The Village Halls Podcast
A podcast for anyone involved in the running of Britain's 10,000 village, church and community and anyone interested in the vital community services they provide.
The Village Halls Podcast
From Draughty to Efficient: Transforming Community Spaces
We dive into the world of energy efficiency for village and community halls with experts Andy Mitchell and Phil Strickland from 21 Degrees, exploring practical solutions to reduce carbon footprints and energy costs.
• Heat pumps can work effectively in any reasonably insulated building when properly designed and installed
• Understanding the difference between how boilers and heat pumps heat spaces is crucial for optimal efficiency
• Insulation fundamentally changes a building's physics, requiring careful consideration of moisture management
• Mechanical heat recovery ventilation systems improve air quality while maintaining energy efficiency
• EV charging points offer village halls an opportunity to provide valuable services to their communities
• Solar panels work even on cloudy days and can be integrated with EV chargers and battery storage
Entries are now open for the Village Halls Inspiration Awards 2025, celebrating the incredible work happening in village, community and church halls across the country. You can apply between the 1st of May and the 30th of September, so do consider putting your hall forward.
Hi, I'm Marc Smith and welcome to the Village Halls podcast sponsored by Allied Westminster, the UK's largest specialist provider of Village Hall insurance, and the home of Village Guard. Before we begin, a quick reminder that entries are now open for the Village Halls Inspiration Awards 2025, celebrating the incredible work happening in village, community and church halls across the country. You can apply between the 1st of May and the 30th of September, so do consider putting your hall forward. In this episode, we are diving into the world of energy efficiency, something more and more village halls across the country are striving towards on their path to net zero. It's great to see so many community buildings taking the lead, and today we're celebrating just that.
Marc Smith:I'm joined by Andy Mitchell and Phil Strickland, from 21 Degrees experts in energy efficiency solutions. So, no matter the type of building, Andy and Phil bring a wealth of knowledge and practical advice, and they're actively helping halls and organisations across the UK improve their energy use and reduce their carbon footprint. So, whether you're just starting your energy journey or already halfway there, this episode is packed with ideas and inspiration to help you take the next step. Let's get started. Welcome to the podcast, Andy and Phil.
Phil Stricland:Morning, good morning.
Marc Smith:So you both work with 21 Degrees. Can you tell me a little bit about where 21 Degrees came from and what your roles are at the company?
Andy Mitchell:Shall, I start Phil.
Phil Stricland:Go.
Andy Mitchell:So 21 Degrees is effectively a collection of businesses that have developed since 2020. We're operating partly on what we call a buy-to-build model, so that's under a vision of delivering much better sustainable homes and broader buildings. So it includes commercial across the UK and so there's been a number of businesses that have been bought, which kind of networks from kind of York mostly down the east and then across to Poole down in Dorset supply and installation service of products that deliver better energy efficiency, better energy use, but also, with that, health and comfort, because they're all kind of interlinked yeah yeah, so yeah, excellent.
Marc Smith:What about yourself, phil? What do you do at 21 degrees?
Phil Stricland:so I'm the technical operations director, so I'm responsible for essentially helping improve how we deliver quality installations and broadly improve what we provide for the customers across the board.
Marc Smith:Right, I'm going to start off strong here. So how important is design and planning when it comes to retrospective energy efficiency?
Andy Mitchell:essential, unless you don't want to do it properly yeah, because what I was a?
Marc Smith:I saw I think it was phil you on your LinkedIn. You were talking about heat pumps and a lot of people obviously have a bugbear with heat pumps and I know very little about heat pumps, but I always presume that it's through lack of planning really.
Phil Stricland:Yeah, that's exactly it. I mean the design of the installation of a heat pump is critical. So I mean a heat pump can go, can be installed into pretty much any property as long as it's designed and installed correctly. I mean I say that with a pinch of salt because there's obviously extremes of properties. You've got very old properties with you know leaky, drafty windows and doors and that sort of stuff. So you know you're pushing the envelope there right up to you know very well new build properties up to sort of you know sort of passive house which is extremely well insulated, very airtight buildings. But in simple terms, you know a reasonably well insulated, you know property with double glazed windows is perfect for a heat pump. So once you've got that kind of property, you're now down to designing a heat pump system for that property. As long as you design it efficiently and install it well, then you're going to get high efficiency levels from that heat pump and that's the critical part.
