Welcome back to the Cosy Homes Club
After the success of our first phase, we’ve received funding to continue exploring how to make energy efficiency available for everyone in our community! The Cosy Homes Club is investigating how we can achieve an efficient roll-out of whole-house retrofit in our local area, for people in all tenures, without leaving anyone behind, through our project ‘Cosy Homes: Energy Efficiency for All!’
Homebaked CLT was created in response to the failures of top-down regeneration, by local people with a desire to take back control. We aim to act as a catalyst and enabler for community-led regeneration, holding the question ‘what does it mean to live well?’ at the core of everything we do. The Cosy Homes Club focuses on one aspect of ‘living well’ by addressing the lack of quality and affordability in housing that we believe everyone deserves.
Fuel poverty in our area is double the national average, with homes in the lowest 20% of domestic energy efficiency. However, through developing our scheme to transform the derelict terrace next to the bakery into community-owned, affordable, low carbon homes (alongside community business spaces) we know how beneficial retrofit measures are in improving living conditions.
Government policy is failing to create an effective roll-out of domestic retrofit, which is an issue especially for people who are not able to make these improvements to their homes on their own. We hope that, in the absence of effective national policy, this project will start to address this issue from the bottom up.
DEFINITIONS
Retrofit and Whole-house retrofit:
Retrofitting is the process of making improvements to a home to make it more energy efficient. This can often include adding (or upgrading) insulation to the walls, floors and loft; upgrading windows and doors; upgrading a heating system or adding solar panels. Whole-house retrofit means that there is a comprehensive plan aiming to ensure that a property operates in as energy-efficient a manner as possible. All aspects of the building are considered and improvements are carried out in a sensible order and work together.
Fuel Poverty:
Fuel poverty is when a household cannot afford to heat (or cool) their home to an adequate temperature.
The UK government consider a household to be fuel poor if it is living in a property with a fuel poverty energy efficiency rating of band D or below, and when they spend the required amount to heat their home, they are left with a residual income below the official poverty line.
A more straightforward description is when a household needs to spend at least 10% of its income on keeping its home at a satisfactory temperature (typically 21°C in the main room and 19°C in other rooms). Households are considered to be:
At risk of fuel poverty if they are spending 8-10%
Persistent fuel poverty is they are spending more than 10% for two consecutive years
Severe fuel poverty if they are spending more than 20%
