As a family we've decided to try and make our house a bit greener and use less energy - but where to start? We didn't want to spend money on something, only to find out there was something else we could do that was cheaper and had more effect.

Living in London we were able to sign up for the Mayor of London's Green Concierge Service which is billed as a "personal service to help homeowners make their homes energy efficient" - just what we wanted ... Well nearly, it did have the slight problem you have to pay £200 for a year's service - surely if the UK government is serious about tackling climate change it should be providing this service free. Still, we thought we'd stump up the money and give it a go.

The first thing that happens is that they send someone around to do an energy assessment of your home - how efficient is it now, and how can it be improved. The nice friendly guy measured our house, checked the insulation, windows, light bulbs etc, fed it all into his laptop which told us how efficient - or not - the house is currently.

Energy Efficiency Rating for our house

Image by Ken Kitson

These charts showed how are house fared. The first chart shows our house's overall energy efficiency - you get a score between 0 and 100.

100 is best - only a specially built eco-house that required virtually no energy to heat or light it would get this sort of score. 0 is worst which corresponds to living in a tent with an electric fire inside it. The average score for houses in England and Wales is 46. 

So how did we do? As you can see from the graph, we got a score of 52, which put us in band E - not dreadful, but definitely room for improvement. Our house didn't do as badly as some because it is a "mid-terraced house" and so has houses either side of it limiting the heat loss. Plus we have had work done on the roof fairly recently which meant the roof insulation was reasonable. But as the chart also shows we could improve our score to 62 ... more of that in another post.

Carbon Footprint Rating of our house

Image by Ken Kitson

What does this means in terms of effects on climate change? This second chart rated our house according to its carbon footprint. Here we did a bit worse with a score of 44. The assessment also tolds us that heating and lighting our home produced about 7.6 tonnes of Carbon Dioxide per year - or 1.9 tonnes for each person living there.

Bearing in mind a sustainable personal footprint for the world is reckoned to be around 2 tonnes of CO2 per person per year, this meant we were using up our fair portion of the world's resource just by heating and lighting our house ... time to make some changes.

That's where the second part of the assessment came in - telling us how we could change our house, and what difference those changes would make. More of that in my next post.