Marc Smith:And do they work in village halls or say it was a large village hall, then you're going to get high efficiency levels from that heat pump, and that's the critical part. And do they work in village halls or say it was a large village hall is there a limitation of how much space a heat pump can heat, or is it? Just basically bringing a bigger heat pump?
Phil Stricland:No, absolutely yeah, you can put them pretty much into any building, and village halls are perfect for that. We've done a lot of installations in all types of village halls, sports halls and all sorts of stuff like that. But yeah, fundamentally they come in all shapes and sizes. You can double them up and do all sorts of stuff with them. Whether they're air source or ground source, extracting heat from the ground. There's lots of different ways to design and install them. So yeah, very much so, I think the biggest challenge Marc comes from?
Andy Mitchell:uh, just the primary understanding. I think people, uh, you know there's layers to this, so it's not a gas boiler, um, a gas boiler, gas as a as a fossil fuel is an incredibly cheap energy source. Uh, despite looking at our gas bill, it is actually still remarkably, it is actually still remarkably cheap form of energy in reality. And a heat pump is a different tech, but effectively they're doing the same thing, which is providing a heat load into the property to try and match the heat requirement of that property. And I think the key thing is that it is different tech, you know.
Andy Mitchell:So a gas boiler generally pushes water. You heat water up, you push it through some pipe work into radiators and the radiators your emitters, and they heat the room. But actually the flow rates are relatively quick and the heat temperature of that water is relatively high. You'll know that. You know you lean up against the radiator. Sometimes it's like, oh, that's a bit bit hot. You don't get that with a heat pump. The flow is slower and the temperature that is actually being pushed around is lower. So therefore it'll do the same job.
Andy Mitchell:It's energy in and energy out, but it's just different and I think people kind of just expect it to be completely different. You know, it's a bit like getting into an electric car and expecting it to behave the same as a petrol car. It doesn't. You know, there's aspects of it that are familiar Four wheels, windscreen, steering wheel but actually your interface with the car is different. You know, particularly if you go for the most obvious one for those who've driven is is the kind of one pedal system where you take your foot off the accelerator assuming the car sets up this way and it actually slows it down because it's got regen braking, um. So you can end up just doing one pedal driving, um. But people aren't familiar with that you know, so it it's.
Andy Mitchell:There's actually quite a lot of education. That's also needed, you know. So, phil. Phil's completely right. You can heat pretty much any space with a heat pump, but it could cost you an awful lot of money. You know to do that just because of the way in which they they operate.
Marc Smith:All right when you put a heat pump in, is there anything you have to consider with the hall If it's old, do you say, right, well, we need to insulate first. We need to do this first, before we even think about bringing it in.
Phil Stricland:No, absolutely yeah. So we're always. You know well any type of heating system. You want to insulate first, because obviously that's going to reduce your fuel bills. So you always want to be looking at reducing air leakage from a building, so that's around your windows and doors, things like that and insulating. You know the fabric of the building, you know the walls, you know the loft insulation, things like that.
Phil Stricland:That's the first thing you want to be looking at and then you want to be looking at how the property is being used.
Phil Stricland:So if it is a village hall as opposed to a home which is used predominantly throughout the day, typically a village hall can be used very, very differently.
Phil Stricland:So some are used a lot throughout the day and some could be used a few times a week and that makes a big difference to how you could potentially use the pump and the sorts of emitters that you'd put into it, because there's no point having, you know, underfloor heating in a village hall that's used a few times a week, because underfloor heating is a very slow form of heat that takes a while to heat up, which is not going to be any good if you're going to, you know, if you want it on at 10 o'clock on a Tuesday and 10 o'clock on a Friday and it's going to take a few hours to warm up each time, that's not a very good way of trying to heat that space.
