Home Improvements Blog

One of the most valuable things to arrive in the home improvement world in the last five years were the free solar deals that rose out of the Feed In Tariffs introduced a few years ago. Unfortunately, the tidal wave of companies offering free solar panel installations fell by the wayside when the incentives were slashed in 2011, even though delayed until 2012, slowing to a trickle of providers who have been willing to accept much smaller returns on their investments.

The simple fact that some companies are still providing the installations for free shows that the returns are still greater than the costs, especially for homeowners that also benefit from the free power they generate – something the investors have never seen a gain from.

Many people have misconceptions about solar technology, believing that they don’t get enough sun where they live to make installing the panels worthwhile. By way of an example, fitting solar panels in Norwich will provide no greater gain than anywhere else in the country, just because there tends to be a lot of sun.

As we talked about when referring to the Green Deal, you can often get a loan under the scheme to help pay for your panels, but it’s unlikely to cover the full cost. As a supermarket likes to say though, Every Little Helps, and it could mean finding thousands of pounds less up front, and you can use the savings on your electricity bill to repay the money you borrow.

Most of us would love to live a greener life, and solar is the perfect way to do that, save money on your bills, earn extra income, and even become immune to daytime power cuts! Of course, it’s wise to do your research first, as not every household will be able to make the numbers work to be better off as a result of their solar investment.

In the last post we talked about mounting a TV on the wall, and touched on how to get the TV signal to the TV when it’s up on the wall away from your TV receiver box. In that article we talked about Sky TV, but of course there are other options like Virgin Media TV packages, or perhaps you’ll be swayed by a BT Vision Review. If you’re happy with the free to view channels, then there’s always Freeview. If you don’t already have a digital aerial, you’ll need a digital tv aerial installation to get the best signal quality and full range of channels.

Regardless of the company you choose, you’ll need to have the company out to your home to complete the installation. BT’s options can be the least invasive, as most homes already have a phone line on their network, and if you’re lucky, it will be close enough to the TV to provide service, or you’ll be able to deliver the service over a wireless signal.

Sky engineers will need to mount a dish on the side of your home, and run a cable to the location of your TV (or TVs if you choose a multiroom package). This can involve a long cable running along the external wall of your home, and you will need to have a hole drilled through into the house for the cable to run through.

Virgin Media are limited to the areas they can supply digital services to in that they don’t have the whole of the UK cabled. If you’re lucky enough to be in a cable area, the installation will involve running a wire from the street into the house. This will ultimately reach a box that’s going to split out the signal to your TV, phone and Internet, which may or may not be in different places in your home. The internet service connects to a cable modem, which more often than not will connect to your computers, laptops and mobile devices over wifi, and your TV connection is via a set top box similar to Sky’s technology.

Whichever company you end up choosing, you’ll need to get the installation completed before undertaking any decorating or more comprehensive interior design, as the engineers will almost always need to drill through walls, floors or ceilings to get the cabling to where it needs to be. There’s nothing worse than completing hours of decorating only to find someone needs to start drilling through it to install your chosen digital TV service!

A common question, particularly when you’re doing up your home yourself, is how to gain space in living areas by mounting electronics such as TVs on the wall. In your mind’s eye, you’ll likely be imagining a perfectly positioned flat screen to capture your attention when lounging on the sofa, but probably haven’t thought too deeply about it, like how to plug it in or get the sky signal to it.

First and foremost, most (if not all these days) TV manufacturers design the casing for their larger TVs to either stand on their own on top of a unit, fix to a dedicated to stand, or fix to the wall with a specially made bracket. A lot of people are concerned due to the weight of modern flat screens that they’ll fall, especially with wall mounted solutions. Because the brackets are designed specifically for this use, you shouldn’t have a problem there, it’s more likely to be the way it’s fixed to the wall that’s an issue. Be sure to read the instructions supplied with a TV bracket, as they will usually advise a minimum length of screw to guarantee the safety of your TV and more importantly, your family.

