1) It is our intention to achieve big improvements for the O’Donnells in terms of their comfort, health and the money they have to spend on running their home. We are using a sensible, cost-effective collection of improvements to make their home more comfortable, healthy and cheaper to run. Our aim is to do this at the same time as minimizing the disruption caused by building works, so the O’Donnells don’t have to move out of their home with all the worry and stress and expense this would cause. The purpose of our retrofit project is to showcase a means of achieving these big improvements in a way that can be realistically reproduced across the country in large numbers with minimal disturbance to the occupants of the houses. We believe designing for people to stay in their homes is possible and we do not believe that it is realistic or reasonable for local authorities and housing associations to have to move large numbers of people out of their home to improve the home’s energy efficiency and comfort. We have to devise ways of overcoming all the problems of our existing building stock in a way that is manageable. Key to achieving this is putting insulation externally rather than internally. The planners were happy with this approach in our projects. We believe that planners and communities across the country need to accept that there is no alternative other than external insulation except in rare circumstances. This should be viewed positively – it gives us a wonderful opportunity to freshen up our streetscapes at the same time as making a public statement about the commitment of an individual or community to address the serious problems of fuel poverty, health problems from damp homes (asthma etc), and national security caused by the country’s slow uptake of the desperately overdue need to act! As well as external insulation, we are insulating below the ground floor with minimum disruption on a room-by-room basis, we are improving loft insulation, addressing cold bridging, replacing all the windows with extremely high performance laminated wood windows which should last at least as long as the house, reducing draughts, and adding an energy saving fresh air system with heat recovery to make sure there is ample healthy fresh air in the house when people keep their windows closed in the winter months.
An important part of any retrofit project is close communication with both the occupant and the contractor. Our blog will include interviews with the occupants and the contractors. We are producing a short film that will be open and honest about the lessons we all learn along the way and it will say whether, at the end of the build phase and then during the first two years of performance monitoring, the O’Donnells and Hounslow homes feel that we have achieved our shared objectives.
