Green home improvements that add the most value and why

For some, living a more sustainable lifestyle might start with what they eat. It could involve cutting back on travel, rejecting fast fashion, or recycling more and wasting less.

For others, however, ‘going green’ starts at home. And, with around 40 per cent of UK emissions coming from households – and the average UK home emitting around 2.7 tonnes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every year – there’s a strong case that it should.

But eco-home improvements are far from a selfless act of pure ecological altruism. They also shave money off your energy bill, add value to your home, and offer a wealth of long-term financial savings – all while clearing your climate conscience.

So, what can you do to make your house an eco-home? Read on to find out.

Below, we’ll discuss the top reasons why homeowners are joining the eco-home evolution, before unpacking 13 of the green home trends proving popular in 2024. Then, we’ll explore these green home improvements in detail, weighing up how much they cost, how much value they add to your property, and how much they’re set to save you – both in emissions and cash.

According to the Rated People Home Improvement Trends Report 2023 – which surveyed homeowners looking to carry out renovations and home upgrades in 2023 – the most common reason for making green home improvements was saving money on bills. The other reasons were:

• Being environmentally conscious (32 per cent)
• Decreasing the size of their carbon footprint (30 per cent)
• Making long-term financial savings (29 per cent)
• Minimising their environmental impact on the planet (28 per cent)
• Adding value to their home (23 per cent)

As it turns out, making eco-friendly adjustments to your home can help you achieve all of the above – although as we’ll see, some changes are more impactful (both on your bank balance and the environment) than others.

So read on for our breakdown of the green home improvements set to add the most value to your property in 2024 – and why.

We assessed 13 of the most popular eco-home improvements to understand which are the best value for money and which are best for the planet.

We found the green home technologies that are best for the environment aren’t necessarily the friendliest on your wallet.

The most eco-friendly green home improvement you can make, for instance, is an air source heat pump. By reducing your reliance on gas and transmitting heat seamlessly between the interior and exterior of your property, air source heat pumps can reduce a household’s carbon emissions by 20 to 80 per cent compared with gas boilers.

However, air source heat pumps – along with biomass boilers, standalone domestic wind turbines, and triple-glazed windows – are expensive.

What’s more, heat pumps actually save you less off your annual energy bill (£72) than any of the other green home improvements thanks to their reliance on electricity, which tends to be more expensive than gas. Meaning that, while they’re an excellent choice for the environment, they’re more difficult to justify come energy bill time.

Dive into our table below for a full cost and CO2 comparison of the green home improvements you could make in 2024, then scroll down – we’ll analyse all the data in full below.

*Refers to all insulation, including cavity wall and roof – hence why the figure is duplicated across both

So – which green home improvements make the most financial sense?

Well, solar panels stand to add the most value to your home (up to 14 per cent, according to some estimates), and will save you the third-most off your energy bill. 

Biomass boilers, thanks to how cheap the wood pellets that fuel them cost (especially compared to gas-, oil-, and electricity-based heating systems), can save you the most per year. However, they can also cost the most – although, as we’ll explain later, grants from the UK government should help shoulder some of that fiscal burden.

Of the cheapest green home improvements to make, it’s hard to look past smart thermostats (£225) and draught proofing (£250); although the saving potential they offer is, unsurprisingly, relatively paltry compared to some of the other, more expensive, strategies on this list.

The eco-home improvement with the best overall value is the EV (electric vehicle) charging station. Available at an average cost of around £1,000, its annual savings of £492 mean you’ll recoup your investment in around two years. Plus, the cost savings of owning the EV itself (which you can read more about below) only serve to sweeten the deal.

Below, we’re unpacking each element of a modern eco-home, and analysing the total costs and savings – both in terms of money and carbon dioxide emissions – they provide.

Of course, eco-homes don’t just save you money on a yearly basis; they make you money when you eventually go on to sell your home. So, where possible, we’ll also dive into the data around how much sell-on value each green home feature can add to your property.

When it comes to eco-homes, the sky’s the limit – so we’ll start there.

Solar panels convert the abundant, inexhaustible resource that is sunlight into power. And the effect, when you install solar panels in your own home – on your roof, perhaps, or in your garden – is that you’re able to generate your own private source of usable electricity.

This not only reduces your reliance on the grid (something which, in a country dogged by ballooning energy prices, is vital), but can even make you money. Under the UK government’s Smart Export Guarantee (SEG), you can feed any surplus renewable energy generated through your solar panels back to the grid – and be paid for every unit of electricity you supply it with.

So, how much can solar panels save your home in the UK? The exact figure will depend, of course, on the size of your domestic solar setup – the bigger it is, the more electricity it can generate; you’ll be less reliant on the grid, and can sell more excess energy to it.

But it’ll also depend on where in the UK you’re located. If that’s Eastbourne – which, with an average of eight hours of sunshine a day in June, is the UK’s sunniest place – your solar setup will be more effective than, say, one in the Scottish Highlands.

That’s why exact estimates of how much a home solar panel setup can save you tend to vary. Our research places the average solar panel cost at around £6,000, and yearly energy bill savings at up to £1,190. Energy Saving Trust estimates, meanwhile, place savings at between £175 and £420, with an extra £100 to £145 available through selling excess energy back to the grid.

Energy Saving Trust also provides useful estimates of potential annual solar panel savings broken down by location, and whether the home is selling energy back to the grid via the SEG.

The data in the table above is based on homes with residents who are at home all day. Source: Energy Saving Trust

Even with the maximum yearly savings – a house in London, utilising the SEG – you’re still looking at over a decade to offset the initial outlay – though most other modern estimates say a solar PV system can pay for itself in under 10 years.

To get an idea of your estimated costs and savings based on your postcode, use our handy solar calculator below.

However, it’s worth noting that, according to Zillow, homes with solar panels sell for an average of just over 4 per cent more than homes without them; while other research suggests solar panels increase a home’s value by an average of 14 per cent, or £32,459.

From a financial perspective, then, installing solar panels is a long game. But it’s one that – even without taking into account future energy price rises, or the growing importance of sustainability in the public zeitgeist – will almost certainly pay dividends.

Better still, solar panels will also save you 0.7 tonnes per year in carbon dioxide emissions. Extrapolate that out over two decades, and that’s an incredible 14 tonnes of emissions you’ve prevented.

Double-glazed windows are ones made with two layers of glass, separated by a thin space (filled either with air or a special gas such as krypton, xenon, or argon). They’re designed to provide better insulation to a home – keeping its interior spaces warmer in winter and cooler in summer – and are more energy-efficient than their single-glazed counterparts.

Because of these energy-saving qualities, double-glazed windows can save you money you’d otherwise have to spend on heating or cooling your place; all while reducing the size of your home’s carbon footprint.

What’s more, they also come with a range of ancillary benefits, including reducing noise levels from outside, cutting down condensation and protecting you (and your furniture) from the damaging effects of UV rays, all while offering average savings of £195 per year on your energy bill.

Taking into account the average double glazing costs of £5,000 (though this will, of course, differ based on the amount of windows in your home), it’ll still take around 32 years to offset the initial cost of your double-glazed windows. Meaning, given the lifespan of the typical double-glazed window is between 25 and 30 years, the breakeven point here is essentially unattainable.

However, research shows that double-glazed windows can boost your home’s value by 10 per cent – and the 0.33 tonnes you’ll reduce your carbon emissions by every year make it a sensible choice for the environment, too.

Triple-glazed windows, as the name suggests, consist of three layers of glass separated by two insulating spaces. Even more comprehensive than their double-glazed counterparts, they work in a similar way to insulate your home and boost its energy-efficient qualities.

They can add even more value to your home, too. One study – which explored how much extra UK home buyers would be willing to pay for particular eco-friendly home features – is instructive. It showed that, while double-glazed windows add £12,005 to a home’s value in the eyes of buyers, triple-glazed windows add £12,788 – behind only solar panels (£13,512) and a domestic wind turbine (£12,941) for their value-adding properties.

Better still, triple-glazed windows are around 24 per cent more energy-efficient than double-glazed windows – and this data from Everest demonstrates the key differences.

All that energy efficiency and desirability doesn’t, however, come cheap. The average cost of triple glazing in the UK comes to around 10 to 20 per cent more than the cost of double glazing.

Given this – and the fact the jury is still out regarding exactly how much more triple-glazed windows add to your home’s value – you may prefer to opt for the more affordable alternative.

To help you identify which windows are best suited to your home, explore our windows guide for a full, transparent explanation.

Cavity walls consist of two separate walls (known as ‘leaves’, or ‘skins’) with a gap (the ‘cavity’) between them. They’re common in modern construction for their insulation properties, as the gap creates a thermal barrier, reducing the transfer of heat between the inside and outside of a building. If, that is, these walls are insulated properly.

With an average cost of £2,700, cavity wall insulation is one of the more affordable green home improvements you can make. And, with the excellent average energy bill savings it can offer (around £300 per year), it’ll only take nine years to see your money back.

Given that more than a third (35 per cent) of a home’s heat is lost through its walls – making it the biggest culprit of heat loss in homes – cavity wall insulation isn’t something you can afford to skimp on. Plus, it’ll bear fruit not only for your wallet, but for your climate conscience, too – insulating your home’s cavity walls can relieve it of 0.65 tonnes of CO2 output every year.

Roof insulation is another green home improvement that ticks both boxes: being relatively cheap to make, and offering big cost savings. Unlike double glazing or solar panels – in which recouping your initial financial outlay can be a matter of decades – roof insulation will cover the cost of your investment in less than three-and-a-half years.

The process involves insulating the area between your home’s roof structure and interior. By minimising the transfer of heat between these spaces, roof insulation can save you money on both heating and cooling your home; savings which, according to Energy Saving Trust, could amount to £225 to £415 a year, depending on the type of house you live in.

Given the average cost of insulating your roof is only £930 – and that reports suggest insulation can, overall, increase the value of a home by between 2 and 6 per cent – the maths are compelling. What’s more, roof insulation can reduce your yearly carbon emissions output by 0.62 tonnes – so it’s a decision that makes sense for the planet’s balance book and yours.

Heat pumps are versatile systems that heat, cool, and dehumidify your home’s interior spaces.

Unlike gas boilers – which, through heating homes via radiators, create more greenhouse gas emissions (around 2,200 kg of CO2 per year) than any other home appliance – heat pumps are a more sustainable alternative.

Air source heat pumps work by transferring heat energy between the outdoors and indoors, extracting heat from outside of the home to heat it, or doing the opposite to cool it down. In doing this, air source heat pumps can cut your home’s CO2 emissions by 2.2 tonnes per year – making them the most positive green home improvement for the environment.

Heat pumps make sense from a planet perspective, then. But what about a financial one? 

Well, the average cost of an air source heat pump in the UK is around £14,000. Take into account annual energy bill savings of £72, and you’re looking at almost 139 years to pay back that initial output. Given the average lifespan of an air source heat pump is two decades – one-seventh of that time it would take to break even – it’s not exactly a nest egg.

That said, World Wildlife Fund (WWF) research, in conjunction with Scottish Power, has shown that heat pumps can boost your home’s value by between 1.7 and 3 per cent. What’s more, UK home buyers are happy to pay an extra £12,251 for properties with a ground source heat pump, and £11,670 for an air source heat pump.

Plus, it’s worth remembering that heat pumps shouldn’t be used in isolation, but with several of the other thermal technologies we’ll cover here, including insulation, double- or triple-glazed windows, and a smart thermostat. With these all working in tandem, the cost savings you’ll see will add up to more than a heat pump alone can provide – and help you witness a more rapid return on investment on your green home improvements.

Smart thermostats allow you to remotely manage and optimise your home’s climate settings through your computer or mobile device.

You can adjust your house’s temperature settings, monitor its energy usage, and receive alerts on the go, from wherever you are (providing you have an internet connection). You’ll also get more in-depth insights into how your home uses energy, enabling you to make better decisions about your heating consumption to save on bills.

Available for an average cost of just £225 – but dangling an impressive £130 in yearly energy bill savings – smart thermostats offer the quickest route to green home return on investment. You’ll have recouped your initial outlay in just over 20 months; all the rest is pure profit.

