The SAVE@Work4Homes project aims to achieve a very significant reduction in energy consumption in social housing across Europe, across all types of existing building and across all tenant groups, by providing information and support to tenants enabling them to optimise their energy consumption behaviour.
The approach recognises the great variety of living conditions and cultures in European social housing and does not attempt to define a single best strategy. Instead, partners in 6 organisations in the three Member States with the highest proportion of social housing will develop and test a complementary set of viable and effective Energy Awareness Services, based on a “toolbox” of components to be developed in the project.
Components of the system will be subjected to extensive functional testing with tenants to select from open content options and finalise interface and presentation features. In the introduction phase, tenants will be instructed in the use of any services or components which require their active access such as portal or assessment tool. After introduction, field trials take place under conditions as close as possible to those expected on full deployment. Dissemination is targeted to European social housing as a whole through sponsoring partner European association CECODHAS (The European Liaison Committee for Social Housing). The evaluation programme is a most important part of the project, with the goal of both summative and formative evaluation of the success of the various energy awareness raising strategies and techniques.
