While I think that the Home Energy Saving scheme, is a good idea I do think a better investment would be to update the building code and make it harder for builders to get away with not properly insulating the houses that they built in the first place. It seems that Eamon ryan in his wisdom, will be offloading the cost of re insulating and upgrading of houses to the taxpayer, is two fold, The Grant money is taxpayers, which will probably only cover 1/3 or at best 1/2 the cost of the job, and then the rest of the money will have to be paid by the taxpayer(Home owner).
My experience with builders and contractors is that they will try and get as much money for themselves. Ripping off the taxpayer once again (The grant is almost free money to them).
Will this become another (smaller) building bubble, I’ve never seen so many builders advertising insulation contracting before. Having the tax and insurance clearings will not mean that the contractor is any good at his or her job, I suppose there will be cowboys in this business too.
While I support reducing heating bills and in turn reducing C02, I’m not 100% convinced that it will work, I hope I’m wrong!