About House & Carbon

Investigating how to make low-energy living accessible to more of us

Dr Simon Pardoe

Brick terraced houses in the UK © Vmorfield

The focus of House & Carbon will be on what we all need to know, as ‘common knowledge’, to ensure we can make our homes energy efficient, and avoid expensive mistakes. It’s about respecting and informing householders and busy local builders as the key decision-makers in making UK homes more energy efficient.

  • Qualified Retrofit Assessor Level 4 – The Retrofit Academy / AIM 2024

  • AECB Carbon Lite Retrofit Graduate – 2021-23

  • Qualified Domestic Energy Assessor – The Retrofit Academy / ABBE 2024

  • Qualified in the Survey & Calculation of Domestic Building Heat Loss – ABBE 2023

  • >120 hours of CPD with The Green Register, ACAN and Futurebuild – 2020-24

  • 35 years’ experience in education, training, and communicating research.

Like many in the home ‘Retrofit’ industry, I first became involved when I took over managing an extension and retrofitting of our own house, after realising problems in the quality of insulation. I then renovated and retrofitted a second.

In two very different contexts, it gave me direct experience of the challenges faced not just by householders, but also by trusted local builders.

Having worked with building professionals on and off most of my adult life (alongside a career in vocational education and research), it is evident that the demand for energy efficiency in the fabric of our homes, and the challenges to achieve it, has radically changed what every local builder needs to know.

Since 2020 when things went online, I have had the opportunity to attend over 100 hours of CPD through The Green Register, aimed at architects and builders. Those presentations, along with the annual Futurebuild event, have been a unique opportunity to hear directly from leading experts in the field, and hear the priorities and solutions they advocate, and their own passion and ongoing learning.

I realise now that what I had needed for our own home retrofit and extension, was to understand some of the core principles of retrofit, so that I could make better informed decisions and intervene with more confidence when things were not right.

In fact, if I had known then what I know now, we would have requested a completely different plan, at lower cost. And if we had done so, I can confidently say that we'd be paying lower energy bills now.

It seems vital that more of us in the UK can achieve comfort, healthy air, lower energy bills and lower carbon emissions in our houses. That is basic, and should not be rocket science, even with the chaos of government funding. Comfort and low bills should not be a privilege for the few who can afford the costs and risks. But with so much confusing information online, visible failures in the news, and a shared past experience of building work, many of us would justifiably prefer to wait.

Inspired by the optimism in The Green Register presentations, and having qualified as a ‘Carbon Lite’ graduate with The AECB, in the last year I took the opportunity to focus on qualifying formally.

I have qualified as a Retrofit Assessor (ABBE Level 4 with The Retrofit Academy). As the required first step, I qualified as a Domestic Energy Assessor (to produce Energy Performance Certificates using the Elmhurst software). I also qualified in Domestic Heat Loss Survey & Calculation (ABBE Level 3 with Stroma-Cert).

As a Retrofit Assessor I want to be able to offer householders a genuinely useful assessment of their home, and if they are interested, some of the core principles of retrofit as they apply to the home. It is what I needed, and I think we all need, to equip us to understand what is possible, identify priorities, engage with the retrofit process, and demand quality from professionals.

That goal is also at the core of PAS 2035, as the framework for UK retrofit. It demands a whole-house approach, and a focus on accessible advice, and working with the householder to prioritise, and to review the work. Above all it demands that:

The role of the Retrofit Coordinator shall be to identify, protect and document both the client’s interest and the public interest. (6.1.3)

For the UK to achieve the goals on energy efficient buildings, this would seem vital. Any retrofit that is not in the client’s interest, and the public interest, surely wastes resources, wastes an opportunity, and can damage homes and lives.

In the homeowner sector, the ‘client’ or householder is a key decision-maker. They have valuable knowledge of the home, and need to know what is possible. They (we) need the confidence that it will be achieved, before going ahead. Ultimately they (we) bear the real costs of every gap in performance, by enduring the financial costs and disruption, but then continuing to pay high energy bills, perhaps with added damp, and then one day having to pay for it all to be undone and redone properly. That scenario prompts justifiable caution.

My interest in this House & Carbon project is that I believe the core principles of retrofit (the whole house approach, fabric first, airtightness, ventilation, etc.) are things most of us as householders could understand. We have seen how one job done badly creates three more, so we already know about unintended consequences and how everything impacts on everything else. That too is a shared life experience that justifies caution.

The challenge for building professionals, and for those training a new generation of retrofit professionals, is to change the story. To drive that change, I believe has to include making some core principles of retrofit become common knowledge.

We have seen that when specialist knowledge becomes common knowledge, and even becomes ‘common sense’, there can be a kind of sea change. There is no longer any excuse for professionals not to know it and pursue it. (I’m thinking of the politicians and business leaders who like to describe how it was their kids who made them realise how things need to change.)

A builder who perhaps routinely leaves a half inch gap around the insulation to make it easy to fit, will change habits fast when his colleagues, the householder and even his kids regard airtightness and thermal bypass as common sense. But he may not change the practices of a lifetime if they just seems like specialist stuff, or a tedious regulation, or something for those fresh out of college.

So could retrofit principles become ‘common knowledge’? My belief that as ordinary people - householders and local builders - we can get our heads around them, comes from my own background in vocational education and training, working with adults and young people with little or no previous educational success. I believe it too from running UK public consultations on complex technical issues, and from communicating university research to those who might use it.

So my focus in the House & Carbon project will be on that ‘common knowledge’, on what we all need to know to ensure we can make our homes energy efficient, and avoid expensive mistakes. To put it another way, it’s about respecting and informing householders and busy local builders as key decision-makers in making UK homes more energy efficient.

I hope to use the practical work as a Retrofit Assessor, along with interviews and collaborations, to offer more people a way in to understanding the core principles, current thinking, and practical challenges of retrofitting our homes.

Of course, there is already lots of solution-selling retrofit information online, and sites with ‘behaviour tips’ for householders. It is a crowded field. So to create a useful addition requires it to be independent, respectful, accessible, conceptual, very practical and a good listen. There are many good independent sources, but maybe not quite with this focus or this intended audience. So it’s an interesting challenge.

I am based in Manchester, Lancashire and South Cumbria.

If that interests you, please get in touch, comment, or just subscribe. Updates will be on this website.

Best wishes.

Simon

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Further information

Links to things I have mentioned:

Many of the seminars and courses I have attended are run by The Green Register (TGR), and by the Association for Environment Conscious Building (AECB), and I would highly recommend them for building professionals.

The CarbonLite Retrofit Foundation and Coordination courses are offered by the AECB. Retrofit training and qualifications are available for example from the Retrofit Academy, including to train as a Retrofit Assessor and/or Coordinator, part-funded by the Department for Energy, Security and Net Zero (DfESNZ).

The annual Futurebuild event in London offers multiple parallel streams of seminars on every aspect of energy efficient building, and seems unmissable.

The 2016 'Each Home Counts' review was a starting point of the current UK policy change. It's readable, interesting and available online.

The TrustMark scheme that underpins current retrofit policy, and offers homeowners some limited links to approved Retrofit coordinators and other building professionals, is at https://www.trustmark.org.uk/homeowners

The new PAS 2035 framework is a "Publicly Available Specification" (PAS) called "Retrofitting dwellings for improved energy efficiency”. It can be downloaded free from https://www.bsigroup.com/en-GB/standards/pas-2035-2030/.

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Investigating how to make energy-efficient living and comfort achievable by more of us.

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NW England. Hill walking. 2 ducks. Retrofit survivor. Enjoys investigating, communicating and achieving more through collaboration.