The council has launched a retrofit open home for the Autumn, and is inviting visitors to tour the property and see some low carbon technologies for themselves.
The house is a three bedroom family home on Abbotswood Road, Round Green. Over the summer it was retrofitted to low carbon standard, in partnership with Luton Rising. It features a number of points of interest for those looking to reduce both their carbon emissions and their bills:
- Solar panels and storage battery
- Heat pump
- Heating controls
- Insulation and triple glazed windows
- Compost demonstration
Open the cupboard under the stairs, and you will find the building’s gas pipe, now closed off and capped. This is an all-electric home, powered by the solar panels on the roof. The batteries, also under the stairs, capture solar power to use at night, and the system can provide around three quarters of the home’s electricity needs.
Step into the garden and visitors can see compost and leaf mould demonstrations, courtesy of Edible High Town. They have also added a little sign drawing attention to the ‘energy-saving solar and wind powered clothes dryer’, known to you and I as a washing line and proving that not all green tech is high tech.
Against the back wall visitors can see the heat pump, gently whirring. (You may have read the recurring complaints online that heat pumps are noisy – come and listen for yourself!) The heat pump captures warmth from the outside air, even in low temperatures, and pipes it into the boiler. That then supplies the radiators.
Because it uses heat from the environment rather than burning fuel to create warmth, heat pumps are very efficient. In this house, it’s also being powered by the solar panels and this will mean very low bills for future residents.
Those future residents are expected in mid-January, so there is a limited time to visit the show-home. With a housing shortage in Luton, a council house can’t be kept empty for long, so visit it while you can.
Booking a tour is easy. Visit the Luton Rising website and click on an available time slot.
As well as demonstrating the technologies to interested people, the home is also a way of testing those technologies in a council home. Luton has just under 8,000 council homes of one kind or another. Moving them towards low carbon will help to meet our climate targets, but it will have lots of other benefits as well.
“We’re taking a start to finish approach to sustainable housing,” said Dylan Katuwawala, Principle Climate Change Office at the council, as he showed me around the house. “That begins with upskilling and green jobs to deliver retrofits, and results in warmer homes and lower bills for residents. It will reduce our carbon emissions with all sorts of co-benefits along the way, from improved health and wellbeing to addressing fuel poverty.”
Zero Carbon Luton 