Home Energy Made Easy

The project builds on four years of partnership working between Cumbria Action for Sustainability (CAfS), People Powered Retrofit, Cumbrian community groups and local vetted installers, to make home energy improvements more accessible and less daunting for households.

Working with volunteer sustainability groups, they will continue to engage local people at Solar Made Easy events around the county. At these events, local vetted partner installers answer questions about solar PV systems, and CAfS then facilitate quotes and support households through to installation. Alongside this, the project will launch ‘Heat Pumps Made Easy’ using the same replicable delivery model, adding expert energy modelling to assess whether people’s homes are heat pump ready.

Their partnership working with sustainability groups also extends into delivering free thermal imaging surveys in their local communities. The project will continue to train and support volunteers to use thermal imaging to raise awareness of where homes are leaking heat, and to advise households how CAfS can support them to address it. This support starts with home energy modelling, continues through design and specification stages and ends with support during installation.

To help more people overcome the barriers to retrofit, the project will also deliver a number of webinars about home energy and renewables plus a series of ‘pop-up’ home energy advice sessions around the county.