Cosy Homes Club: capacity building with our local team
After recruiting a team of local Energy Champions and Citizen Researchers, our first collective training workshop was held in an appropriately cosy room at Everton In the Community, just before Christmas. We begin by sitting down together for lunch for a chance to chat and get to know each other a little, and then spent the rest of the afternoon being led by Helen Grimshaw from Carbon Coop through the links between homes and health; our connection to the wider energy system; how energy flows through a home and the importance of repairs and maintenance!
LOCAL EXPERTISE AND THERMAL IMAGING
At our second workshop, we begin with lunch and a catch up, this time with freshly baked pies from Homebaked bakery – a welcome sight after arriving at our hosts New Beginnings Improving Lives, on what was a cold and damp afternoon!
After a thorough grounding in energy efficiency during our first workshop, the content for the second session was shaped by the group to cover topics of particular interest to them. So, after lunch we settled down to learn some of the theory about thermal imaging and discover how this can be a useful tool to explore energy flows in buildings. We then applied our newfound understanding by exploring NBIL’s building using thermal cameras, finding some unexpected things which prompted much lively debate about what might be going on behind the walls. Since this workshop, the Cosy Homes Club thermal camera has already been used by three of our team to begin investigating the performance of their own homes!
The second half of the session was focused on exploring the housing typologies of the local area and comparing and contrasting their energy performance using a combination of printed maps, post-its, sharing of local expertise and interactive online data tools.
If you’re interested in exploring these ideas yourself, the mapping tools that we used during the sessions are below:
https://parallel.co.uk/fuel-poverty/#12.72/53.41918/-2.94335/43.7/2
https://liverpool.gov.uk/council/key-statistics-and-data/ward-information/neighbourhood-profiles/
Would you like to get involved?
Our next Cosy Homes Club workshop will explore some of the DIY measures that householders can do to improve the performance of their homes at a practical (and free!) draughtproofing workshop led by Carbon Coop, on Wednesday 20th March.
This is open to anyone in our community, although places are limited, so if you’d like to attend then please sign up at our Eventbright page here:
