Making homes energy-efficient

Posted on 14 November 2023

Customers in Cambridgeshire will enjoy warm homes and lower energy bills this winter.

We want customers to live in energy-efficient homes, that are safe and affordable, as well as being comfortable and enjoyable places to live. We’re building thousands of energy-efficient homes and investing millions of pounds each year in improving flats and houses.

We improved the energy-efficiency of nearly 700 homes last year, and were part of a successful bid by the Greener Futures Partnership to secure Government funding to improve 1,000 more by September 2025.

One of these retrofit projects was at Maurice Close in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, where we improved the energy-efficiency of 22, two- and three- bedroom semi-detached houses, in response to customers’ concerns about the rising costs of heating.

Work was carried out by Dyson Energy Services at no cost to customers. Each of the social rent homes had at least one improvement. We installed:

  • Top-up loft insulation to 300mm in seven homes
  • Solar panels on 22 homes
  • Air source heat pumps in 19 homes, replacing inefficient and expensive storage heating systems.

We also met with customers at the beginning of the work, to explain more about the benefits of the new systems and to give them general advice about how to keep their energy bills low. We met with customers again at the end of the project to get their feedback and to answer any questions they had. This, along with monitoring of how the systems are performing, will be used to inform future retrofit projects.

The original aim was to increase energy performance of the all the houses to at least EPC Band C. In fact, 12 of the homes reached EPC Band B by the end of the project. More importantly, customers will be warmer this winter, while saving money on their energy bills.

You can read more about the work we’re doing to improve the sustainability of our homes, communities, services, and our business as a whole, on our Sustainability pages and in our Sustainability Report 2022/23 (PDF, 2MB).