Our ‘Warm Homes Peterborough’ project has won a national Green Apple Environment Award, recognising environmental best practice!

Tags: Warm Homes Peterborough | Energy Efficiency | Nadia Grys

It’s the summer holidays and that can only mean one thing, yes it’s time for the annual fun day at Woodfield Park .

Mick Steele from the Welland Residents Association invited us to attend this annual event and, as we had enjoyed this event so much last year, we are really looking forward to pitching the PECT gazebo and spreading the eco message to the residents who attend in their thousands, well nearly, mmm.

Last year Patrick and I gave away hundreds of free Warm Homes energy packs and we found our 500th survey participant for the Seeding Sustainable Communities project that I was working on at the time. This event was a great marker for us, it led to lots of conversation based around comments such as ‘this time last year’ and it was really great to sum up all the things we have achieved over the past year. Patrick has completed hundreds of surveys and is well into the second year of his project where he helps people find their way out of fuel poverty buy offering friendly and effective energy saving advice and I was promoting the Greeniversity, Peterborough’s green skill and green experience website.
Also joining us during the year was Sophie and her Green Team who have just completed their 2,000th free eco audit. At the event Scott and Chris from the Green Team spent the day helping people to identify ways they could cut their carbon. They even persuaded me that I should make the effort and get on my bike!

We were particularly lucky that the deputy mayor Bella Saltmarsh joined us at the PECT stand, Bella has been particularly supportive of PECTs projects on her patch and we are really grateful for all her efforts. We were also grateful to the Mayor who helped us to set up the stall then stayed around for a while helping to attract attention to the PECT stand.

The event itself was fabulous. Patrick loved the huge boot sale and I got both my dogs a new teddy each. I was able to buy a big yellow sunflower for my garden and the bees pleasure and some of the most delicious peaches I’ve ever had from the fresh produce stall. I didn’t fancy wall climbing, Patrick wanted to do bungie jumping but said that he had a medical condition that prevented him from doing anything dangerous – likely story!

  Along with all those that attendedr we really did have a great time When works this good who needs Saturdays off?   

Tags: Greeniversity | Green backyard | Energy Efficiency | Warm Homes Peterborough | Patrick McLintock | Karen Lawrence

Warm Homes Peterborough is PECT’s community-based fuel poverty project, providing free energy-saving advice and products to social housing tenants, and reducing the carbon footprint of 5 Peterborough neighbourhoods. Having successfully worked with 750 tenants in its first year, the project’s second year has recently begun.
 

Whilst the likes of Brazil, Spain and The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea have been battling it out for football supremacy in South Africa, our very own Warm Homes team (complete with new signing Bacar) has been working with residents to slide-tackle fuel poverty in three Peterborough wards not visited last year: Paston, Ravensthorpe and East ward. Having been largely Dogsthorpe-based in our first year, these new areas have taken some getting used to.

Similarly to my Dogsthorpe induction, there has been much walking in circles, head-scratching over maps, and ambitious attempts to commit all nearby bus-stops to memory. As with World Cup squads, internal disputes occasionally threaten the cohesion of the plucky Warm Homes team. “I could have sworn it was just round this corner” is usually enough to prompt a raised eyebrow and a slight look of contempt from my colleague. Thankfully such rifts have remained civil. So far.

Most recently we’ve been knocking on doors and visiting tenants in Paston, and it’s encouraging  that Registered Social Landlords appear to be as focused on energy efficiency measures here as we witnessed them being in Dogsthorpe last year. Unlike Dogsthorpe, where re-roofing appeared to be the order of the day, Paston has hosted a carnival of cladding. Yeah, I said it.

Whereas most of the properties visited in Dogsthorpe have insulated wall cavities, many Paston properties are not suitable for this heat-saving measure. In a solid wall property, or one with narrow wall cavities, the insulation choices are to dry-line walls from the inside of the properties or to clad them from the outside. One huge benefit of cladding, over-dry lining, is the reduced disruption to tenants’ lives during installation. Also it’s far more heat-conserving than dry-lining, making its higher price-tag worthwhile in the long run. 

