Add Value to Your Home With These Eco Improvements

How to Add Value to Your Home

Real value can be added to your house if you improve different aspects of it. This can include improving the heating system so it’s more efficient or ridding your home of draughts to keep more heat inside. This can help maximise the return on your property if you’re looking to sell. Take a look at our list of home improvements below for ways to add value to your home.

Eco Home Improvements

Solar Panels

The most lucrative improvement you can make to your home is by installing solar panels. Reducing your reliance on the grid can add over £5,000 to your home’s value, depending on the system and the size of your home.

According to data from the MCS Installations Database, the most popular low carbon technologies were solar panels, by a whopping 82.83%. Of the 224,931 total installations last year, over 186,000 of them were solar panels, proving they are an incredibly popular technology that's ever in demand.

Energy Efficient Boiler

You can also add value to your home by replacing an old boiler with a modern, energy efficient model. This can add over £3,500 in value as newer models are much more energy efficient. These home improvements remove the need for future owners to replace them, which saves them money and makes your home more environmentally friendly; it’s a win-win all around.

EV Charger

In terms of eco-home improvements, installing an EV charger has the potential to add value to your home to the tune of almost £3,500. Considering you can install home EV chargers for prices between £400 and £800, this puts you in a good position already. More homeowners are looking for ways to be kinder to the planet, and having a home with electric vehicle infrastructure already installed works as a great incentive.

Eliminate Draughts

Inside the home, one of the best home improvements you can make is to simply draught-proof your property. This is actually the easiest and most cost-effective way to add value to your home as the benefits far outweigh the initial cost.

For around £100 in proper draught-proofing materials, you can expect to add over £3,000 to the value of your home. Keeping warm air in your home for longer will improve your home’s EPC rating as well, which means it will cost less to heat, reducing energy bills.

Smart Heating Technology

With technology in mind, a smart thermostat has almost the same benefit as draught-proofing, expecting to add almost £3,000 in value to your home. This home improvement has the potential to learn your heating patterns and to only heat up when it’s occupied or soon to be.

You’re also able to adjust the heating from your smartphone, which gives you much greater flexibility than a standard programmed heating system. Add value to your home without wasting money or energy by implementing smart technology.

Get a Smart Meter

By adding a smart meter, for roughly £40, the automatic meter readings have the potential to add almost a further £2,750. This seems like a no-brainer. They can also come with an in-home display, which monitors the amount of energy that you’re consuming.

Despite not being able to reduce your energy use, they act as a prompt for you to find ways of reducing it. They can add value to your home because having smart infrastructure for home energy allows the national grid to only generate energy for the usage that is needed, taking out the guesswork involved.

Efficient Lighting

We’ve all heard before about energy saving light bulbs and how they can save you money in the home. Increasing your home in value by over £2,500, it’s an added bonus too. Although LED light bulbs are more expensive than their incandescent counterparts, they last so much longer, paying for themselves many times over their lifetime.

They’re much more energy efficient and don’t waste as much energy as heat, so you can easily add value to your home by improving the lighting arrangements.

New Paint

When it comes to DIY, walls with a fresh lick of paint can go further than you might think. To add value to your home this way, you need to use low volatile organic compound (VOC) paint. These are toxic compounds that contain carbon, which gets released into the atmosphere as the paint dries.

Paints with lower VOC ratings are much better for the environment and have the potential to add over £2,500 to your home’s value. Homebuyers are more likely to pay more for a home that has been painted in an environmentally friendly way.

Gardening

The garden is also closely tied to a home’s value. Not only is an outdoor space desirable, but a biodiverse garden has the potential to add value to your home: over £3,000! While a garden that’s looked after can add as much as 20%, increasing the biodiversity of it also helps.

By creating shelter and homes for birds, bees and insects, you can make your garden look more beautiful and fill it with nature, creating a haven for urban life. This can include rewilding parts of your garden or planting bee-friendly flowers. The benefits of the outdoors go far beyond well-being.

Additional Eco Home Improvements

We’ve shown you how to add value to your home through various home improvements, but there’s always more you can do. Even though we don’t have amounts by which the value of your home can be improved, you can still benefit from increasing the efficiency of your home through these steps:

Insulation

Insulation is the biggest hurdle in our goal to reach net zero. Wasted heat is wasted money, and wasted heat is wasted energy that didn’t have to be generated. By ensuring all homes are insulated well enough, everyone benefits from lower energy bills and can then utilise low-carbon technologies.

Wall and loft insulation are the biggest areas of heat loss in the home. Insulating these areas will no doubt add value to your home. Likewise, solar thermal technology can make sure you benefit from free hot water during the summer months. Any form of free heating is always attractive to potential buyers.

Improve Your Glazing

You lose only 10-15% of a home’s heat through your windows, so you can replace them with double or triple glazing. Even though this increases your home’s value, you’ll only recoup the losses of the initial spend. It’s still a worthwhile investment though, as new windows can dramatically change the façade for the better. Complementary colouring can add value to your home as much as a new front door.

Improved Appliances

Energy efficiency should always be at the heart of a home, and appliances represent this sentiment better than anything else. You can immediately add value to your home by replacing older appliances. Energy inefficient ones should be replaced with newer and improved models. Most appliances are rated A-G, but older appliances can go as high as A+++.

Even if you have an older appliance rated A, this is not energy efficient compared to a similar appliance rated A+++ from the same year. This is one of the reasons why appliance energy labels were reclassified from A-G. New appliances that are energy efficient cost less to operate and, if they use water, use less. State-of-the-art appliances can add impressiveness as well as add value to your home.

Other Home Improvements to Add Value to Your Home

If you’re on the DIY warpath, sanitaryware can also be upgraded to be more eco friendly. Modern sanitaryware is usually fitted with aerators or flow restrictors, which limit the amount of water that comes out of basin and bath taps.

Eco home improvements can include replacing your bath and basin, taps and fittings to include aerators. Limiting our water use is just one way in which we can be more helpful to the environment and add value to your home.

Finally, as far as home improvements go, you can add value to your home through installing underfloor heating. It’s a big job to upgrade your heating from radiators. This requires a greater surface area, but is a much more efficient way of warming your home.

Underfloor heating operates at lower temperatures, which makes it perfectly suited for integration with low carbon technologies. This can cut down the cost of future work for fitting a heat pump, for example, thereby increasing desirability of your property.