9873210 wrote:odysseus2000 wrote:Most UK people live in homes built before good insulation was considered necessary & mandated by government, that includes most houses built before the 21st century.
Many houses in the UK were built without central heating. Installing central heating was a big and expensive job, yet people found the money. People find the money to remove chimney breasts to gain a few cubic meters of space and more money to install fake chimneys because of government fiat.
Cavity walls were introduced for a reason, and it wasn't so you could put insulation in the cavity. The many houses without cavity walls are in need of serious renovation, or replacement. Government doesn't need to mandate that, but current policy is to prohibit it.
Attempts were made in the 1970’s to remove a lot of ‘slum housing” & replace it with high rise blocks of flat that had all modern conveniences.The government ran advertising about lack of space & even used images of Lemmings killing themselves as their population was too big. These were faked in Canada, but shown to uk school children as the reason to save space & build upwards.
Developers made a fortune, in some places they added flammable insulation that eventually lead to a tragedy, but setting aside all those who were killed at Grenfell towers, the quality of life for many high rise flat dwellers was often terrible with lift failures, ambush points for muggers & a whole host of inconveniences & such.
In Manchester many of the flats were abandoned & then rented out to students & even students found troubles & avoided them.
One can certainly argue that these were exceptions & should not detract from the need to modernize the UK housing stock, but on the other hand what we have now works for many & can be operated in a low carbon manor as the cost of both renewable generation & storage continues to fall.
One can argue that the tendency to build on good farm land as encouraged by all political parties while our towns, cities & villages decline is not a good idea & we need more renovations or tear down & replace in all the old population centres, but doing this in ways were the folk who live there, tax payers & such don’t get ripped off & developers make a fortune for shoddy work relies on good, competent & low corruption politicians, but we rarely get any of them.
I am kind of left feeling that muddling through & letting new buyers modernize houses as previous generations leave is as good a way as any.
Science has provided engineers with the knowledge to make any old house much better & comfortable than it was for previous generations & over decades folk will slowly improve the housing stock.
Regards,
