Energy

Worried about the rising cost of energy? Struggling to Heat your home? Not sure where to get good advice? Drop in and find out about: Reducing your energy bills and what grants are available.  Free impartial advice from Mark Skinner of South Dartmoor Community Energy.  No appointment needed.

Drop-in sessions scheduled for:

Wednesday 18 February 2026; 09.30-12.00

Wednesday 18 March 2026; 09.30-12.00

Wednesday 22 April 2026; 09.30-12.00

Wednesday 20 May 2026; 09.30-12.00

Wednesday 17 June 2026; 09.30-12.30

Thermal Imaging:

One way to begin to think about your home’s energy performance is to take pictures of it using a thermal imaging camera.  Why a particular room never seems to get warm, and where exactly the heat is being lost – are the sort of questions thermal imaging can begin to address.

Members of SSB can access free training on how to use our Thermal Imaging Cameras.  It only takes an hour or two, after which you are free to use the equipment free-of-charge to take images in your home.  Perhaps you’d like to go further and offer this service to any of your neighbours who share your interest in improving their home’s energy efficiency and reducing energy bills.  For further information, email energy@ssb.org.uk.

Home Insulation Training:

Fully funded online training – ‘Introduction to home insulation’
There are 6 modules consisting of a roughly 10 minute YouTube video to watch,
then a multi-choice test at the end of each, so about 1.5 hours in total.

If you register for these, we’d love to hear how you get on.  Do send your feedback to energy@ssb.org.uk.

Survey of EPCs in South Brent

An Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) is one way of gauging how our homes operate in terms of energy efficiency – how costly they will be to run, and how much CO2 they give out.

SSB always likes to engage with young people, so we were particularly delighted to involve a Duke of Edinburgh’s Silver Award Candidate in the Energy Team’s EPC project.  Chris has just finished a very busy year taking GCSEs at Ivybridge Community College, but he still found time to gather and begin to analyse EPC information for all those households in South Brent Parish that have EPCs in place.

EPC information is in the public domain, but with the work Chris is undertaking, we hope to be able to get a much clearer idea of how our homes are performing overall; what we might need to do to make them more energy efficient, and also find some specific examples from which we can learn.  For example, how did that house that was a very low ‘G’ rated home a few years ago become the excellent ‘A’ rated energy-efficient home it is today?  What ‘retrofit’ actions were undertaken to bring that change about?  And – if we can’t afford to do the work ourselves – what grants might be available?

Watch this space for more information as the EPC project progresses.

NB. The Energy Futures Questionnaire has now closed.

South Brent Primary School – Renewable Energy Generation

Thanks to a generous donation from South Brent Community Energy Society, the Primary School in South Brent is now proudly able to generate a proportion of its own electricity.  Facilitated by Sustainable South Brent, the 17kW array was installed in August by SunGift.  It’s an ‘integrated’ system which embeds the solar panels in line with – rather than sitting above – the roof tiles, giving a sleeker appearance and offering less resistance to the winds that whistle through.

An indoor display panel will give the children a chance to see, minute-by-minute, how much electricity is being produced, how much the system has generated in total, and how many tonnes of CO2 haven’t been produced by using this renewable energy generation.  The system is predicted to save the school several thousand pounds per year on their electricity bill.  All of which will give the children plenty of opportunities for doing some meaningful, real-life mathematical calculations.

The image below, taken on a dark and dreary day, shows that – even when it’s raining – the photovoltaic panels do as their name suggests and respond to even low-levels of available light.  Just imagine what they can do when the sun is shining.

Contact energy@ssb.org.uk

If you have any questions for the Energy Team, or would like to offer your time in support of these and future energy initiatives, please contact Hayden on energy@ssb.org.uk