This wave of cladding in Paston has brought a temporary abundance of scaffolding to areas like Crabtree. Retro pebble-dash houses here are being transformed beyond recognition, with the new rendered layers of being  painted shades of cream, brown and red. On a hot day in Paston you can start to mistake some of the terraced properties for neapolitan ice cream, particularly if it’s been a few hours since lunch. 

 

Tags: Energy Efficiency | Warm Homes Peterborough | Patrick McLintock

Heating is probably the most important use of energy in our homes, particularly for those of us who are vulnerable to cold.
 

However, a number of barriers to affordable warmth can exist. The best efforts of an efficient new boiler and central heating system can be in vain if heat then pours out through poorly insulated roofspaces, walls or draughty windows.

Likewise, bank accounts and prepay meters will be drained rapidly if homes are heated beyond the maximum recommended temperature (21c). Both of these barriers to affordable warmth also involve energy wastage and unnecessary CO2 emissions. Any inefficient use of energy (electricity, gas or other) impacts on our ability to heat our homes, both in terms of resources and personal financial cost.

The rising price of energy has been a contentious and highly publicised issue of late, an issue which makes it even more important for everyone to identify which of the various energy tariffs suit them best. 

Some might wonder why only Dogsthorpe and Central Wards are being focussed on as part of the Warm Homes project. Fuel Poverty is known to be most prevalent in areas which suffer high levels of deprivation. Whilst such statistics are always broad; Dogsthorpe and Central Ward have been identified as suffering some of the highest levels of deprivation within Peterborough, making them strong candidates for any fuel poverty project.

Furthermore, Warm Homes Peterborough is only offered to tenants of Registered Social Landlords (RSLs), not home-owners or those renting privately. As a sector of society, RSL tenants are vulnerable to fuel poverty.  A recent report from the New Policy Institute described how “RSLs house a very sizeable number of those in, or at risk or, poverty”.  RSL tenants are also generally exempt from government energy-efficiency initiatives such as Warm Front grants and the new Boiler Scrappage Scheme announced over Christmas. Despite  this, I have seen first-hand the impressive measures Peterborough RSLs are implementing to increase the energy efficiency of their properties, for example Cross Keys Homes’ work on roof insulation.

Read my first blog post about the Warm Homes project here...
 

Tags: Energy Efficiency | Patrick McLintock | Warm Homes Peterborough

With Christmas Day less than 36 hours away, and after six months of door-knocking, surveying and energy advice, the first year of Warm Homes Peterborough visits came to a close. As the snow fell thickly in Dogsthorpe, the completion of the momentous 250th home survey marked the end of the first phase of this new energy efficiency project.

In the latter half of 2009 I became something of a stranger to the PECT office, and became something of a fixture in the residential lanes of Dogsthorpe and Central Ward, to the extent where one Eastern Avenue resident recognised and welcomed me into his home as “the young man who keeps wandering up and down our street with a trolley and a clipboard”. The same resident revealed how, after repeated sightings of me and my ‘office-on-wheels’, he and his wife had reached the conclusion that I was “just out looking for something to do”.

Whilst the last comment suggests I have some work to do on perfecting a purposeful veneer, the truth is that I was out to deliver energy efficiency advice to 250 Peterborough residents. Warm Homes Peterborough is a project funded by ScottishPower’s Energy People Trust, designed to combat fuel poverty (fuel poverty is defined as where more than 10% of a household’s income is spent on fuel). A wide range of factors can feed fuel poverty, but thankfully an equally wide range of responses can alleviate it.

I’ll be revealing more about how the Warm Homes Peterborough project works in future blog posts.

Tags: Patrick McLintock | Warm Homes Peterborough | Energy Efficiency