• Tube noise: the rumblings of change?
• Clint Eastwood’s visit and details on filming in the area
• Call for ideas on how to spend ASSA community £s
• Rubbish collections and bins in Albert Square
• Details of the recent draught busting day and street sale
• Call for helpers in the Summer fair (June 12th – put it in your diary!)
• Call to action on companies who refuse to deliver up more than 13 steps

Download here: ASSA Newsletter Q1_2010

There will be a ‘Draught Busting Day’ at 6 Wilkinson Street on Saturday, November 21st from 10am to 1pm. Anyone from Albert Square, St Stephens Terrace, Aldebert Terrace, Wilkinson Street or surrounding area is welcome. The focus is on Victorian and Edwardian properties.

A Draught Busting Day is an opportunity to learn how to make your Victorian/Edwardian house warm and cosy in time for the worst of winter.

What will be happening?

• We have sourced draught proofing kits for sash windows that really work. They are normally only available to trade but we have sourced some so you can buy on the day (cost is approx £15 per sash window and they can be fitted with a modicum of DIY skill)
• Demonstrations on how to fit the draught-proofing to sash windows and doors every 45mins
  • 10:45am Draught-proofing sash windows
  • 11:30am Draught-proofing external doors
  • 12:15am Draught-proofing sash windows (again)
• Demonstrations of affordable, removable secondary glazing
• Samples of energy saving lightbulbs that actually work in our houses
• Have a look round at the low cost energy efficiency measures we’ve taken which you could copy in your home
• Contacts with local tradesmen who can help you carry out the work
• Tea and biscuits!

It would help if you could let Chris Morrison know if you’re planning on coming (assacan@assa.org.uk) so he can prepare for numbers but no obligation, feel free to just turn up anytime during the morning.

Have you got stuff you don’t want but haven’t got round to putting on eBay or that’s just too good to throw away? Why not sell it outside your house on the pavement on Saturday 3^rd October or simply leave it for people to take? ASSA will market the event locally.

It can be furniture, clothes, toys, plants, books, half-used pots of paint, anything – one man’s trash is another man’s treasure!

At 1pm, we’ll ask some local charities to come and take what is left that they can use or sell and then Lambeth will clear the streets of all remaining rubbish.

We also hope to be doing some educational and free things around recycling, composting, saving water and other generally green stuff which we will let you know about nearer the time.

If you can help organise the day please contact Chris on 020 7582 7184 or Rosemary on 0207 793 9538

As residents in Albert Square, St Stephens Terrace, Aldebert Terrace and Wilkinson Street, you will be only too aware of the energy inefficiency of old houses and their large carbon footprint. There are myriad ways to make our homes more energy efficient and reduce our emissions; ranging from home improvements to renewable energy to simple behavioural changes.

ASSA CAN is an innovative community programme developed by local residents in partnership with British Gas to help residents improve the energy efficiency of their homes.

It starts with a full home energy assessment by qualified engineers that takes about 1-1.5 hours and will cost you £40 (free to L&Q tenants). After the assessment you will receive a report detailing practical low cost recommendations on how to make significant reductions in your energy use*. These are improvements that can either be carried out by you or the British Gas engineers. You can also pay for the improvements in monthly installments at 0% interest and you don’t need to be a British Gas customer to take part.

As part of the project,  we will have demonstration homes in your street that have had work done for you to visit, we are planning some draught proofing demonstrations, we are engaging with local schools and we hope to have some special offers out too.

Please note that if you are an L&Q tenant we have been speaking directly with L&Q. You will receive a letter shortly from L&Q followed up by a member of the Residents Association contacting you directly.

*Typical improvements are energy efficient lightbulbs, draught proofing, loft insulation, standby savers, electricity use monitors and improvements to your central heating system. Solar power and other renewable energy solutions are also available.

Our original intention was to coordinate a group of commercial partners to carry out the individual home energy assessments, install the insulation and new boilers etc, finance it over a number of years and provide dedicated support. At the last ASSA meeting we reviewed three options for commercial partners. Two options would have involved a lot of organisational work and carried some unknown risks. However as luck would have it, British Gas New Energy, our third option, have been thinking along the same lines as us and are looking to trial just such an idea.They will provide each element of the service and you don’t even need to be a customer of theirs.

Over the next few weeks we will be working with British Gas to develop the service before launching in Jan/Feb 2009. Please give Chris Morrison a call (07971 198555) if you are interested in taking part or would just like to find our more.

Put simply, the idea is that we are currently living at an unsustainable rate in a world with finite resources. Somethings got to give. We can start by making our communities self-sustainable (its actually based on the concept of peak oil which I won’t go into here but is fascinating and if you want to find out more look it up on Wikipedia!). It has been done with great success in Devon. Brixton is the first urban Transition Town.

The Transition Town will develop as a loose coalition of different groups doing things around domestic energy reduction and renewable energy, transport, finance, stronger communities and home grown food. I particularly liked this last point.

This group use the gardens that are not used and to grow vegetables and then share some of the produce with the resident at harvest time.  How many gardens are unused in our neighbourhood? Particularly the gardens of some of the flats. The network is called Food Up Front is this something we want to sign-up to?

As residents in the Albert Square, St Stephens Terrace, Aldebert Terrace and Wilkinson Street, you will be only too aware of the energy inefficiency of old houses and their large carbon footprint. There are myriad ways to make our homes more energy efficient and reduce our emissions; ranging from home improvements to renewable energy to simple behavioural changes. But there are often confusing messages about what we should and shouldn’t do and solutions can be costly.

A new approach to domestic energy

The ASSA Climate Action Network takes a new holistic approach to the energy you and your home need. Instead of selling you units of electricity and cubic feet of gas – your energy supply – we we are setting up a community programme, in partnership with a major utility and a specialist home energy company, that will help you look at your energy demand and ways in which you can reduce it and generate your own energy with renewables. It is often much cheaper to reduce your demand through things like insulation and more efficient appliances than it is to buy more gas or electricity, especially with today’s rising prices.

What will it mean to me?

If you sign up to the scheme later this year, you will receive a free energy audit on your home by qualified engineers. On the basis of that audit you will be offered a range of energy improvement options such as insulation, new lightbulbs, draught proofing, a new boiler or new appliances and options to generate your own energy. Once you have chosen the options you want, you will sign up to a new, fixed energy contract that will include your bills and repayments on any new equipment (or alternatively you can pay upfront and get a discount on equipment prices).

What are the benefits to me?

By setting up a network and working with dedicated commercial partners, we can offer the following advantages:

• You will have a lower monthly energy bill and be better protected from rising prices.
• The energy auditors, equipment providers, power company and bank all achieve economies of scale which are passed on to you
• We can access significant community grants to subsidise energy efficiency and renewables
• With the commercial partners, we take on the research and administrative work, offering you a choice of the best solutions for your home.

Want to know more?

Or contact Chris Morrison on 07971 198555

]]> http://assa.org.uk/2008/10/07/assa-low-energy-network-whats-it-all-about/feed/ 0 chrismorrison http://assa.org.uk/2008/06/01/big-green-challenge/ http://assa.org.uk/2008/06/01/big-green-challenge/#comments Sun, 01 Jun 2008 19:26:09 +0000 Stefan Cz http://assasw8.wordpress.com/?p=39 ]]> ASSA has entered the Big Green Challenge competition with the object of reducing the CO2 emissions of the community by 60% in an innovative, scalable and replicable way. We are already down to the last 100 in the competition and will find out in July if we have made it to last ten and get our project implemented. We will be giving a presentation at the AGM.