National Housing Maintenance Forum
Setting the standards for repairs and maintenance
Relish: Involving the community in reducing energy consumption
Relish stands for ‘Residents 4 Low Impact Sustainable Homes’. This 12 month pilot was set up in March 09 to prove how a pragmatic and cost effective approach to retrofitting can not only meet the decent home standard, but also contribute to the government’s sustainability and fuel poverty agendas.
From the outset, the residents’ experience has been at the heart of this initiative, helping to evaluate the most effective ways to reduce energy use and fuel poverty in social housing through:
? Residents: working together with their landlord, making simple day to day changes that will reduce their energy use.
? Low Impact: ensuring each home is refurbished in a way that minimises their energy use, optimising the benefits of low cost, affordable and sensible improvements.
? Sustainable Homes: promoting lifestyle habits, relevant for each household, which deliver long term beneficial outcomes for families, monitored through their own updateable household energy rating.
Relish is not just another retrofit project!
Relish goes further than decent homes– showing residents how, through an initiative designed to reduce ‘fuel hungry’ homes, they can optimise the benefits for themselves.
The Relish partners, Worthing Homes (landlord), Fairthorn Farrell Timms (surveyors) and Rydon (contractor) set out to quantify the impact of the project on CO2 emissions and fuel poverty in residential properties by:
Authors of this article
Jeff Henton
Refurbishment Director for Rydon Property Maintenance
Colin Farrell
Senior Partner for Faithorn Farrell Timms
Robin Roberts
Property Services Director for Worthing Homes
This article first appeared in the 2010 bulletin publication.
Read the original publication here
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