This episode is all about a retrofit programme gone wrong in Preston and the effort required to fix it.
It's a story that was covered in the pages of Passive House Plus back in 2018 under the headline "Disastrous Preston retrofit scheme remains unresolved" and until recently we thought it remained unresolved.
We're joined by Filipe Amarante and Joanna Curtis to talk about the Preston Retrofit Catastrophe and all the work that National Energy Action has been doing to fix the grotesque damage that was wrought on a community in the 2010s. It's a project that's consumed at least four years and—in truth—will require many more to make good.
It's not a hopeless story though. The work NEA has carried out is full of lessons for anyone who works in retrofit to learn. They've taken a worst case scenario—one so bad it's hard to imagine how you could make it any worse—and developed a remediation programme that mitigates the worst of the situation while laying out a best-practice template for how one should approach place-based retrofit programmes.
They're also hosting a NEA webinar about the programme on 10 June: sign up here.
Notes from the show
**SOME SELF-PROMOTING CALLS TO ACTION**
We don't actually earn anything from this, and it's quite a lot of work, so we have to promote the day jobs.
**END OF SELF-PROMOTING CALLS TO ACTION**