You know you are spending too much money when the contractors start sending you birthday cards.
The cynic in you sees these not as a nice gesture, not "roofing with a human touch", or -- we really do not want to go there -- "plumbing with a human touch". No, no, you see a desire by the contractor that you continue to throw as much money towards them as you did in the past year.
After one hundred years of life, the old roof still looked like a roof but hardly functioned as one. It had to go.
So, we had the attic insulated, and while the scaffolding was up, we stuck foam insulation on two and a half outside walls. The radiator in the hallway is already gone, the one in the kitchen only serves as a sleeping space for the cats.
And a solar hot water installation did not break the bank after the other work, and, come on, the shiny blueish vacuum tubes on the roof look cool. Even all through the month of October, all the hot water was produced by the solar panel.
With only about seventy percent of the walls plus the roof insulated to the current building code standard for a new building, the results during this sustained cold period are amazing.
Just a few years ago, the central heating would be running almost continuously, sucking fossil fuel out of the battery of tanks as well as money out of our wallet.
The wood stove in the kitchen provides most of the heat for the whole house, supported by the central heating in those rooms we want extra warm or during really cold days (as in outside below 20 F).
Germany has so many subsidies and government backed loans for energy efficient building or renovation, it would take a lifetime of reading to get through all of them.
It is fair to say that most of the money is destined for renovating rentals and for those individual homeowners who already have lots of money. I hate so say this, but we did not qualify for a loan, and it was for the better because any loan or subsidy has to be applied for well in advance of the work. And the work must be done by a licensed contractor.
Unless you have "two left hands", as they say here, you can do a lot of work yourself. For example, a quote for the insulation of the outside walls came to just under 30 000 Euros (40 K USD). When I'm done with this, I'll have spent between 6 and 7 K on the material.
Plus, I get the exercise from scooting up and down scaffolding.
And I have learned something by studying the vapor barrier requirements and different material configurations.
If you save 1 K a year on heating, a 30 K Euro measure will pay off just about the time of the projected lifespan of the work.
Not so great.
In short, most of the subsidy money is in effect a subsidy of contracting businesses.
I wish, the government folks would give individuals a discount on material. It does not mean that you lose control over the quality of the work. Just make a post remodel energy audit mandatory.
And then you could give individuals a few CO2 emissions certificates to trade, instead of putting all the certificates into the hands of big poluters.
The one good thing I can say about the German system is their promotion of energy audits that provide very clear technical details about how to reach the efficiency goals.
Our audit, for instance, said that the outside walls needed a 12 cm (4 inch) insulation with a 0.035 W/mK material to get the wall to the 2009 efficiency standards. By using an even better material, this 100 year old house partially beats the 2009 new building standards.
[Update 11/30/2015] The last outside walls were are done in 2014, with a grand total of just under 4000 Euros for the material. A further two radiators are gone altogether, the ones in the large living room are cat furniture. The once vital central heating system is now a fancy oversized water heater that serves as backup heating during a really hard freeze.
There is still room for improving the already achieved 75% reduction in fossil fuel use for heating and hot water.
The one reason why we slowed down is that the German government doesn't like to see revenues decline. Reduced consumption means lower tax revenues (sales tax), which is anathema for most governments and almost invariably means they find ways to ratchet up some fees here and there.
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