Loft Insulation
Almost all homes in Peckham could save money on their fuel bills with extra loft insulation. Very few homes have the recommended 27cm of glass wool insulation. However, insulating your loft isn't as easy as it first sounds. We at Peckham Power hope to make loft insulation easier.
We're currently discussing the best way to approach the challenge of improving the loft insulation in Peckham whilst ensuring that lofts can still be used for storage and minimising the risk of condensation.
A concise summary of the motivations behind the project from Anna (PP Trustee and one of the driving forces behind it):
[You might] ask "why not choose an easier problem to start with?". The problem is that loft insulation is the "easy" problem, no? If you think of any of the other measures we need to implement in our homes - solid wall insulation, air source heat pumps, solar thermal, whatever - those are even more difficult. And equally complex (= dynamic, interactive, with many different levels of scale etc). Moreover, I see the attempt to address people's behaviour outside of their physical environment entirely misplaced; there really is a limit to what you can do given that the available loft insulation schemes for instance don't address the reality of people's lives or the physicality of their buildings.
Given that the govt is now prepared to accept that the likes of Tesco and M&S will roll-out loft insulation en masse, one might ask "why bother?". The answer is that [a] both Tesco and M&S are used to selling products off the shelf, rather than delivering on individualised project implementation at scale, so I doubt the business model will work, and [b] if we pay private companies for loft insulation, then we will have a lot less money available for all the other energy measures we need - including microgeneration. Thus, whilst the amount of community involvement in actual delivery of a loft insulation project will be small, us doing it ourselves helps us build our own energy security and community resilience. We need to make the case for this as part of our engaging people in the project.
The conclusion I come to is that we therefore need proper funding to be able even to attempt it, and that we need to make that case to a variety of organisations (Energy Saving Trust, Institute for Public Policy Research etc).
Please join the conversation in our forum: http://peckhampower.org/forum/general-discussion/loft-insulation-project
And here's an image taken from our Peckham Power Energy Efficiency Model House document illustrating some of the loft insulation options:
