‘An analysis of housing stock by the Resolution Foundation has found nearly half (48%) of the poorest fifth of English households have homes liable to get too hot – three times as many as among the richest fifth (17%).’
#SocialHousing
#SocialInequality
#Retrofit
#OverHeating
#Heatwave
TIL my house has a built in summer storage heater.
Bay window is tiled and filled with single skin of brick. 33c at 11pm at night!
At the time of reading room temp was 26c and outside 21c.
I'll eventually have these bricks out and filled with couple hundred millimetres of insulation.
I can imagine the stress for a conscientious, caring individual. Only because I've had to deal with a #retrofit from the point of view of a tenant (the person for whom I care).
The lack of care, the complaining to the local authority to obtain redress, the lack of care of the people who were supposedly remedying the mess... The stress went on and on.
Hoping today is going well for you.
I have spent last 18mths or so working for a company that claimed to provide #retrofit property services to local authorities and housing associations.
We helped these organisations spend their government grants through paying subcontractors to do the actual work.
It’s the most inefficient and shoddy way to do retrofit.
But today I left.
The company I worked for (which had shareholders) was taken over by a bigger property services company owned by a private equity firm.
Yay capitalism!
And if all this is true of the #retrofit industry, it must be the case across many other sectors too.
Neoliberalism fosters this notion that the private sector can be trusted to deliver, while the authority of the state to have direct and effective oversight of work is constantly eroded.
We are collectively paying more than ever for very poor delivery.
From 40 years experience we as a nation know privatisation is the emperor’s new clothes. It just enriches shareholders and delivers nothing.
I believe as a nation as have to take #retrofit seriously.
Around 25% of UK current carbon emissions come from domestic properties. We have the worst housing stock in Northern Europe. It kills around 10,000 a year in winter from being so drafty and expensive to heat…and kills a further 10,000 in summer from overheating.
But how we go about retrofitting our nation’s homes at scale and pace matters too.
I had my final day in my old job today!
I’m so relieved. I hadn’t realised quite how unhappy it had made me until I left this afternoon.
By the end I felt a complete fraud. Private companies managing subcontractors to install for local authorities and housing associations under bureaucratic government funding regulations is a costly and inefficient way to do #retrofit. But until you’ve experienced it, you don’t know how broken the system is, so I don’t regret it.
Because it’s rare to see #retrofit / #sustainability jokes…and I like xkcd:
Alt Text: ‘A covertly-installed Neighbour-Source Heat Pump takes advantage of the fact your neighbour keeps their house cool in the summer and warm in the winter’. Image of two houses, one with a heat pump and then pipes underground leading to the other, extending up the walls in a loop system.
As someone who works in #retrofit in the UK on social housing projects, I’ve come to realise that persuading residents to have these upgrades, even when they are free, is a selling job. That job is best done by an early adopter who is a neighbour/friend.
I found this article encouraging, in that it acknowledges there are economies of scale, but you don’t need 100% buy in from the whole block to make significant progress.
Bring on the street parties!
Retrofitting homes for net zero - report
Energy Security and Net Zero Committee
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5901/cmselect/cmesnz/453/report.html
Les #Twingo #rétrofit de #Lormauto ne prendront finalement pas la route.
Plutôt que de produire inlassablement des #voitures neuves, Lormauto voulait transformer d’anciennes #Renault Twingo 1 thermiques pour leur redonner une nouvelle jeunesse en #électrique. Le projet n’aboutira finalement pas.
https://www.numerama.com/vroom/1973951-les-twingo-retrofit-de-lormauto-ne-prendront-finalement-pas-la-route.html
‘Equipping new homes with heat pumps, solar panels and high-grade insulation at the time of construction would have cost between £5,000 and £8,500 for most of the period since 2016.
Housebuilders, however, have long claimed building to such standards would be prohibitively expensive.’
Europe manages to do this, even US have higher rate of take up of heat pumps than UK.
It’s a dirty race to the bottom in the UK because of lobbying.
A #WealthTax to support a comprehensive #insulation and #retrofit programme would be very welcome…but I would say that as I work to insulate social housing.
My concern is that any huge sum raised needs to be spent in such a way that it makes real impact on homes and is delivered well and at pace. That requires a skilled, dedicated workforce and less fragmentation and bureaucracy around the finance and process of it.
But that would require a serious look at the class tensions of the industry.
#Farage thinks he can create DOGE style cuts at UK local authority level to remove those working in relation to #ClimateCrisis and diversity.
As the article suggests, there is not much left to cut.
Curious whether it will it include those working on social housing #retrofit decarbonisation projects?
https://www.europesays.com/2016014/ Taking flight: How Air New Zealand brokered its Dreamliner revamp deal amid Covid lockdowns #7879 #after #air #Airline #Amid #Boeing #brokered #covid #covid19 #crises #deal #Dreamliner #escalating #flight #grounded #how #ITS #lockdowns #new #NewZealand #overcome #programme #retrofit #revamp #taking #under #wave #zealand
Many institutions and companies don’t invest in solar pv because they think it will take decades to recover the cost…but really they are missing a trick.
#Norwich University of the Arts have just had a big install (186 panels) that is projected to pay for itself within just 7 years.
I spend about a third of my day typically talking about #ventilation. It’s the least sexy part of #retrofit, but it’s vital if you increase insulation.
I got into this industry because I care about carbon emissions, lowering fuel bills…but also I hate what mould and damp does to people’s homes and lungs.
Condensation sounds less scary than black mould…but that’s what this article is really about preventing!
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2025/jan/28/how-to-reduce-condensation-in-your-home
I believe we need a civil service, but what Bingham says about BEIS rings very true in my experience of it from a completely different field of #retrofit, for which it also had responsibility.
How do we get the civil service we actually need?
This is an important question because it really matters at times of crisis…and climate breakdown is just as bigger crisis as #Covid, if not more so.
But if they have had bothered to get this far into the article they would have seen a graph that makes it clear to the public, mainstream media how much the #retrofit industry was cut to its knees by #Tory decision to ‘cut the green crap’
Loft and cavity wall insulations fell off a cliff between 2012 and 2013. Without the government putting in funding for these measures the industry withered away. We are having to start over…and #Labour are sadly all just talk. The reality is more of the same.
I did something to amuse myself last night. I decided to post this story about how bad the situation is in the UK in terms of our cold, drafty homes that leave people in debt trying to heat them…to LinkedIn.
Most of my connections on there are people working in the #retrofit industry. People who profess to care about #insulation and improving the energy efficiency of homes.
Tumbleweed.
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/heating-uk-home-winter-insulation-cold-191422173.html?
Arno roule 
