Bethan Gritten's Page

Have you seen this? http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2011/apr/12/energy-use-households-monitor-electricity

Might be interesting.

Hi Bethan

Thanks for you message to the SDN group.

I've been privileged over the past couple of years to be working with some of the communities which received funding from DECC's Low Carbon Communities Challenge. 

The is a huge amount of experience now in these communities about supporting and catalysing behaviour change and about which technologies seem to have worked best in different circumstances.

A lot of those communities are also members of the Low Carbon Communities Network.

So if you haven't already, check out the sources and resources on those two sites, and get in touch directly with places like Hook Norton and Chale Green to talk with their active people.

Good luck with this!

Penny

Hi Bethan, I saw your request for support for your North Wales project. I've been trying to do something similar with my own home and lifestyle. I don't claim this is best practice, but some learnings would be:

- To keep it simple and track most of the likely changes you would make, you can focus on domestic electricity and fuel (gas, oil, others), plus car fuel. These are easy to quantify and to convert to CO2 content.

- You also have to decide whether you consider it OK to buy electricity on a renewable contract - some argue this adds impetus to for generators to invest to "green the grid," others say it makes no difference (certainly in the short term) to the actual balance of power generation.

- If you want to be more sophisticated include other forms of travel, water consumption (because water utilities are themselves big power consumers), and embedded carbon in bought items (from day to day groceries to construction materials). But it's harder to measure these things and it may be simpler to apply rules of thumb about maximising public transport use, local food sources etc.

- It's harder to retrofit old houses to be energy efficient, than to build new ones (or even retrofit relatively new ones). This is driven by physical design and materials, and sometimes by planning constraints. Assuming your group have a variety of buildings, you may want to focus on CO2 reduction rather than absolute levels, because different people's homes will have very different potential.

- Real-time information makes a real difference to behaviour. We have a real time electricity meter in the kitchen and it does drive us to go and check what is switched on and makes us aware of the relative consumption of different appliances. The real time fuel consumption meter in the car is even better because you can use your right foot accordingly!

I hope that's some help - good luck and please do share your learnings!