Home Energy Parties: Helping residents create warmer, more energy-efficient homes

Last weekend, we hosted two Home Energy Parties with local residents to explore practical ways to make homes warmer, healthier and more efficient. The sessions created a welcoming, hands-on space for learning and sharing experiences around home comfort and energy use - especially helpful as they took place in real people’s homes!

We were joined by Gervase Mangwana, airtightness expert, who took us through the homes room by room. Together we learnt how to identify areas where cold air seeps in and discussed which improvements might make a real difference in energy usage and comfort.

As part of the sessions, Gervase demonstrated both air tests and thermography. He explained how the processes worked, what the results might mean and how to use these to make meaningful retrofit decisions. Being able to see the processes in action helped participants in really understanding both how heat loss occurs and how it might be remedied in a normal home.

Participants then searched for draughts and cold spots in small groups, learning to recognize signs of energy inefficiency, getting familiar with tools and building the confidence to look at their own homes in a different way

We wrapped up the session with an informal Q&A - a great opportunity to raise more specific concerns and build a collective understanding of retrofit.

Home Energy Parties - especially those guided by experts - offer a powerful way to build confidence, learn more about retrofit and create collective, community based understanding. Being able to see how homes ‘work’ in a regular, real world setting makes retrofit slightly more tangible, accessible and less intimidating for regular householders. Questions can be answered, problems discussed and solved, and in doing so these parties help empower householders to improve comfort, reduce energy use, and feel more in control of their living spaces.