Project CALEBRE: Consumer Appealing Low Energy technologies for Building REtrofitting: a summary of the project and its findings

Project CALEBRE ‘Consumer-Appealing Low Energy technologies for Building REtrofitting’ (October 2008 – April 2013) was a £2 million E.ON / RCUK-funded research project comprising a partnership of six leading UK universities, and supported by a Project Advisory Board. Our aim was to contribute to addressing the challenge of reducing UK domestic energy demand and carbon emissions. With our focus largely on solid-wall, ‘hard to heat, hard to treat’ dwellings, we investigated a selection of current, medium and longer-term technologies for domestic energy efficiency refurbishment, with householder perspectives at the heart of our thinking. We approached this from a multi-disciplinary perspective, encompassing a range of techniques that included laboratory testing, simulation modelling, test house field trials and user engagement methods.