Retrofitting Dave and Kathy’s terraced home in Crookes
Dave and Kathy are refurbishing their mid-terrace home and using it as an opportunity to make their home more comfortable and decarbonise their environmental footprint. They love their home: they have lived there for 30 years and have no plans to leave.
Like other houses built between 1900 and 1929 it is a stone front brick house with solid walls. They had previously added some insulation and ventilation and double-glazed the windows, but the back of their house is particularly cold in winter, their attic room is too hot in summer and too cold in winter, they have a draughty front door and living room and issues with condensation.
SY Ecofit’s whole house assessment recommended room-in-roof insulation plus front and rear wall internal insulation. Because the house doesn’t have cavity walls, we have to be sensitive about retaining wall breathability when recommending insulation type. We also recommended new windows and insulated doors. Although their existing windows were double-glazed the window frames were worn and cracked. Their house was a leaky envelope - but can be fixed - and importantly when fixing heat ‘leaks’ it is still key to ventilate the house.
We recommended they complete fabric improvements to the house before installing their much-desired heat pump. Making fabric changes first means they will need a smaller heat pump.
Our recommended improvements will see a significant improvement in the house’s EPC rating but most importantly for Sarah and Joe they will reduce their carbon emissions significantly, their home will be warmer all year round and they will be able to use their attic in comfort!
Estimated costs of retrofit measures: £35K +VAT
Grant eligibility: Government’s Boiler Upgrade Scheme
Typically these retrofitting measures for this property type save 3 tonnes of carbon p.a.
Transforming ‘Our Cow Molly’ dairy farm
Our Sheffield Farm project, co-led by SY Ecofit and Sheffield Renewables aims to transform a dairy farm from a consumer of energy into a net provider of energy by integrating sustainable energy provisions into its dairy farming operations. The project is funded by the government's Green Energy Fund and is at feasibility stage.
Cliffe House Farm, better known as Our Cow Molly, is in Dungworth, four miles from Sheffield city centre. The project would transform the farm into a community-owned energy producing dairy farm combining solar panels, wind turbines, anaerobic digestion and innovative hydrogen production technology.
A newly-constructed barn with 2,713 sq m of roof space would be covered with solar panels and a 7,726 sq m field would be ‘planted’ with ground-mounted solar panels.
The project plans to generate around three megawatts of electricity which would be transformed into green hydrogen via an on-site electrolyser which separates hydrogen from water in a process known as anaerobic digestion. The hydrogen produced will not only cut emissions but also fuel economic growth, with revenue funding job creation, skills development, and retrofitting homes for better energy efficiency.
This goal would be to produce approximately 383kg of hydrogen daily, enough to power around 20 buses. Revenue from the sale of surplus energy would support charities and community organisations to retrofit local homes and buildings reducing their energy costs.
"This is about more than just clean energy - it's about building community wealth," explains Jonathan Hind from SY Ecofit. The project plans to raise £5 million through a combination of community share offers, grants, and green finance. Local residents and organisations would have the opportunity to invest and benefit directly from the scheme.
Transforming homes for ASSIST SheffieldSouth Yorkshire charity ASSIST Sheffield works with refugees and those seeking sanctuary. At the end of 2023 they received funding from the government’s Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund for the potential retrofitting of five houses which meant they were eligible to commission works from a PAS35-accredited contractor. After our cost-benefit analysis we proceeded with four properties.
ASSIST commissioned us as its delivery partner and as a new organisation, this was our first commission.
ASSIST wanted to collaborate with a skilled provider who could provide a local pipeline and became our first retrofit customer - a great example of local organisation collaboration. They gave us a budget and the brief to elevate the properties to EPC C level standards.
Their varying states of disrepair posed tricky: the properties needed different improvements - some requiring extensive renovations as well as retrofitting. This meant that the works could not be completed via a one-size fits-all approach often favoured in large-scale projects by larger contractors.
One of the benefits of the SHDF-enabled consortium is that it reduces the administrative burden on housing organisations in commissioning contractors. ASSIST were pleased to find that commissioning us wasn’t onerous. They coordinated the funders whilst we coordinated the teams of mostly-local contractors to work across the portfolio of buildings for 12 months.
Our timeline of works was impressive - properties were completed a year after the first conversation started. This was due to impressive teamworking, use of local contractors and flexibility from our teams. Retrofitting multiple properties meant that we could offer local contractors sustained work and that they were on-hand to support the different projects.
