MELTON PARISH COUNCIL
WARMER HOMES (THERMAL IMAGING) PROJECT
MPC agreed we would like to take part in a Suffolk County Council initiative to help householders identify heat loss from the homes and inform them of how to improve this. SCC have purchased a number of thermal imaging cameras and are lending them to local groups who carry out the scanning. We applied to be part of the project and were accepted and allocated the cameras from the 7th to 20th March 2023. In reality, we could only collect the cameras late on the 7th and had to return them very early on the 20th so only had them for 12 nights.
We had a lot of difficulty getting the information we needed to plan our part of the project but we made up five teams of two councillors (plus one helper). We discovered just before we started that we could only use the cameras at night, that the cameras did not work in heavy rain, and that although the camera that fitted an iPhone was fine, the Android camera did not work with most Android phones.
Cllr. Gradwell put a huge amount of effort into preparing an information sheet identifying the help available to householders, both financial and advice.
We scheduled scanning on 10 evenings, keeping the middle weekend free, so each team worked for two evenings, as long as the weather was fine. After a very dry February, March turned very cold and wet and a few of the evenings were either too wet or too icy to scan which meant we did not manage to scan all of the applicants, but we did do most of them.
Each householder we visited was given copies of the scanned photos of their home plus the information sheet.
We scanned 37 properties (1 community building, 2 terraced, 10 semi-detached, 12 detached,12 bungalows) and all except one were owner-occupied. 23 were built since 1980, 3 between 1930 and 1979, 1 between 1900 and 1929, and 2 before 1900. We needed to collect this data to provide it to the SCC project team.
Appreciation is due to councillors Charmain Biggle, Jim Crawford, Deborah Darby, Carol Gradwell, Peter James, Alan Porter, James Stern and Chas Taylor and to Dudley Watson. My own thanks to all but especially to Alan who came out in the heavy snow so that we got most of our properties scanned and to Peter for scanning properties in Melton on behalf of Transition Woodbridge as well as for MPC.
Cllr. Katy Martin
20st March 2023