Generally speaking, if you’re the kind of person to invest in your home entertainment enough to consider spending money of mount it on the wall, you probably also have devices like a Sky box to receive channels, and maybe the Sky wireless router to watch Revenge online, or alternatively a PS3 connected to the web to watch Dexter online. However you choose to do it, you’ll need to connect those devices to your TV. You can do that in one of three ways.

The most discreet way is also the most work, and that’s to channel cables into the wall. That’s beyond the skill of many home owners, so you might need to get tradesmen in to do the job and ensure the wall is patched up well afterwards.

The second option is to simply allow the cables to dangle down the wall, or to put a shelf up next to the TV. This probably won’t be considered a good solution, because it can look untidy, which is generally defeating the point of mounting the TV in the first place.

The final option is tidier, but also much simpler for the do-it-yourself novice, and that’s to run a plastic cable housing down the wall from the TV which hides the cables. You can then run the housing along the skirting boards to wherever you want your Sky box and other home entertainment systems to be. Done cleverly, the plastic housing can often be run down the corner of a room which is a subtle solution for many living rooms.

Mounting a television is something which seems like a daunting task, but with a little careful planning doesn’t need to make a mess or cause an untidy result. You’re trying to get more space than by using a TV stand or unit, without reducing the high quality finish of the room’s decor, so be sure to think carefully about these goals when planning the change.

An increasingly common reason to wall mount is that you’re placing the TV in your home gym, or other room where there’s a lot of activity. As well as gaining space by avoiding the need for stands and cabinets, it also keeps the device away from movement, whether that’s you or a piece of equipment. If you’re running on a treadmill, pedaling on a bike or even scaling the heights on a vertical climber, there’s a much greater chance of losing your balance than in any other room of the house – you don’t want it to be the TV that breaks your fall!

One of the most popular home improvements in recent years has been to install solar panels onto your home. This gives a number of huge advantages, not least the ability to reduce your electricity bills. Energy prices have been soaring over the course of a decade, and are becoming unaffordable for many households. The same families have also been forced to accept pay freezes due to recessions in the same period, magnifying the effect of rising bills.

So, while reducing bills tends to be attractive to home owners, the multi-thousand pound price tag associated with the solar panel installations have been prohibitive and so for many homes, buying them hasn’t been a realistic prospect.

Nearly five years ago the rumblings of a new opportunity began, and feed in tariffs were born. This allowed people to fit solar panels and get paid for the energy they create as a green incentive. Resourceful investors quickly recognised that they could tap into these attractive returns, by paying for solar panels and giving home owners free installations in return for the energy payments. Unfortunately, the government reduced the level of payments from creating this green, renewable energy back in 2011, and with that the free solar panel deals became much harder to find as the return on investment had been greatly diminished.

Now, there is a new scheme to subsidise the cost of going solar. The Green Deal is a government initiative to reduce carbon emissions and make homes more energy efficient. For example, in Yorkshire you can arrange for a company like Green Deal Sheffield to visit your home and carry out an assessment, and they’ll identify all manner of work that can be completed which results in energy savings that more than pay for the cost of completing the work. It may not necessarily mean that you can have solar panels for free, but you might find you can get a loan towards them which effectively pays for itself. What’s more likely is that you’ll get the up front costs of work like insulation or the supply and fitting of a new boiler, and the cost of it paid out of the reduction in your energy bills.

The great thing about the Green Deal is it’s handled (on the whole) for you by tradesmen who are already experts in the field. For example, you might find that the Sheffield Green Deal experts we referred to earlier work with installers of solar panels in Wakefield, so they already of a network of specialists ready to complete the job to the same high standard and with the same expertise that you would get if you paid for the improvements yourself out of your own pocket.

UPDATE: 2015 has seen the death of many incentives relating to reducing energy use and creating green power in the home. The Green Deal has been scrapped and in early 2016, the feed in tariffs paid to solar panel owners are going to be drastically reduced for new installations. Undoubtedly something will have to come along to replace them in time, but for now there are less opportunities available in the market than there have been for many years.