That said, it’s unclear exactly how much – if any – value a smart thermostat will add when it comes to selling your home.

One source reports that smart thermostats can add £197.58 to a home’s sell-on price, but this doesn’t even cover the purchase cost. Through this lens, installing a smart thermostat is far less about your home’s eventual value, and far more about the considerable energy savings it can offer while you’re living there; not to mention the 0.5 tonnes it can save your home in annual carbon dioxide emissions.

If you’re interested in installing solar panels to generate electricity, you’ll also want to look into some way of storing it – particularly if you’re planning on using your system to reduce your reliance on grid electricity, even when your panels aren’t producing power, such as at night.

Here’s where solar battery storage (or, simply, ‘solar batteries’) come in. These devices help you retain the electrical energy your solar panels (or your domestic wind turbine) have generated, and store it for later use. This gives you greater energy independence, as you’re able to draw on your own stored electricity during peak hours (when grid demand is at its highest), and charge your battery when grid energy is at its most affordable.

The only caveat is that, at an average cost of £4,500, storage batteries don’t come cheap – and, though it feels intuitive that a storage battery would add value to your home, there are no concrete figures that back this up.

That said, the £701 per year it’ll save you means it’ll take less than 6 years to offset your initial outlay. And, given how integral a storage battery is to enabling other crucial eco-home features, such as solar panels and wind turbines, it still seems like a shrewd investment.

Plus, a solar battery can slash your home’s emissions by 1.12 tonnes per year (around 41 per cent of the average three-bedroom UK home’s yearly carbon footprint, which is 2.7 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent), so it’s a huge game-changer.

A domestic wind turbine is a small-scale wind power generation system that, like solar panels, allows you to reduce your reliance on the grid by generating your own renewable energy.

Wind turbines can be freestanding or mounted on your roof – you’ll just need to make sure that where you live experiences enough wind to justify the outlay. Ideally, that’s wind speeds of at least 10 to 12mph most days.

Speaking of outlay, a small roof-mounted wind turbine capable of generating around 1 to 2kW per day will cost you around £2,000, while prices for standalone turbines able to generate around 1.5kW start at £7,000. For 10 times more power, however, it’ll cost you 10 times the price – 15kW systems, which provide around 36,000kWh of power per year, cost around £70,000. And we haven’t even mentioned the other costs yet – permission, installation, and connection to the grid – combined, they can total between £10,000 and £20,000.

Domestic wind turbines can lower your electricity bills by between 50 and 90 per cent – but there’s still a lack of data about just how much value they can add to your home. Similarly, while the exact annual cost savings you’ll see with a domestic wind turbine vary, sources suggest it’ll take between 6 and 20 years for it to break even.

Biomass boilers use organic materials (such as wood chips, pellets, or logs) as fuel to generate heat. Unlike traditional fossil fuel boilers – which rely on burning coal to produce energy – biomass boilers use renewable, sustainable biomass resources.

While this process does still emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, it’s offset by the CO2 the plants – which eventually become the fuel – absorb during their lifecycle and growth. This creates a closed carbon cycle, which helps make biomass boilers a carbon-neutral method of heat generation.

In the UK, the cost of a biomass boiler depends on whether it requires you to feed the logs or pellets in yourself, or whether this happens automatically. Manual-fed biomass boilers range from £4,000 to £10,000, while their automatically-fed counterparts average around £16,000. You can, however, offset this cost with the help of the UK government.

Since 1 April 2022, the Boiler Upgrade Scheme (BUS) has been enabling homeowners to receive a grant of up to £5,000 towards the installation of a biomass boiler – and this will increase to £7,500 on 23 October 2023. The scheme is in place until 2028 as part of the UK’s wider pledge to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, and decarbonise all aspects of its economy.

Even after a BUS grant, however, biomass boilers do still seem expensive – particularly when you factor in wildly varying installation costs of between £4,000 and £21,000.

But take a closer look at how much biomass fuel costs – especially vis a vis fossil-fuel-based alternatives – and the picture changes. Heating your home with wood chips costs 20.9 per cent of the cost of electricity, and less than half of the cost of oil. Per kwH, wood chips are also less than two-thirds (58 per cent) of the cost of gas, which heats 74 per cent of UK homes.

