RIFF is demonstrating value for money and immediate replicability by retrofitting two properties on the same street in the village of Beausale in Warwickshire. Both houses are owned by Warwick District Council and are currently occupied by two different families. They are identical in layout and construction, each having three bedrooms and a total heated floor area of around 80m2. These homes were selected as typical examples of the rural house type found in Warwickshire and across the UK, where rural properties comprise around 20% of the total social housing stock. Rural properties are notoriously hard to treat and expensive to heat since they are often off the gas network and tend to be poorly insulated, often with solid brick walls.
Storage heater
The two houses in Beausale are both off the gas network and are heated electrically, one by night storage heaters and the other by an inline electric boiler feeding wet radiators. The properties have filled cavity walls but we noticed that bricks bridge the cavity gap at regular intervals and the width of the gap is only around 20mm, so they are only slightly better than a solid wall and there is no insulation in the solid ground floors. The windows were recently replaced and the loft insulation topped up, so both lofts and windows meet current Building Regulation standards.
The Challenges of Retrofitting Existing Homes
Discussions with Warwick District Council and with our tenants identified one of the biggest challenges of this and similar projects as being the need to decant tenants while refurbishment work is carried out. We therefore proposed a non-invasive solution, carefully developed so that tenants could remain in their homes throughout the project. This will save money and time because there is no need to co-ordinate or finance a re-homing schedule. It also means that scale up of our solution is easier to implement since work can be completed on a group of houses at the same time, rather than at a time that fits around a re-homing schedule.
We also identified cost as being a major barrier and our non-invasive solution demonstrates cost-effectiveness by proposing to renovate two homes with the available funding, rather than just one. And we present no hidden costs since there is none associated with decanting tenants or with the type of redecoration work that is usually required with some of the more invasive retrofit options.
Planning is key and social housing providers often find it difficult to balance the demands of local councillors who are always pressing for work to be carried out in their own constituency. Our proposal presents a retrofit toolkit that is split into four distinct modules: Together they form a whole house retrofit kit, but each could be considered separately to enable a staged renovation plan in homes across a good spread of constituencies.
