The national exhibition season now seems to be at an end. The AECB was giving presentations and offering advice in the “Ask the experts” area at both the Homebuilding and Renovating Show and Grand Designs Live. A longer report on this activity will be available soon, but in brief there is clearly a huge demand for informed independent advice on a range of green building issues.

The main area concerns the challenge of affordably heating  poorly insulated rural homes. People were desperate not to use oil due to cost, unreliability of supply and risk of theft. Mis-selling to this sector appears widespread and simply having a space to talk the issues through was very much welcomed by householders. Now that the Low Energy Buildings Database is up and running on the AECB website it might be interesting to explore ways to get good quality information on retrofit issues out to the public. As far as I can see the agencies charged with advising on these issues are not very good at the face-to-face support and that is desperately needed.

Geoff Stow, AECB Trustee

The Technology Strategy Board has recently agreed to fund further development of the AECB database to enhance its functionality, searchability and ability to share lessons learnt from the 87 Retrofit for the Future projects, and a further 33 low energy projects. There will be more detail on this, and how the database will be linked to the new National Refurbishment Centre’s database, in next month’s Network.