Energy Efficiency in Community Buildings

Tackling heat loss and energy efficiency in community buildings, Surefoot working in collaboration with HeatHack is delighted to announce confirmation of an Ingenious Public Engagement Award from the Royal Academy of Engineering.
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Surefoot has been awarded £29,600 for this project which will run from May 2022 through July 2023. Surefoot associate Jean Carletta had the inspiration for this project and successfully bid for the opportunity with the Royal Academy of Engineering.  

Project Overview - Important but challenging buildings
For this project, a small team of people from across Surefoot and HeatHack will be working together to deliver a programme that will help churches and community buildings across Scotland understand what a net zero future means for their premises.
 
Overall, the project will deliver the programme to 40 small groups involved in running church and community premises from across Scotland.
These important community spaces are difficult to move to Net Zero. BUT they are some of the hardest buildings to manage because they are traditionally built, often listed, and not designed to modern heating requirements!
This Surefoot project has two main objectives:

• To help property managers and building users understand how heating and heat loss in these spaces work now and could work in the future
• To collect the data that energy efficiency consultants and conservation architects need to be confident about how to retrofit them

It will help participants to not just understand energy efficiency and thermal comfort in difficult buildings, but also to think about how their buildings should be used in their local contexts and how to make this change happen.

Project Process
HeatHack’s volunteer engineers will work with church and community groups to help them understand the basic principles behind thermal modelling and apply them to their own spaces.

The programme combines some technical learning and engineering investigation of the premises and heating and ventilation systems with Surefoot’s hallmark facilitation approach.
 
Under the engineers’ guidance, each group will complete four two-hour exercises in their buildings over the course of a year. They will also be equipped with devices to capture temperature data from their buildings.
Participants will explore how heating systems work, heat loss, thermal comfort and possible future changes to their buildings in the drive to Net Zero.

Importantly, the process includes how best to bring people along with enabling change as the groups then plan and hold a community consultation showcasing their learning.

This project will change the futures of some important buildings and create a culture in which communities remember to seek out and value the engineers who live among them. Open content materials will be produced for wider circulation.

Registrations open in early June 2022 with the first groups starting in September. Please Contact HeatHack for more information.
 
More about HeatHack
HeatHack is a group of volunteers working on an interesting question:  how can we make Scotland’s community spaces comfortable on less energy use?  

Over the years, HeatHack has developed techniques for:

• teaching building managers and users how core concepts like thermal comfort and heat loss apply to their buildings, including how daily multi-purpose use might change how the building feels
• diagnosing heating system faults, including problems with the choice of end user controls
• monitoring temperature and relative humidity cheaply and with low skill required
• assessing heat loss and exploring the likely effects of possible mitigations

HeatHack’s work empowers the volunteers who manage community buildings to have the right conversations with the professionals they engage, leading to better building outcomes.
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The Surefoot Effect CIC is a Community Interest Company that helps communities, businesses and governments put sustainability and resilience at the heart of what they do. Our approach encourages people to explore their emotions, motivations and behaviours and to make positive changes for themselves and their communities.