Accessing funding for energy saving measures - Green Homes Grant

Home Retrofit
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Has anyone applied for this? Green Homes Grant - Greater Manchester Combined Authority

I expressed interest a couple of days ago and someone from EON rang me today to see if I was eligible. The main criteria are an income of less than £30k and a property rating of E, F or G. A surveyor will visit my house at some point, although they didnt have any appointments available in my area right now.

I am part way through my retrofit journey which has been going on for over 10 years on a house that had an EPC rating of F when i moved in. As that was done over 10 years ago, the surveyor sent by EON will do another EPC. The very gradual improvements I have made will have (hopefully) pushed up the energy rating so I may end up being disqualified from applying for the grant. This is really frustrating because I have just had some work done which has put me into debt and it will be a long time before I can save up enough to get EWI installed and £10k towards it would help massively. The scheme is backed by BEIS, GMCA and being administered by EON.

So it’s worth looking at if you think you might be eligible. I’ll keep you posted on what happens with my application …

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As far as I know the Green Homes Grant is now closed. We did manage to get in and were successful in getting £5k towards the cost of our ASHP under the Green Homes Grant scheme which was excellent. But the scheme was complicated for installers to participate in and hopefully it will be replaced with something somewhat less bureaucratic and generally better run.

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Hi Ann,
I applied and got as far as looking for installers - in short there seemed to be hardly any in our area. One underfloor insulation specialist I spoke with said it was a complicated registration to become a pas2035 installer for the green grant scheme - that filling out the paperwork for their own payment was lengthy and almost required an additional admin person for that job alone.
I noticed the structure of this green grant scheme seemed to have an agency as a middle man allocating jobs to the few registered installers they had.
Overall, the feeling was that installers were dropping out, because it was so time consuming and they didn’t feel secure about payment from the scheme for their work , that the additional labour and agency involvement was pushing the price up for homeowners.
Similar problems happened with the last scheme too - where contractors signed up for work and the workload completely overshot what they’d been paid for, resulting in rushed jobs with fewer safety checks and a lot of failed work.
All of the above put us off , despite knowing we would have qualified for the grant.

This new scheme, which better recognized the importance of quality work and checks for suitability of retrofit fixes and initial surveys, didn’t hit the mark because it not only failed the homeowners with few installers, it failed the installers who had their own concerns.
I believe the green grant scheme has now been pulled - but I would love to know where the funding has gone ?

It’s been on my mind to raise this issue with government. I am thinking to go local and write to our re-elected Andy Burnham.
Knowing our countries commitments to targets - this is all very poor performance and failure.

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I agree @pottyone72 and @zapaman - lots of confusion for all involved. When it was first launched, I didnt think I was eligible, but then I saw a tweet from GMCA about it with the link (see above but here also - Green Homes Grant - Greater Manchester Combined Authority ) which seems different to the original scheme. I wonder whether BEIS have got GMCA (and EON) involved because the onus on householders to find installers was so hit and miss and maybe the assistance of go-betweens would help them to spend at least some of the budget earnmarked for this, even though that budget has been cut?

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Maybe we should send a joint letter to query all this. What do you think Ann. Shall we run this by Carbon Coop - maybe other members would be interested.

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UPDATE: Had an EPC done on my house because the previous one was over 10 years old. Okay, so my house had been rated at ‘F’ in 2009 and in 2021 after having floor, loft and cavity wall insulation, new doors and windows, airtightness work and MVHR unit installed, low energy appliances and lighting, my house is now rated at ‘F’!!! Yep, those measures that I have undertaken seem not to have made a jot of difference to the EPC rating.

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WOW!! Ann that just doesn’t seem to add up. WHY??? Surely this is a mistake on the EPC part .
Unless they have changed the criteria :
:roll_eyes: This has a to be a case in point.
Except for generating your own electricity, you have done practically everything possible to improve your homes rating.

I am trying to apply through Eon for the Green Grant again. I’ll let you know how we get on!!

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I think there has been lots of criticism about the shortcomings of the methodology used. My house is a detached bungalow so there is a large surface area to lose heat from, therefore the form of the building itself will make it hard to radically improve. From the energy assessment I had done, external wall insulation was deemed to be the measure that would save me the most heat loss but the Green Grant scheme only seem to be recommending EWI for solid walled buildings. It’s frustrating that this measure is not available to me when it is the measure that I really need.

