UK GOLD AWARD WINNERS
Radian, Southeast England
Radian won a 2011 Ashden Award for its achievement in retrofitting hard-to-treat homes to save energy and building new homes to high environmental standards.
Background Reducing energy use and CO2 emissions from homes is a key challenge for the UK in the coming decade – in 2008, about 30% of all UK energy use was in the domestic sector. Of the UK’s 27 million homes, over eight million were built before 1945, and over four million before 1919; unless they have been retrofitted, these homes have very low levels of energy efficiency. Although new build homes are much more energy efficient than the average for the UK housing stock, they are still some way off from being ‘zero carbon’.
Of the UK’s total housing stock, over 4.8 million are in the social housing sector, with just over half being managed by housing associations and the rest by local authorities. All social housing has to meet the Decent Homes standard, but this can be achieved while still having relatively poor energy efficiency. The majority of homes owned by social landlords were not built recently, and require significant retrofitting to bring them up to a good standard of energy efficiency. Radian is leading the way in demonstrating how this retrofitting can be achieved within the budget of housing associations and other social housing providers, even though rents are set nationally.
The organisation Radian is a housing association operating in Southeast England. It was formed in 2006, from the merger of similarly sized Swaythling Housing, Parkside Housing and Drum Housing as equal partners. Radian owns around 16,000 homes, providing accommodation for over 43,000 residents, and has some responsibility for the upkeep of a further 1,500 leasehold flats within blocks that it owns. It has 650 staff and in 2010 had an income of £105 million.
Radian’s primary focus is to provide its residents with good homes and service, and it sees sustainability as a core feature of this. Improving the sustainability of its housing stock can improve the quality of life for residents by reducing fuel bills, improving thermal comfort and enabling them to choose more environmentally friendly lifestyles.
The programme The constituent housing associations that joined to form Radian had been working to improve energy efficiency since 1996, but the pace has increased in recent years with the pressure of rising fuel prices and concern over climate change. By efficiently managing its housing stock and operations, Radian is able to allocate sufficient resources to continually upgrade the energy efficiency of its older housing, and ensure that new housing is built to high environmental standards.
Radian uses contractors to construct new homes, but carries out most of the retrofit and maintenance work using its own direct labour organisation, Radian Services, and brings in contractors where necessary. Two different methods of retrofitting to improve energy efficiency are used by Radian. The first is to include the retrofit within the planned maintenance programme, replacing windows, boilers, etc. with more efficient versions as they reach the end of their lives. The second method is to carry out an intensive ‘whole house’ retrofit, where all the work needed to bring a home up to a high standard of energy efficiency is done over the course of a couple of months.
The latter approach clearly requires a larger one-off expenditure, and the residents must also be relocated while the work is carried out, but the advantage is that the home will then need no further work for many years. Radian selects which approach to use according to the current state of the housing, available finances and the wishes of the residents.
The technology How does it work? For older homes that need retrofitting, Radian plans projects to use the most cost-effective measures, progressively adding the less cost-effective ones until the desired energy efficiency is achieved. Homes with solid walls are classed as ‘hard-to-treat’, and these are surveyed with a thermal imaging camera before and after retrofitting, to ensure the best measures are not just selected but also correctly installed. Radian also undertakes pre- and post-retrofit air tightness testing
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CASE STUDY
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