A day of firsts!
Today was a day of firsts for the Chessel Street store – we hosted our first community meeting & Emma was a speaker & panellist at her first public event!
Transition BS3 held their monthly planning meeting in the shop, followed up by an interactive slide show & discussion on safe road cycling practices by Veronica Pollard of Lifecycle & Transition BS3.
Meanwhile Emma was at the CREATE Centre taking part in the “Eco Renovate your Home” event. The event started with humourous & informative presentations by Dave Hampton (the ‘Carbon Coach’) & Lucy Pedler (local eco architect & founder of the Green Register) looking at why we should (or shouldn’t) eco renovate existing houses, and talking through the experiences, successes & problems of their own eco renovation projects. It was surprising, and a bit daunting, to learn that both Dave and Lucy had had difficulties with their tradesmen, despite both having years of experience ‘in the trade’. Both houses are large detached family homes and each had different issues to address but for both Dave and Lucy their primary focus was on minimising the energy use of their house by insulating everywhere they could. Dave also set out a series of reasons, from saving money, dealing with peak oil and trying to ensure a future for our grandchildren, to try and persuade us of the importance of taking action on our homes. Lucy’s presentation focused on the details of what they decided to do and how they did it, including before, during & after photos.
Emma then spoke of her own current project, eco renovating a Bristol terrace on a tight budget & with relatively little experience of managing or coordinating tradespeople. With limited knowledge of running such a project, Emma has relied on building strong relationships with very local contractors, and explaining what she is trying to achieve all along the way. Emma’s presentation highlighted the realities of undertaking the management of such a project yourself. There is definitely a ‘price’ to be paid for living on site and being responsible for all the details & coordinating everything. The more time you can put in the more you can ensure you are getting what you intended. Equally, the more time you take to explain yourself and get to know your contractors, the easier it gets because you create a teaml working towards a common goal.
The last part of the event was a 45min Q&A session, and Mark Letcher (Carbon Works) joined Dave, Lucy & Emma on the panel to try and answer the audience’s questions. There were several issues in common across the audience, mostly about being confused about which changes were the priorities to have the most impact on our homes’ energy use and about how to select the right materials and methods of insulation for specific property construction types – the main thing to come out of it all seemed to be that we need to get stuck in and learn a lot more about the technicalities of how our houses ‘work’ in terms of air tightness (air quality, renewal & circulation) and breathability (how our house handles moisture & humidity and what impact it has on the physical fabric of our house). I’m off to learn more about the ‘dew point’ of a space …
One Response to “A day of firsts!”
Oh, and our first blog post!