On Monday 22nd March, 25 people from various Transition Bristol neighbourhood groups (including 5 from Montpelier) attended a Home Energy Auditing Training run by the Energy Savings Trust’s Green Communities team at the CREATE centre. The aim of the training was to develop teams of known, friendly and approachable people who can support and advise people on domestic energy efficiency within their neighbourhoods.
27% of the UK’s CO2 emissions are from our homes. This needs to be reduced significantly.
We had an excellent day and our enthusiasm and passion was commented on by our trainer Bev. Comments from some of the delegates include: “Thanks for the great event on monday”, ” I really enjoyed the part of the course I attended on Monday-thanks for organising it”, Monday was an excellent day, Thank you”.
The training course content was put together by people from Transition Montpelier’s energy group (TMEG) and the Easton Energy Group and is strongly informed by the success of the Household Energy Service in Shropshire who have just been awarded a significant grant to furthur the excellent work they are doing with communities in their county. We are hopeful that this training, combined with some significant other work going on in Bristol, can hasten the way forward to our city becoming more energy efficient, secure and sustainable.
Futher information:
The follow up document from the training here features links to many other useful sites.
I think the main thing to come out of the training for me was an awareness that the whole home energy issue has so many variables feeding into it in terms of construction, appliance efficiency, individual habits etc that there is unlikely to be a ‘one size fits all’ answer to anything. The training was informative and well presented but has left me with a feeling that rather than put myself forward definitively as a ‘home energy auditor’ for my neighbourhood, I would rather use what I had learned as a basis for exploration with others, and I am thinking along the lines of something like a CRAG (Carbon reduction action group) where we let people know that we have done the training and offer them not only the option of a home visit with the check list that I believe a few people are now developing, but also something in the form of peer to peer help where there is an invitation to come and discuss and learn on a fortnightly/monthly basis.
I would be keen to explore how to set up and run this sort of support group in a community and would like to have a neighbourhood meeting where people who have set up and run CRAGs or similar explain how it is done. I know there is a group in Redland and I remember SusWot saying they were thinking about an ‘energy buddies’ project. Would anyone else be interested in using this sort of format to bring what we learned on Monday into our neighbourhoods? If so, a meeting to explore this might be useful.