I had cavity wall insulation soon after moving in but remember thinking at the time that the lad who came did the work very quickly. The assessment I had done a few years later showed that when looking down into the cavity, the material it should have been filled with couldn’t be seen. A poor quality job had been done that only partially filled the cavity. It’s hard for householders to see whether a good job has been done or not as it is hidden from view. I borrowed the thermal imaging camera a few years ago, which also showed heat loss from the walls. I mentioned this to the EPC assessor and he said that if drill holes could be seen on the walls, then they had to record that the cavity had been filled, even if there was evidence that it had not been done to a good standard.

As the Carbon Co-op are in dialogue with the government department responsible for these grant schemes, I wonder if BEIS would be interested in feedback from members about our experiences navigating the process? It seems that a few of us have struggled to make progress when engaging with these iniatives.

Fingers crossed that your application goes well.

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Thankyou Ann. And the same wishes for you too…I hope your case is taken up by BEIS or whoever can look at this. It’s just not on really …the whole reason people are so wary of undertaking energy efficiency measures.
Navigating solar is very overwhelming … I looked at the ratings for Eon solar provision, they are very poor. I’m already on guard, feeling like I want to source an installer of my own choice.
I wonder if because it’s a grant, we will have to get what we’re given…beggars can’t be choosers type deal :roll_eyes:

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Hi Ann,
after applying last week and initially looking at Solar we have changed our mind because of all the messing about with the roof. It steers us away from our fabric first approach. After consulting about our retrofit @Lewis_Sharman we’re now looking at a heat pump .
Our EPC rates our home at E . The only improvements we made so far have been to the loft - insulated.
We are pretty much at the start of our retrofit journey. Through Covid and redundancy we’d just started claiming universal credit - we feel hopeful that we might be eligible for this grant to get a heat pump.
The surveyor is coming out on Thursday (3rd June) - we’re in Northenden.
We had a look at some of the criteria for the RHI renewable heat incentive scheme - if we are to benefit from this we will have to have an air to water heat pump and the pump has to be on the MCS list.
Our home energy planner survey with PPR has come into it’s own here - showing a heat loss of 9kw , which will reduce after our fabric first fixes are completed to save us nearly 2kws of heat and means a pump of about 9kws is about the size we are looking at.
It’s good having some understanding of this - would have been clueless about it all, were it not for the educational opportunities Carbon Coop provides for us - @polly @andyham :smiley:
I’ll keep updating how we get on!!
Hope they get to you soon Ann x

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I’ve had bits and pieces of work done on the house over the last six or so years, and been in the PPR pipeline for the next pieces of work for a while. So when I found that the EPC eligibility for Green Homes Grant administered by Eon is now D or less, and since I retired my income is definitely lower than the max, I decided to apply. The website said you had to have an EPC so I paid for the first ever EPC on this house. Annoyingly it now appears that Eon would have done one for free if necessary!
Anyway, it turned out my EPC is D, so I applied for underfloor insulation, although tbh I’m very wary of actually having the work done by anyone Eon commissions.
From the application to the first callback took about 2 weeks.
Then about another 2 weeks for the ‘survey’ to take place. Except that the survey was a ‘whole house’ assessment, not an underfloor survey, which took over 2 hours.
He seemed particularly interested in carpeted rooms and said he been told to measure the gap under doors while the door was open!!! He agreed with me that it was pointless, and that the gap was only relevant when the door was closed, but he was following orders.
He told me that he could do the EWI that Marion and Diana (PPR) had looked at during their visit the day before, but that he knew nothing about underfloor insulation.
He checked my income eligibility, and asked me to sign that the information I’d given him was correct, but didn’t leave any paperwork with me.
Before he left, he advised me to call up Eon in 4 to 5 weeks time, saying Eon had told him to increase the time from 2 weeks because they weren’t able to process the reports in two weeks. So I’m guessing the onus will be on me to chase Eon up.
Hope you’re making some progress @Ann_Kolodziejski and @pottyone72!

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Hi Sian ,
We discussed underfloor insulation with the Eon retrofit surveyor.
Talking about underfloor insulation with him, we said we wanted to do one room at a time, starting with our back room - where we have access to the sub floor.
The front room and hallway has an engineered wood floor fitted on top of the floor boards - there isn’t access to this area of sub floor We haven’t seen the state of the joists, DPC, insulation or the mortar in the foundation brickwork.
The surveyor’s reply was that you have to have all the ground floor done - partial isn’t an option on the green grant. Additionally, he inferred that if the installers made a start on the job and found damp joists, they would have to abandon the work owing to PAS2035 regs. On the back of that comment I also inferred the other scenario ,that installers would want to paid and might complete the job without reporting any problems to the householder - after all - people need to get paid !!
Resulting in my advice to self - don’t have underfloor insulation unless the whole of the underfloor is surveyed.