Phil Stricland:So you want a very quick way of pushing heat into the room, into the space, for the few times a week that you're going to use it in that scenario. So you need to think about those things because with underfloor heating. You really want to keep the space heated throughout the week, on all the time? Yeah, so you know. You need to find out from whoever's using the hall how it's used throughout the time if it's a village hall how it's used throughout the week. Otherwise they're going to be heating it unnecessarily when they don't need to be.
Phil Stricland:So yeah there are other considerations that need to be thought about.
Marc Smith:So when it comes, to insulation. Obviously there's so many different types. So, say, the majority of obviously the village halls will be older buildings. What are the types of insulation that you can actually put in to these? Especially, I suppose, if they're historic, it makes it a bit harder as well. You can't exactly just rip walls down willy-nilly to put insulation in. What are the options that some of these older halls have got when it comes to insulation?
Andy Mitchell:Well, the key thing to remember is, when you're applying an insulation to a property, you're changing the physics of the building. You're changing the way in which both heat and moisture move through the building fabric, so you have got to be quite careful. Generally speaking, it does very much depend on the construction. So if you've got a cavity wall construction, then you could potentially fill the cavity wall, although you've got to be careful there, because some cavity construction is quite poor and therefore there's a lot of foreign stuff in in the wall that fell in when it was being built, which can cause problems afterwards um yeah, yeah.
Andy Mitchell:So so it's not a given that you can just fill that with insulation. If you're in an area of high driven rain, then you can cause other problems because you can end up with moisture tracking across. People often think that cavities were designed to keep the rain out. That's not true at all. It was just a cheaper way of building.
Andy Mitchell:I really suppose yeah, yeah yeah, no, if you go on the continent, they maintain solid masonry walls for well, they still do. Frankly, they've changed the way in which the composition of the block is used, but it's monolithic. Construction in mainland Europe is still common. It's just if you've got a cheaper block or cheaper brick on the inside than an outside and tie them together. It's a cheaper way of construction. So that's the principal reason why we ended up with the Cavity War, which was only really introduced in anger in the 20, in the 1930s. So so there are cavity wars before then, but, but not as much. Most masonry wars are solid before then and and they are more than adequate to keep the rain out, and if they're not in a particular area, then they were rendered. That's why we have render on properties. I think we've forgotten this. Render is as was applied to buildings, for practical reasons first, and not to make them look pretty. Um, you know, brick is porous and it stops stops the rain actually tracking through the brickwork.
Andy Mitchell:Um, yeah, I learned this recently because I had to put in a like a, like a waterproofer into some mortar I was mixing up to put on the wall, because some of it had basically blown away in the wind yeah yes, so yeah, yeah, I didn't realize that was actually yeah, I mean, in scotland, you may or may not notice that the the render is usually more coarse, um, uh, the furthest further north you go, and that's generally to reduce the impact of the rain, which is usually driving harder, um, so it reduces the amount of energy that's hitting the surface of the outside of the wall. So there's loads and loads of practical reasons why we built and I think, sadly, over the years, we've kind of forgotten the reason why we did these things. You know, um, we just think, like I say it's, you know you, you look at various, you know seaside towns. You are, they've done it to make it look all pretty with the colors and it's like, nah, it's there for a practical reason. Um, they've added a color in, for sure. You know, yeah, yeah, okay, but I mean, you know the stuff had to be on the wall, it wasn't just to make it look pretty. Uh, all right, right, so so back to the insulation.
Andy Mitchell:So you've either got external or internal insulation on a solid wall. Um, if you do internal, you can cause problems. Uh, to do with the fact you've now cooled down the wall because you've got insulation on the inside and therefore, if you're not careful, moisture that tracks through the insulation which it will, could condense on the inside surface of the wall something called interstitial condensation, which can then cause problems with the whole building fabric. So really you want to. If you're internally insulating, I'd stick to products such as diethanite, which is like a, a cork and a mineral mix, or something like wood fibre, because they're the only real ones that seem to deal properly with the moisture issue.
Andy Mitchell:Go externally and you can start to use things like XPS, so extruded polystyrene. You can use wood fibre again. That tends to be a bit more expensive and you're effectively tea cosying the building. The problem with that, going back to Phil's earlier point, is you know how often are you using the building. So if you tea-cozy the outside of a village hall and you're only using it in the evenings each week, then you've got to wait for the whole of the internal what is now the internal brickwork to completely heat up before actually it's going to start feeling warm.
Marc Smith:So yeah, all right. Yeah, insulation on the outside, so outside. So could sorry, you have to excuse me, could you explain that how obviously? I know the ticosi um metaphor but, like how does that actually work? How do you put stuff on the outside the building space, because each building is shaped differently. Do you have to purpose, make a different like polystyrene. Is it polystyrene, or is that okay? Well, it can be so let'sPS is extruded polystyrene.
Andy Mitchell:You can have wood fibre, which is they're usually what we call semi-rigid sheets. So if you picked them up, they don't flop around. And you, I mean there's multiple methods, so the solid sheets you would fasten back to the structure. That depends on what the structure is. So if it's timber frame, then you're in a whole different world and arguably you probably wouldn't want to be doing that. You'd want to approach it differently.
Andy Mitchell:If it's timber frame, you may find, if you remove the cladding, you've got voids in the stud work, in which case you could look at installing a mineral wool. But again, you want to be careful about moisture. So you need to put membranes and stuff in to make sure that the moisture can basically get out more quickly than it got in. Um. You you've got a situation where you've got um, if you've got masonry building, then you can fasten, uh, insulation to the outside of that and then you can either clad over the insulation or you could render directly onto the insulation. I mean, there's a spectrum of stuff. I think it's a bit like if somebody who'd never lived in a climate, um, like we have on this planet, okay, uh, and they were just used to walking around in a t-shirt and a jumper. Okay, and you and they said to you so so what kind of clothing do I wear outside?
Andy Mitchell:yeah, you probably wouldn't say I would just wear one of these. Yeah, you'd say well, it depends on what kind of weather is. What do you mean? Well, it could be, it could be sunny, you know, or it could be windy, in which case it's winter. So, okay, you're dry, but you just need to make sure that the wind doesn't take all your heat off your body. So you want to wear probably a thin kind of um product that allows the moisture to get out of you, you know from.
Andy Mitchell:Otherwise you'll get all super wet because you're just wearing a plastic bag and suddenly you realize, actually there's yeah there's quite a complexity to this, and it's exactly the same with buildings well, you've, you've proved the point there of planning you really need to plan before you do anything.
Marc Smith:That's the best reason to plan, because there's so many variables there are. So, I suppose, when it comes to insulation, all I think is glass, wool and pir board. But would you consider glazing indoors as an insulator? Or because if you have triple glaze windows, is that there to to stop the heat escaping, or to look pretty, or what's the? No, what are they categorized as really? So triple, triple glazing.
Andy Mitchell:So different terms and different things. So if you've got a, so you've either got a frame and that frame may move, so that's usually referred to as a sash. It doesn't have to slide, it could be on hinges, um, or it could be a fixed window frame, so there's no moving components. But then you've got a, a glazed section which is either single, double or triple. Occasionally you can get quadruple, but I mean that's it depends where you components. But then you've got a glazed section which is either single, double or triple. Occasionally you can get quadruple, but I mean it depends where you live.
Andy Mitchell:The primary benefit of moving from to double or to triple is to reduce the amount of heat loss through the glazed area. But there's a secondary benefit when you move to triple glazing, which is to do with comfort. So effectively what you're doing is normally your double glaze or triple glaze units are filled with something called argon, which is a slower moving gas than air. So the heat transfer from one glass the inner plane of glass to the external plane of glass is slower, because the energy just moves more. The gas is more viscous, so the energy transfer is slower because the energy just moves more the the gas is more viscous, so the energy transfer is slower um. So therefore your heat loss out of the the building is is is reduced um. With triple you're kind of improving that significantly again um. But the. But the big difference really with triple versus double is the inner pane of glass is much closer to the internal temperature of the space.
Andy Mitchell:So, as human beings, we often think it's the air temperature that kind of makes us feel warm. That's partly true, but the main reason why you feel warm as a human being is to do with something called radiant heat. So if you're outside in a sunny day and a cloud goes in front of the sun, you go oh, it's got a bit chilly, chilly, but the air temperature hasn't changed, it's exactly the same. It's because, actually, that radiant heat has been cut off.
