Anna & Shelagh's Lewisham Retrofit Story - Making Our Home Fit for the Future
From insulation, to solar power, to heat pumps, hear Anna & Shelagh’s Lewisham retrofit story, and how they upgraded their home to be fit for the future:
A few quotes from the interview are included below:
Could you tell me a little bit about why you were first interested in making your home energy efficient?
“The 2015 light bulb moment was when I went to a conference, it was a Scientists for Global Responsibility event, and there was a speaker there from Imperial College – Professor Keith Barnum – who was talking about house heating and lighting and the use of solar.”
“And he’d written this book called the Burning Answer which you read. I read it from cover to cover… and that was a big spur, because I realised you don’t have to have south facing panels in order to have an effective solar array on your house.”
Insulating wallpaper and CorkSol
“And the other thing we’ve had done is the corksol, which is divided cork that gets sprayed onto the outside of your house, gives you 6 millimeters of insulation, in different colours and that’s also helped insulate these thin walls that are on this kitchen here.”
“It’s nothing like what you would get with a proper internal insulation, but it really takes the edge off the cold and it’s also been really good for the damp and mould…”
Heat Pump Myths
“I understood how the basics of how a heat pump worked. I’d read the research around heat pumps. I knew that… were a lot of myths about them that were just not true.”
“I knew there were a lot of myths about solar panels as well. And our direct experience contradicted all those myths that, oh, you can’t get enough electricity in cloudy times or you have to have this, or you have to have that, or it’s not worth it.
“I think in terms of the actual choosing which product we got for the heat pump, we just trusted our neighbour’s son. We’d known him since he was a little boy and we knew every single step of his education. So we knew he has properly qualified.”
“And so we just took his advice around that and we just used the product that they use.
So yeah, often that kind of peer to peer knowledge sharing is what facilitates that.”
“Which is why things like the retrofit parties or the community building around this project are so important because trusting a neighbour, trusting a friend.”
“Exactly. And a friend of ours, her neighbour, we went round to their house to have a look at their heat pump, didn’t we? We thought their house was incredibly warm and it sort of helped us in making our decision about where to site the pump.”