To produce a ‘Quids in! Special’ magazine for Bath on ways low income households can reduce the cost of running their home through minimising energy usage.

It will use the trusted Quids in! brand to influence habits and encourage savings, with clear ‘what’s in it for me?’ messages that compel the reader to take action. In its established house style, it combine a familiar-feeling tabloid approach with socially responsible content, keeping information simple, engaging and practical. Readers will save money and poverty will be alleviated home by home, while carbon emissions are reduced across B&NES.

Working with the local authority, the magazine will be distributed* to 10,000 lower income households in B&NES, targeting the wards identified as affected by child poverty and super output areas where residents are more affected by disadvantage. It will be supported by publication online and marketing to council officers, housing professionals and support agencies across the authority area.

Web content (on www.quidsinmagazine.com and www.accessgrantedbath.org) will provide further links to generic and local advice and support.New and existing partners will be involved in a unique opportunity to engage ‘hard to reach’ groups within local communities. Together it promote the principles of self-help and change beginning at home. Quids in! has a unique relationship of trust with readers and avoids talking down to them, despite promoting messages that their landlords, energy suppliers and the authorities try through conventional means, that are often treated with scepticism.

Overall the project will improve the standard of living for people in fuel poverty and other forms of hardship in the local area. We will also distribute the magazine to foodbanks, homelessness agencies and Children’s Centres to maximise its social impact.

Dry Arch Growers is a community supported agricultural project on the edge of Bathampton Village. It is run mostly by volunteers. We sell local veg boxes to 24 suppliers throughout Bath. As the project is volunteer run, they may be working in the week and not able to water the plants.

We are applying for £1,000 to set up a solar powered automatic watering system. The majority of cost is for equipment to build this. The group anticipate a saving in their water bill and that the equipment should last a minimum of 5 years. They could also be a model example of how other gardening groups or professional growers could utilise such a watering system.

This project is based in Bathampton 1 mile from the BWCE hydro facility at Bathampton Mill

This project will develop a boiler controller which is optimised to minimise running costs, energy consumption and carbon emissions of community buildings throughout the country.

This application seeks funding of £2,500 for the development of a boiler controller for Freshford Village Memorial Hall.

This investment would provide a proof of concept and the basis for a product which could be further developed for many community buildings throughout the UK and potentially elsewhere, leading to significant reductions in running costs, energy consumption and carbon emissions.

Background

Through an energy survey of Freshford Village Memorial Hall we realised that the most effective recommendation would be to improve the control of the hall’s boiler which is currently managed by a very old 24 hour mechanical timer.

The hall has a multitude of uses which creates irregular usage patterns. The heating is set to run 7 days per week between 6.30am and 10.30pm but it is not occupied for much of this time – users manage these periods of no occupancy by turning the thermostatic controls down when leaving the building and turning them up on arrival. Not only is this onerous for the users, but if the users forget the boiler could, for example, be left on all weekend with no occupancy. The booking of the hall is managed by a booking secretary via a publicly readable online google calendar.

We searched for a commercially available solution to this problem; something which integrated with an online calendar to cope with the irregular booking patterns of the hall and something with sophisticated control, including ‘optimum start’ which would automatically bring the hall up to temperature for the start of the occupancy period depending on internal and external temperatures.

Our research suggests that there are no controllers on the market which meet these requirements. It also occurred to us that this was a common requirement of most community buildings and something the market is not addressing. We therefore felt there was no alternative but to develop a bespoke boiler controller which meets our requirements and potentially those of many other community buildings.

We have already received expressions of interest from two other community buildings in the Bath area with similar requirements. It is expected the development will take place over the summer with installation and fine tuning from September 2015 at the start of the heating season.

The group believe there is a gap in the market between high volume domestic controllers which just focus on 7-day management of heating, with a single user, and much more expensive, and not cost effective commercial controllers. The ultimate objective is to provide an affordable, low-cost, flexible, easy to use product to reduce the running costs, energy consumption and carbon emissions of community buildings. A 17 page supporting project plan has been submitted.

Transition Bath currently allows residents of Bath to borrow its try-before-you-buy LED kit from Bath Central Library. The aim of the project is to encourage residents to replace their energy inefficient halogen down-lighters with LED replacements which use up to 10 times less electricity.

This funding application is to enhance this kit with an additional 4 down-lighter kits (GU10s and MR16s), plus a new kit with a wider variety of fittings. The application also includes funding for the production of a leaflet and marketing to continue to ensure the kit is well used.

The aim is to increase the volume of halogens being replaced in Bath. The kits have significant potential to make large energy savings, we estimate that if fully utilised 40 weeks of the year over the next 5 years, they have the potential to save up to 1,500,000 kWh of electricity or 400 tCO2, saving residents £170,0001 over and above the cost of purchasing the LEDs.

This is an innovative project, we believe the first such scheme in the UK and probably worldwide. The project enjoys the (non-financial) support of B&NES council and Bath Library Service.

Background

The original kit was developed during 2014 and finally installed in Bath Central Library in December and contains 40 different GU10 and MR16 down-lighters, of differing beam angles and colour temperatures. Users can borrow the kit for 1 week, try the bulbs and purchase them online. It bypasses the barriers to purchasing LEDs; the difficulty in trying to determine whether they are compatible with existing dimmers and transformers. We tested over 80 bulbs before recommending these bulbs from 4 on-line suppliers, who provide them to us for the kit as samples, provide good support and 5 year guarantees.