$ 2 per month: energy bills for UK energy efficient home owners

British architect Colin Usher, director of the company John McCall Architects , has developed an energy-efficient house for his family , equipped with, among other things, solar panels. As a result, the building turned out to be so energy efficient that the owners have to pay only $ 2 per month for electricity.

It takes into account all the energy used for heating, lighting, water heating and cooking. In local currency, this is less than £ 15 per year. It should be noted that the house equipped with solar panels is not located anywhere in sunny California, but in the town of West Kirby in Merseyside County in North-West England.

Concrete walls, triple windows in the windows, the correct location in relation to the cardinal points, dynamic heating with a heat pump and solar panels on the roof allow the house to effectively store the resulting heat and get the necessary energy from renewable sources. The house consumes 3,453 kWh per year, of which 3,338 kWh of solar energy.


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The principles laid down in the house scheme are known in Europe as “passivhouse” - this German word means “ passive ”, in the sense of “energy saving” house. Energy efficient are houses that require no more than 10% of the energy needs of an ordinary house.

Reducing energy consumption is achieved primarily by reducing the heat loss of the building. The architectural concept of a passive house is based on the principles of: compactness, high-quality and effective insulation, the absence of cold bridges in materials and junctions, the correct geometry of the building, zoning, orientation to the cardinal points. Of the active methods in a passive house, it is obligatory to use a system of forced-air ventilation with recovery .



Ideally, a passive house should be an independent power system that does not require the cost of maintaining a comfortable temperature. The heating of the passive house should occur due to the heat generated by the people and household appliances living in it.

Building a house costing the equivalent of $ 358,000, which is quite reasonable for the UK. In addition, in the UK there are government programs for subsidizing the owners of private houses that install solar panels.