Retrofit West
Clean energy production is critical to meeting our carbon reduction targets, but it will only be effective if we also reduce consumption. A large part of that is improving the energy efficiency of our homes.
The brief
Retrofit West was commissioned by the West of England Combined Authority (WECA), which Floating Harbour has worked with since 2016 across a wide range of films focused on nature recovery, green energy and regional sustainability.
WECA wanted to create content for its partner Retrofit West to encourage greater uptake of home retrofit measures across the region, including improved insulation and other energy-saving upgrades. Retrofit West works with community groups to help local residents start their retrofit journeys, and the aim was to make the benefits feel practical, relevant and achievable for local households.
What we did
We provided end-to-end production, including editorial guidance, filming, interviews, post-production and advice on how the finished content could work effectively across social media. The event gave us a valuable opportunity to speak not only to scheduled contributors but also to attendees, allowing us to capture a broader range of authentic voices and generate genuine enthusiasm around the programme at a local level.
As an environmentally conscious production company that has been through retrofit firsthand, improving the performance of our own studios with insulation, solar and heat pumps, it was fascinating to see the process from a residential perspective.
The challenge
The main production challenge was time. Many of the people we interviewed were attending the event for other reasons, so we had a very limited window to capture strong material without disrupting their day. We were particularly pleased with the quality and range of interviews we achieved within those constraints, and with the fast turnaround that followed.
The outcome
Both WECA and Retrofit West were delighted with the finished films, which were used to help drive interest in retrofit programmes and encourage more people across the region to consider measures that could reduce energy use in their homes.
This film is part of our corporate film work. See all the films we make.
Read the transcript
So I'm Steve. I'm a member of Go Green Widcombe. It's a local community volunteer group. We're part of the Widcombe Association and our aim is to help local houses on the journey to become more sustainable.
We teamed up with Retrofit West and they've given us grants, which has enabled us to have talks and we're having several talks about retrofit to help people on the retrofit journey because we all want to proceed to net zero. The benefit of having local community groups like Go Green Widcombe is that we have built up links with the local council. We have a link with the combined authority. We are working with Retrofit West now, so we are like the conduit that takes all their input information, all the links they can provide, and feeds that out to our community.
Retrofit West is a community interest company and we are trying to educate and engage with homeowners to install home energy efficiency measures in their properties. Retrofit West has been set up with impartiality in mind. We are a not-for-profit organisation looking to inform people rather than selling a product. And so we have lots of people, experts and advisors who are trained to give impartial, accurate, concise retrofit advice.
I'm trying to retrofit my 1930s solid wall semi over in Bristol. I've been doing it for a couple of years now. It's quite disruptive. I've definitely spent a lot of time trying to find out lots of information about all this stuff, but really you can't beat coming to speak to people face to face.
You get much more out of it and you get that kind of lived experience relayed to you and you really understand what it's about. I am a resident of Bath for the last year and a half and we've just bought a property here in Widcombe that we're doing up at the moment. I've lived in the same house for 40 years. It's a big Victorian villa and I've been doing some retrofitting on it.
I started with the windows. We're in a conservation area, but they didn't need approval for changing the windows. So they're now double glazed and fully draught proofed. And I've been draught proofing the whole of the house.
Now that we've bought this property, having the ability to make it as green as possible has been really motivating for us. It's important to me because I feel like if I can make any sort of impact in the little things that I do, I want to be able to do it. The reasons I want to make my house more energy efficient: it's mainly for climate change and to help save the planet, but I do have financial reasons as well because I'm not on a very high income. So far I've increased insulation in my loft, I've put carbon beads in the cavity walls, and I have solar thermal and solar PV.
A huge amount of our carbon emissions come from energy use of buildings. The UK's got some of the oldest housing stock in Europe. We have an option to either demolish homes and rebuild, or we can work with our existing stock and make them better and make them perform better. It's very expensive to do all of these things, and with that, hoping that grants and things like that can help will obviously be helpful.
Carbon reduction is the motivator. Whilst it may not be in a lot of people's minds in terms of why they want to do things, from a practical point of view they get bogged down in the cost of that. But the motivator has to be carbon reduction. So the focus today has been retrofit, and that's why we had Retrofit West, because we want to help people on the retrofit journey.
It's complicated and we wanted to just get them on the road. This is a really good way of motivating people to do the work. If they know someone locally who's done the same thing, it's going to be really encouraging to go ahead and do the same thing. So a lot of this is about raising motivation in the local area to do this stuff.
I really think that this is a great initiative. I hope that more small boroughs will be able to do this.
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