On Thursday 10th March we welcomed Cosy Homes Oxfordshire to an in-person event at the Spire & Spoke. 25 people listened to a talk by Geordie Stewart, retrofit coordinator and scheme manager at Cosy Homes, talk about the value of home retrofit and the services Cosy Homes offers.
Geordie’s presentation gave us some background on the importance of home retrofitting, and the benefits it can offer, including:
Improved comfort
Lower energy bills
Reduced carbon emissions
Every home is unique, even homes of the same type, size and age can perform very differently depending on how they’ve been updated over time, and the way we each live. The Cosy Homes Plan Builder is a free online tool where you can start your retrofit journey. By simply inputting your postcode, the tool allows you to customise information about your home to create an initial assessment of the possible retrofit measures – you can find the Plan Builder tool here: https://app.cosyhomesoxfordshire.org/
Cosy Homes then offers two paid services: the first is a detailed ‘whole house plan’, following on from the initial online assessment. The whole house plan is a detailed survey by a retrofit assessor, which provides a bespoke report for your home outlining retrofit options, what order to complete the works, and their likely cost. The second service from Cosy Homes is their retrofit project management: sourcing quotes and tradespeople, and project managing works.
Geordie told us about typical ‘trigger points’ – times when you might be doing other works or have significant life events which might prompt home upgrades, such as: building an extension, having a new baby, grown-up children leaving home, or long-term planned maintenance such as new windows, a new roof or a new heating system.
If you’re at a stage like this, definitely get in touch with Cosy Homes to make a whole-house plan, so you don’t miss opportunities to make easy additional upgrades from which you’ll see a long-term benefit.
Retrofit projects can take many forms, from individual measures during planned maintenance or upgrades to a whole-house deep-retrofit, where multiple retrofit measures are delivered at the same time, to create a low-energy, high-performance home.
Following the presentation there was about half an hour of questions, ranging from the need for planning permission (not typically), through the cost of an air-source heat pump (very expensive!) to the suitability of different insulation materials in loft conversations (definitely choose the wood-fibre board to avoid summer over-heating).
Thank you to Geordie for coming along to Watlington to present Cosy Homes and the importance of home retrofitting to us.
For more information about Cosy Homes Oxfordshire, please go to their website: https://cosyhomesoxfordshire.org/