Tackling the Terrace

Brr! Its cold outside.

Read on to find out how a group of neighbours are teaming up to make their homes warmer.

We are pleased to announce that Bristol Green Doors has been successful in being awarded one of the first grants from the Department of Energy and Climate Change’s (DECC) Local Energy Assessment Fund (Leaf). The fund has allocated £10million to community based schemes across the UK that actively promote energy reduction or renewable energy production, and Bristol Green Doors have been awarded £78,000 from this fund.Click here for more information on other successful projects.

Our project, “Tackling the Terrace”, will involve cladding a micro-terrace in St Andrews with external wall insulation. The terrace comprises four houses, 3 of which are owner-occupied, whilst the fourth is divided into 3 privately rented flats. We believe this project is the first of its kind in the country, where individual property owners are working together to install external insulation to make their homes more thermally efficient.

Why is this type of work important?

Bristol has a lot of old houses, many of which are built with solid wall construction. As homes loose around 35% of their heat through the walls, insulating them is important to make them more thermally efficient and keep them warm. Unfortunately, for houses built with solid walls this isn’t straight forward or necessarily cheap.

Bristol also has a lot of terraced housing - about 36% - which is higher than in most cities. By working together with the neighbours and insulating the terrace as a whole, our project will look to see if there are advantages of working in this way.
• Are there cost savings to be made?
• What are the technical and practical benefits that result from doing this work?
• And are there any other implications that need to be considered, i.e planning costs, working together as a group, personal vs group requirements.

In addition, we will be carrying out monitoring activity to measure the effectiveness of this type of work - will it save the householders money on their bills, or just create a warmer environment for them to live in for the same cost? Householders are being asked to monitor their energy use in the period between January and April 2012 before the insulation is fitted, and for the same period in 2013 following installation. Temperature gauges will also be installed in all six homes to see what difference the cladding makes to the comfort of the home.

Building work on the terrace is due to start in mid February, completing towards the end of March 2012. Householders from the terrace will be taking part in the next Bristol Green Doors open homes event over the weekend of 17 & 18th March 2012. The building works should still be in progress for this event, so if you want to see a real life installation of external wall insulation, come along over the Bristol Green Doors weekend.

We will be sharing our progress and findings on this project in the following ways:
- Bristol Energy Network meeting - 23/02/12 7-9pm at Hamilton House, 80 Stokes Croft, Bristol BS1 3QY
- Federation of Master Builders workshop - 07/03/12 at the Almondsbury Interchange Hotel. If you work in the building industry, running your own small or medium sized company, and are a member of the FMB, why not come along and find out why visiting Bristol Green Doors events, and learning more about energy efficient retrofits could be good for your business.
- Sustainable Bishopston - Thursday 8th March at Bubalu, 79-81 Gloucester Road, Bishopston, BS7 8AR, from 19.15 till 21.00.

Following completion of the project we will write a report of our findings. This will be accessible from the website in April 2012.

This page will be updated as the works progress, so keep in touch during this time, or sign-up to our newsletter to find out more.

For enquiries on this project please email kate@bristolgreendoors.org

For more on solid wall insulation see our own Next Steps section http://www.bristolgreendoors.org/next-steps/insulation-walls