingly savvy to energy efficiency, and a home that will help them reduce the cost of living in the long-term is much more of an attractive proposition than one that needs work.

Your loft in particular has a massive bearing on the overall efficiency of your house. By investing in a high quality loft conversion that adheres to even the most basic of home greening principles, you’re not only creating critical space that will add both monetary and aesthetic value to your home, but you’ll also be optimising what was previously very likely the biggest energy sink in your whole house. Converting your loft is the perfect way to go green and add value to your home – best of both worlds.

For more information on greening up your home, go to the Channel 4 Green Homes website.