Home remedy

The wind is howling down a Victorian terrace in Whitehall but inside Maddy Longhurst’s rented home it’s warm. At the kitchen table, lead energy tracer Boycee is syncing up an iPhone and a tablet and fitting a top-of-the-range thermal imaging camera not much bigger than a nine-volt battery into the charging slot. His colleague Kirk McLean brings in a bag of equipment and begins to set up a large fan. They will soon examine every inch of Maddy’s home to give her a hyper-detailed view of where energy is lost when she turns the heating on.

Boycee, Kirk and Maddy all work for the grassroots Cold Homes Energy Efficiency Survey Experts (CHEESE) Project, a community interest company that has been running in Bristol since 2014. The project’s founder is Mike Andrews, an engineer who spent two decades at the BBC making films about science and the natural world, and who, in 1991, was amongst the first television producers to broach the subject of climate change in his series The Birth of Europe.

Later inspired by local direct-action environmental groups, Mike set up the CHEESE Project and received money from Bristol’s Green Capital funding pot in 2015. Initially Mike imagined creating a Google Maps-style thermal sweep over the city to visualise the energy being lost, but fellow director Brian Harper, a thermal imaging expert, convinced him that the better option was to get inside individual homes.

Lead energy tracer Boycee searches for gaps in the seals of the door that could be letting heat out

The specialist surveys take around two hours, and to date more than 200 have been conducted for householders all over the city, from housing association tenants to homeowners in some of Bristol’s grandest mansions. “The great thing is that it works, and people do take the remedial action,” Mike says – three quarters within a month of the survey. “People are fascinated and inspired by the surveys, and it leads to very cost-effective remedies.”

While Maddy ushers Henderson the rabbit out from under the table and out into the garden, Kirk rigs up a tarpaulin to fill the open back door and sticks the fan through it. This will draw some of the air in the house out, turning places where hot air would usually escape into inlets for cold outside air that can be captured using the thermal imaging camera.

Boycee – an eco-builder who lives in Whitchurch and volunteers with the CHEESE Project four days a week – grasps the iPhone carefully and leads Kirk and Maddy upstairs to start the tour in the back bedroom. It’s a room she says is always cold, and Boycee immediately finds that the window is missing a couple of catches that would keep it firmly closed: rummage through a skip or find some old windows on Gumtree to salvage the clips is his down-to-earth advice.

He runs the camera around the window frame and it glows purple-black amongst the warm oranges of the rest of the wall. Holding a tablet, which is linked up to the phone using technology developed by CHEESE Project’s third director, Jeremy Birch, Maddy can see everything that Boycee sees, including temperature data. His running commentary is also recorded into a video that Maddy will receive at the end of the survey.

Volunteers are trained to use the state-of-the-art surveying equipment, which is then taken into individual homes

The video is a vital piece of information. Having it means she can watch it back for extra detail when it comes to taking remedial action herself – lagging the bathroom pipes and making a draught excluder for the front door – and use it as evidence when reporting anything more major to her landlord – investigating a damp crack in the bedroom ceiling and taking the render off the bay window to properly insulate the front of the house.

“We want the layman with zero knowledge to be able to do this for absolutely as cheap as possible,” Boycee says as he stands at the kitchen table once again and downloads the video onto a memory stick. “It’s all about making sure people are warm and comfortable in their own home for less than or the same money that they are spending now.”

Though Maddy works for the CHEESE Project, organising the surveys to happen for others, she says the experience of having her own home surveyed has been eye-opening. “Not knowing how bad it is can be a burden,” she says. “You get stuck in inertia when you think the worst.

“It’s been really great spending that time on the survey. The thoroughness and dialogue are really important, as well as the involvement you can have. You’re not waiting for it to be over and you get told what they find at the end. Instead, you’re watching it on the tablet and you’re right there. It’s handing over that knowledge and expertise that it would be hard to find elsewhere.”

CHEESE Project surveys cost from £75, but households with low incomes can apply to have it done for free. Find out more at www.cheeseproject.co.uk

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