Latest News

Blog for Building.co.uk: Real retrofit requires real professionals

building logo

Our Managing Director, Russell Smith’s most recent blog for Building, posted 12th December 2013

Real retrofit requires real professionals; Retrofit is being dumbed down, and the results of ignorance can be disastrous

There has been a lot of rumpus recently over what makes up our energy bills. It’s surely obvious that the energy tariff actually becomes less of a priority if you are hardly using much energy in the first place. There are two factors that make up our energy bills – the tariff you pay and the kWhs you use. The tariff set by the energy company is determined by the absolute costs of energy, the costs to produce and deliver it and then the profits on top.

Whilst politicians play politics they suggest you’d best shop around to keep your bills as low as possible i.e. dealing with the tariffs. It is far more important to insulate yourself from future rises by keeping your kWh use down.

If you are in an existing property and have already optimised your energy behaviour, that means retrofit.

There has been lots of research and articles on the barriers to retrofit and I don’t intend to revisit them all here, but I would certainly like to address one barrier that comes up every time I run a retrofit workshop for professionals.

I run an exercise to list all barriers so that we can seek to address then in the training, and the ever-present is ignorance. By this they mean householders being uneducated, unaware, or uninformed. However, the more I work with householders, the more I realise this isn’t quite the issue professionals think it is….

to read the full article go to the Building website