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BACKGROUND

Together Housing Group is one of the country’s largest social landlords, owning and managing over 36,000 homes, primarily in Yorkshire and Lancashire. Key concentrations of properties are found in Blackburn with Darwen, Calderdale, Pendle and Rossendale.

The housing association has installed external wall insulation to benefit 68 families in the Calderdale village of Illingworth. This project is part of Together Housing’s plan to invest £120 million in green energy projects in its communities and move fully away from fossil fuels by 2035.

So far, it has completed more than 3,000 renewable energy projects as it looks to halve its operational carbon impact by 2030.

ACTION

Residents living in four blocks of low-rise flats in Illingworth near Halifax are benefitting from external wall insulation (EWI), designed to create warmer, efficient homes with lower energy bills.

Each property benefitted from an additional 100mm of sustainable, non-combustible, and thermally efficient insulation, before a thin self-cleaning render was applied to give them a whole new look. The project could help to save each flat, on average, £169 a year on the energy bill. This is an environmental saving of, on average, 900kg of CO2 a year.

The initial works took around six weeks to complete and has improved each flat’s Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) from a D rating to at least EPC C rating.

The properties will also switch from gas central heating to renewable energy sources like solar panels and heat pumps in the future to further reduce their carbon impact and help to save on energy costs.

IMPACT

One of the residents who benefitted from the works last year was 72-year old Harold Hebblewhite, who said at the time:

PATRICK BERRY, DIRECTOR OF TOGETHER NET ZERO, SAID:

“We have quite a lot of homes which are non-traditional builds with little or no insulation. They can be quite expensive to heat and expensive to bring up to our standard.

The way they’re built means we have to think differently about the way we insulate them and thanks to this funding from the government we’ve been able to work with our partners to identify our homes most in need and provide low-carbon solutions to help them operate efficiently. And through changing the heating systems and making a significant impact on the aesthetics of older buildings like this, we’re really making a difference.”

LESSONS LEARNT

Improved understanding of financial reporting, costs and underspends. This was the first project for Together Net Zero delivering EWI to a block so there was no frame of reference of the cost. There was an overestimation of costs and therefore the project was left with a large underspend. It is difficult to track costs on block work as opposed to a traditional house, this caused a delay in reporting the underspend as the anticipated large final bill simply didn’t arrive. Together now have a much more accurate idea of costs along the EWI journey – including administration and ancillary costs – how they are spread and what they are likely to cost from the outset.

Approvals from the electricity distribution network operator for an ASHP application do not necessarily mean that it is possible to install an ASHP. It is best to do a further study of the mains cables going into the block and the individual fuses in the properties.

Where there is a valid EPC D or below at the time of grant approval; and circumstances have changed between then and the retrofit assessments being done, it is better to use an energy performance report, so as to not override the valid EPC.

FUTURE PLANS

Together Housing’s future plans from the SHDF Wave 1 project are to deliver an SHDF Wave 2 project. The housing association secured £9.6 million in funding with a further £9.6 million co-funding secured to deliver fabric measures to 2,237 homes across the North of England. This includes 2,006 properties receiving light retrofit measures such as cavity wall, underfloor and loft insulation, 77 ‘off-grid’ properties receiving air source heat pumps with associated insulation measures and a direct continuation of the Wave 1 scheme with the EWI element being scaled up from 68 properties to 154 properties. They are also tackling blocks with more intricacies such as planning, boundary issues and access issues.