On top of all this is the realization that if we’re having a heat pump through the grant scheme, it needs to be sized after we have had our retrofit measures - I feel like I’m only going through this green grant process to feed back on the experience now - I will refuse the heat pump if they won’t future proof the sizing taking into my pending fabric first measures - triple glazing and a newly insulated kitchen roof - reducing our 9kw heat loss to 7kw.

So much for the green grant eh !!
Hope you start to have better luck with it.

All the best
Carla x

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If the surveyor doesn’t check the sub-floor thoroughly by suitable means I definitely won’t be taking it any further! Am seeing high humidity in parts of the house and want to find out what’s causing that and make sure everything is sound under the floorboards first.

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I have heard absolutely nothing from EON. The EPC was done on the 19th of May, so almost 2 months ago and nothing further from EON since then. So their communication leaves a lot to be desired.

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We’re having the same problem too. Since the EPC survey and the last correspondence to say the heat pump surveyor will contact us within 7-10 days - it’s all gone quiet.
That was about 4 weeks ago.:roll_eyes:…
It’s very worrying. We’re clearly getting hotter, but how will we meet carbon reduction targets at this pace ?

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While waiting for Eon to contact me again, I started checking the humidity values being reported from the sensors all over the house, rather than just the temperatures. There was a period of a couple of weeks where the hall readings were between 70% and 75%, just going over 80% occasionally, but never going below 60%. I also discovered a patch of wet peeling wallpaper on an internal wall :thinking:

I decided to get a damp survey and ground floor timber inspection done. It was pretty thorough, and I got a decent report highlighting problem areas where the original 1920s bitumen damp proof course had failed or hadn’t been considered necessary (around chimney breasts). The majority appeared to be still intact. He couldn’t see any signs of rotten joists.
By this time Eon had booked someone in to carry out a technical survey. The underfloor insulation surveyor had come all the way from Birmingham and works for Love2Save https://lovetosaveenergy.com/. I think the EPC man worked for the same company.

The surveyor’s day job is actually installing gas boilers… I asked him if the company were starting to retrain gas boiler installers as heat pump installers, and he said they were, and he had considered taking up the free training, but he wasn’t sure he was prepared to go through it all again - I’d say he was in his 50s.

He lifted the hatch in the utility room and had a look underneath. We still couldn’t find one in the front room, having unsuccessfully searched with the damp surveyor. I’m sure I saw one back in c 1998 last time the front room carpet was completely removed before the work on the bay a few years ago.

I printed off the page from the damp survey report showing areas needing treatment, and gave it to him, since it was easier than trying to explain where the damp patches were.

I asked how they insulated under the floor. He said they used ‘something like’ rockwool.

I asked what they would do where the insulation met the wall, and he said nothing different. (I can’t remember what the CC ‘approved’ detailing is, so didn’t press him on that!)

I asked whether they would need to remove the floor coverings, and he said, no but they would want to have/make an access hatch in each room. But he also said that the installers might take one look and decide they weren’t prepared to make access hatches and work below the floor!

He said that since there was evidence of some dampness he wouldn’t advise me to go ahead at present. I said I would want to have damp remedial works done first, and that sequencing was important. I asked if I went ahead how long before the work was carried out and he thought it would be within about a month.

The most useful thing he said was that they could keep me on file and potentially do the work after the damp remedial work was done, and I was confident that the damp had been successfully treated. I said I thought the grant funding ended fairly soon, and he said he was fairly confident it would be extended until at least March next year and possibly beyond.

He took lots of photographs, but when I asked if he’d seen the report and photos from the previous visit by his company he knew nothing about it!

I’m expecting another call from Eon to agree whether or not to have the underfloor insulation done. If they agree that I can be put back in the queue for later, then that’s probably what I’ll do.

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Hi everyone,
Not commented on the forum before but, like others, have contacted Eon and had an initial assessment, however I’m now (similarly) beginning to lose confidence in the process. Here is my email corespondence with them following the assessor’s visit, which seems to have left more questions than answers …

From: GreenHomesGrant
Sent: 16 July 2021 16:20
Hello Mr Shephard,

Following your survey I can confirm we can go ahead with either External Wall Insulation on its own, Air Sourced Heat Pump and Smart Meter Heating Controls together, or Under Floor and Loft Insulation together.

I cannot offer you all measures to be installed as Wall Insulation and the Air Sourced Heat Pump are the two most expensive measures and come to no less than £10,000 on their own.

Please let me know what option you would like to go ahead with to a technical survey to confirm if we can do it under the costs of the scheme

Kind regards,…

From: Tom
Sent: 17 July 2021 15:20

Thank you for the information.
Is it at all possible to get a cost breakdown for each item before I make my decision?

I am considering some of the insulation measures independently, so a price guide would be helpful. …

From: GreenHomesGrant
Sent: 19 July 2021 16:15

Hello Mr Shephard,

I cannot give you an exact price for your property as this is done at the technical survey which is the next stage.

I can give you our rough estimations which are External Wall Insulation is between £10,000 - £15,000 roughly, Air Sourced Heat Pump and Smart Meter Heating Controls can be between £10,000 - £15,000 roughly, Under Floor Insulation is between £2,000 - £5,000 roughly and Loft Insulation is between £1,000 - £5,000 roughly but please keep in mind this is based on an average property similar to your type and is not exact, the quotation could come back different to the figures that I have gave.
I hope this helps.
Kind regards,…

Sent: 26/07/2021 13:04
Dear [],

Thank you for the information you’ve provided, however I’m somewhat confused by the prices listed.

With prices above £10,000 that you have suggested, the scheme would not even cover an average installation of an ASHP or External Wall insulation which seems… problematic.

In addition, references online suggest that an air source heat pump (ASHP) should nominally cost no more than £10k to buy and have installed (upwards of £4k for equipment and £2k for installation).

I understand that once a technical survey is completed the costs will become clearer, but as you will appreciate it’s difficult for me as the homeowner to pick the best option when I don’t even know the costs. Especially as it appears I may need to make up the shortfall, going off your figures.

This being the case, would it not be possible for a technical survey to weigh up several of the measures available? For example, if the ASHP was judged to cost £6k, that would leave enough over for underfloor insulation as well, perhaps.

Though I am aware that the limiting factor here may not so much be the cost, but the number of installers available in the time in which the scheme is active, I assume that the purpose of offering a scheme such as this is to bring houses in the Grater Manchester area up to a certain standard of efficiency and carbon reduction. For this reason I would ask that a technical assessment is made for a number of the measures available.

Kind regards, Tom
/// I’ve not heard anything since.

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Welcome to the forum Tom, and thanks for sharing your experiences!

Unfortunately this seems to be similar to others, it is really useful for us to see how people are getting on with the scheme (even/especially if it is negative!).

Hopefully EON are able to get their finger out and get things moving, but I wouldn’t have the highest confidence.

I would be interested to hear how you get on, so please make sure to keep us updated!

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Thank you Matt for the warm welcome (no pun intended!)
I did eventually get an update yesterday from Eon which reads as follows:
//
The scheme allows for £10,000 of funding per property, however we have to balance the costs across all properties. For example some properties will receive an install of £5,000 and others will receive works that are to the value of £15,000.

Our prices are fixed in contracts with trusted and reputable suppliers and every ASHP job is £10k+. There’s lots of costs on top of just an ASHP unit such as pipework and new radiators that increase the pricing as well as incorporating the costs for surveys and compliance measures to align with the scheme.

The fixed prices allows us to have business decisions in place such as an ASHP or EWI install are standalone installs because of the cost and therefore there’s no option for an additional measure.

I would recommend that either the Air Sourced Heat Pump along with the Smart Meter Heating Controls or the External Wall Insulation measures would be one of the best option for your property from an energy efficiency standpoint but it is yourself that needs to decide.
//
I have put a couple of points of interest in bold.

First that they are aggregating the costs over all properties (or claim to be).
Second that an ASHP install may include uprated radiators in the pricing!
The original assessor indicated that EWI was a fixed cost measure (front and back) when I asked about just having the (north backing) rear of the house insulated. That now makes sense in light of the way they fund the whole scheme.

If I can get some upgrades to my radiators included in this work too then it seems the ASHP is clearly the stand-out item (ironic as, if all else remains the same, I will still be living in a poorly insulated property!).

I thought that prior to replying to Eon I would just see if anyone here had any additional advice or opinion greatly differed on what to go with. Also of course this knowledge about how Eon appear to be calculating such things could be of wider interest perhaps.

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I’m pleased to see that you have managed to correspond by email. Despite asking them to contact me by email, they have not emailed me once. What you say about averaging costs across all households is definitely interesting. My underfloor insulation could be subsidising your ASHP… :slightly_smiling_face: