Healthy Homes keeps on growing

Our director Tara advises a client at our clinic at The Beacon Community Centre.

Our director Tara advises a client at our clinic at The Beacon Community Centre.

It has been a busy winter so far for our Healthy Homes team. Each month the diaries of our four home energy advisors are full with LEAP home visits, drop-in clinics and talks to community groups. And across our region, which now covers Exeter, Mid Devon. East Devon, Teignbridge and Torbay, we have been building strong links with partner organisations providing training to their staff and volunteers to help them make referrals to the project. This helps to ensure we are reaching the most vulnerable in our society.

Our drop-in advice clinics are going well across the region. We’ve got some new clinic venues in East Devon, a new monthly clinic at Citizens Advice Exeter, and a change of venue in Crediton. See the full list of clinics here.

The energy advice clinics are open to everyone – come along for energy saving tips, tariff and switching advice – please bring a recent bill – help with signing up to the Priority Services Register and for Warm Home Discounts. We can also answer all your questions about smart meters too.

To 31st January 2019 our cumulative output figures since the start of the project in November 2017 were:

  • 904 Enquiries/One to Ones at clinics, talks etc
  • 505 LEAP Home visits
  • 303 Income Max referrals: benefit and debt advice
  • 153 ECO referrals for boilers and loft and wall insulation and ECHO referrals emergency boiler repairs and replacements
  • 110 Other referrals for fire Safety checks, health, water, debt etc
  • 64 Warm Home Discount referrals, saving £8,960
  • 214 Energy bills and Tariff/supplier switches, saving £21,569
  • 3978 behaviour changes/easy measures installed equivalent to £385,086 saved
  • 326 Priority Services Register sign ups
  • 87 Water Care Tariff forms submitted, with estimated savings £12,358

We won some new funding at the end of 2018 from Western Power Distribution. These funds are helping us to work with more health-related partners, and also to develop our outreach work in East Devon, Teignbridge and Torbay.

We’re also now working with the Royal Devon and Exeter hospital, helping patients discharged early from respiratory wards. We’re hoping to improve their home living conditions, and in the longer term reduce hospital readmissions.

We are pleased to be part of the Devon-wide Warm Homes Fund applications that will provide funding for installation of first-time gas and oil central heating. If these applications are successful we’ll be able to help more people get out of fuel poverty by replacing inefficient forms of heating with gas or oil boilers.

We’ve been working hard on the Big Energy Saving Network campaign during the winter. With seven more weeks left for this campaign, we’ve already nearly hit our targets of 200 consumers helped, and 80 front line workers trained.

Our Smart Energy GB campaign successfully rolled out from July to December. This campaign was to provide factual information about smart meters and answer the many questions we all have about this new technology. We reached over 10,000 people via our talks, clinics, events and one-to-one interactions.

The Healthy Homes project is now supported by Sarah, our newest team member. Sarah is helping with developing new partner links, administration and providing follow up support to our clients.

We also have a new online referral form , so if you or anyone you know would like some advice or help with energy bills, or heating/insulation upgrades, you can use this or come along to one of our monthly drop-in advice clinics.

Full details of our Healthy Homes project can be found on the website.