@Robcass78 and
@LavelleRoisin
Rob, Roisin, great thread. And Rob, your enthusiasm is exactly what gets people off the fence, so don't lose it. 😇😀😊🧐
A few points made by you both are bang on. 🤠🧐🥸🤓🤑🫶
#Love #Emojis
Your "% of pension income" reframe beats "payback years" hands down. €300 a month out of a €1,300 pension is a quarter of the income exposed to prices you can't control, and turning that into a one-off spend plus near-zero running cost is real relief now, not in 12 years.
The second-hand EV to kill the diesel bill is arguably the single best move on that same logic: the first owner already ate the depreciation and home-charging marginal cost is tiny. He's an EV I believe from memory already as he rang me one morning about that when I was out walking....... ☺️😇
But here's where Roisin's payback lens has to bite. A real worked example landed this week (anonymised, screenshots of the BER report below for interest): a solid C2 bungalow, actual SEAI advisory report. What did the independent assessor recommend?
- No heat pump (heating already rated Very Good)
- No wall or cavity insulation (walls already Good)
- No new windows (Fair, but not worth replacing)
- Heating controls a stove a small PV array, and that alone takes it from C2 to B2
The expert who actually rated the house said don't spend on the big-ticket renewables. And even the one win, PV, is a 6 to 10 year payback on €4,000 to €7,000 net, with the counterintuitive kicker that going small lengthens the payback, because the fixed costs (scaffold, inverter, labour) barely shrink while the output does.
So it isn't enthusiasm vs pragmatism. Your "% of income" is the numerator and Roisin's "payback and horizon" is the denominator of the same sum.
Match the intervention to the house's actual weak points (per the BER, not assumptions) and to the household's horizon and capital position, and you get three different right answers.
Your parents going full off-grid EV, active and long horizon, want the bills gone: yes. The 78/73 couple with a working boiler and capital to preserve: leave well alone, also yes. My 80-year-old with the C2 bungalow: do the cheap stuff, skip the rest, exactly as his own report says.
And here's the thing, Rob: your community housing and energy work via EU funds is the actual fix for the bit I flagged.
The reason small individual systems pay back slowly is those fixed costs. Aggregate them across a parish, bulk-buy, one shared procurement and scaffold, and the per-home maths transforms.
Collective schemes are how you make the numbers stack for the fixed-income households that need it most. That's where the enthusiasm genuinely scales.
So keep the fire going. Just point it where the BER says it'll land. ☀️🔋