Given that British Gas reports the average cost of heating a three-bedroom home in the UK as £152.83 per month – or £1,833.96 per year – we can estimate that, at 58 per cent of the cost, a wood-chip-fuelled biomass burner would cost around £1,096.69 per year.

That’s more than £737 per year in savings compared to a gas-heated home.

Broadly assuming the boiler cost around £10,000 to purchase and £5,000 to install – but that, through the BUS, you’re able to claim £5,000 back in benefits – it would take you just over 13.5 years to break even. A long time, perhaps; but knowing you’re doing your bit to be more eco-friendly and offset a portion of your carbon footprint equates to a lot of good sleeps.

A solar water heater uses solar energy to heat water, capturing sunlight, converting it into usable heat, then using this to warm your home’s water.

The cost of solar water heaters depends on the system’s size, and the number of people it’s heating the water for. A typical solar water heating system costs between £3,000 and £5,000 and, for a three-bedroom house, a solar water heating system stands to save you around £120 on your annual bills alone compared with gas water heating.

Plus, a robust solar water heating setup is a vital asset for the long-term; and, when it comes to selling your home, can add £11,646 to its value.

Available for as little as £1,000, an EV charger can add almost 12 times that amount to your home’s sell-on value – all while saving you £492 every year on your energy bill.

That means you can break even on your EV charging point’s upfront costs in just over 2 years. Of course, that doesn’t take into account the fact that, for an EV charging point to justify its presence, you’ll need an EV to go with it.

Yet, while EVs are more expensive to purchase than petrol-reliant cars (Vauxhall’s electric-powered Mokka, for example, is around 30 per cent more expensive than its petrol-powered counterpart) you’ll be exempt from ULEZ areas and road tax. And, on average, electric cars are £579 per year cheaper to run than petrol cars, which makes them a more financially (and environmentally) sustainable solution in the long run.

Draught proofing is the process of sealing cracks and gaps in and around your home’s doors, windows, walls, floors, pipes, and vents – plus any other openings – to prevent the unwanted leakage of air.

Left unattended, these draughts allow hot air to enter your home in summer, and cold air to infiltrate during winter. This puts greater pressure on your heating system to counteract these fluctuations in temperature, and increase not only your home’s energy consumption and bill – but its carbon footprint, too.

To draught proof your home, you can use a range of materials – including sealant, draught excluders, or weatherstripping – to take a DIY approach. Otherwise, you can have it done professionally for around £250.

Done properly, draught proofing around your home’s doors and windows can save you around £45 per year off your energy bill, while draught proofing your chimney – if you have an open one, and you don’t use it – can save you £65 in annual heating costs.

When it comes to increasing your home’s value, draught proofing is key – and, given that prospective home buyers are willing to pay an extra £11,151 for a draught-free home, it’s clear that it’s one of the first things they’re looking for.

Here, we’ve looked at 13 different eco-home improvements you can make to your house in 2024. Whether you’re looking to add value, reduce your carbon footprint, pay less in energy bills, or simply feel better about your role in combating the climate crisis, building an eco-home can help you do all of the above – without having to cost the world.

With that in mind, let’s quickly recap what we’ve learned.

Money notwithstanding, we’d all love to build our dream eco-home – a planet-promoting paradise where everything, from the doormat to the kitchen sink, is based on sustainable principles and materials. In reality, though, that’s merely a pipe dream (at least for most of us).

So what can you do? Well, making incremental changes can help. You don’t need to conduct your eco-home revolution all at once. Start with the small stuff – installing a smart thermostat, for instance, or plugging those pesky crevices around your pipes and vents – and go from there.

As you progress, become more invested and interested in your energy bill. Understand how you’re consuming power, and consider how minor tweaks to your habits and electricity usage could save you money. Then, make even more changes: insulating your home, exploring renewable alternatives to gas, and researching the many government grants on hand (such as the BUS) to give your eco-home improvements a financial leg-up.

These are the small stones that, once they start to move, can become an avalanche of positive change. So good luck, and remember – your eco-home journey starts today.