36 PROJECT REPORT: SOCIAL HOUSING


Before


improvements  chie y insulation  were at the core of the measures which Karbon undertook, including fi tting eternal wall insulation (EWI), as well as cavity, loft and under oor insulation. owever, the latter saw some unusual innovation in the social housing sector, using a robot to install it and thereby minimise disruption to tenants.


As well as insulation, the project also included reroofi ng many of the properties, and adding PV panels to assist in reducing their carbon footprint. PV has been added to help reduce fuel bills and support “grid resilience” for the homes, however the team had to demonstrate that all fabric options had been eplored fi rst. The u windows across the schemes still had a considerable life left in them, so replacement was not required. The scheme comprised a miture of bungalows and houses with cavity walls, and a variety of heating methods from gas to solid fuel – some even had air source heat pumps. Before the project, the homes’ EPC energy performance ranged from D to F. A number of the properties are in rural locations, and in an area where residents have a  likelihood of eperiencing fuel poverty.


BACKGROUND


Karbon Homes formed in 2017 as a merger between three north east housing associations, and now owns and manages close to 30,000 homes across the North


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East and Yorkshire. The overall Karbon Group it belongs to spans beyond further across Yorkshire; as far as Leeds to the west and Hull to the east. The Group also includes 54 North Homes, which formed at the end of 2022 with the merger of two housing associations, Leeds & Yorkshire ousing and eisting subsidiary of the Karbon Group, York Housing Association. Karbon Homes covers a wide range of social housing properties, from those in dense urban areas, to others in very rural communities. One of the organisation’s key aims is to “shape strong and sustainable communities,” and this energy retrofi t proect is a striking eample of that goal in action, by enabling people to have energy resilience for the long term. As it embarked on the project, Karbon had a big learning curve in terms of not only the right energy effi ciency measures to approach, but fi rstly ust to gather a large amount of data on the condition and need of its properties. As Craig Lonsdale, asset and sustainability manager at Karbon Homes told Housebuilder and Developer, “we spent a lot of time analysing all of our homes from an energy perspective.” David Milburn, head of investment at arbon omes eplains that the two schemes – at Ouston, an urban location in hesterleStreet, and a rural street in Otterburn in Northumberland, were “very different.” Despite their differences, both schemes had suffered similar energy


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