Andy Mitchell:Yeah, um, so the reason why you feel warm, usually in a room, is normally because, um, the surface temperatures, the table, the chair you're sat in, the walls, um have a temperature that's pretty close to the room temperature. You feel less comfortable and more cold when those temperatures don't match the room temperature, which is why, when you stand close to single glazing, you feel uncomfortable, particularly in the winter, because actually the surface temperature of that glass is much colder and you can literally feel the heat pulling away from your, your body. With triple glazing, the temperature and difference is only about sort of three, four degrees and generally, as human beings, we don't tend to notice that.
Phil Stricland:So those, those are the primary reasons it's partly about heat loss partly about comfort all right, that's a beautiful, beautiful segue into a big difference between boilers and heat pumps. A boiler pushes very high temperature heat into the room via the radiators and basically tries to heat the air, or does just basically heat the air off the radiator and just pushes the air around the room and then basically overheats that air and the radiators click off and then it all cools down again and then the radiators click on again and they just go through that cycle on and off, but they're just basically heating the air in the room. And that's where you get these variations in temperature across the room and whereas with a heat pump you're not heating the space, the room, in the same way. As Andy was saying earlier. It's a much more even temperature, it's a lower temperature that you're pushing into the room over a longer period of time.
Phil Stricland:And what you end up doing is you end up heating all the fabric in the room, the walls of the room up to the up to a temperature of the temperature you've selected 21 degrees into the room, so that over time that all gets reflected back into the room off those hard um building fabric into the room as well. So you end up with everything within the room becoming the same temperature rather than just the air temperature in the room. So things aren't clicking on and off all the time. Everything becomes 21 degrees, so it becomes much more comfortable and the occupants in the room become much more comfortable within that room as well. So it doesn't really matter whether it's under floor or radiators.
Phil Stricland:With a with a heat pump, everything just becomes very, very calm. And and the efficiency from the heat pump comes from that as well, in the fact that you're you're just slowly um pushing that heat into the room at a much lower temperature, rather than pushing a high temperature into the room like a boiler, you're just trickling heat into that room, which is where the efficiency comes from, and that heat is then getting slowly radiated back into the room from all that, from the walls and the hard fixtures in the room, and that that is just much more comfortable as a as human beings, and you can generally have the room a little bit cooler, set a little bit cooler than you would with a boiler as well, because it's more comfortable. It feels more comfortable to the occupants as well.
Marc Smith:And are heat pumps obviously more energy efficient? Are they reasonable to run as well like cost-wise?
Phil Stricland:Yeah, yeah. So again, as long as you've got a reasonably you know well insulated property, um, so you know, if it's very, very leaky, you know so you've got single glazed windows, poor insulation and gaps around your doors, then a heat pump's going to struggle so it's not that it won't do it.
Phil Stricland:You could put a heat pump into any property, but at the bottom end of that scale you know you're going to be, the heat pump's going to have to work pretty hard, and that's when a heat pump becomes less efficient. So as long as you're.
Phil Stricland:As long as you've got a property you know um older properties you want to start insulating, first getting rid of your air leakage, and then you start getting the heat pump into its optimum efficiency window, where you can start dropping the flow temperatures through your radiators, underfloor heating, whatever and then you start getting the efficiencies up. That's when the the costs start dropping right.
Marc Smith:Are there tests to do so? If you went into village hall, would you do a certain number of tests to say, look, this is what's what type, what you need to do before you put the heat bump in, or what would you? I mean we, certainly do.
Phil Stricland:I mean we do a site visit and we'd look, look around at um and you can I mean not a test, but you can quite quickly see um, you know what sort of insulation the property has, what sort of glazing the property has. We certainly love the village hall but you know, in properties generally we'd look at the loft insulation measure that, see how much insulation is up there and advise them on. You know what sort of level of efficiency we'd kind of expect from that kind of property and what sort of costs they're likely to see from that. We'd do some expect from that kind of property and what sort of uh cost they're likely to see from that. We'd do some calculations on that. Yes, um, because because essentially you know if they're switching from a traditional boiler to to a heat pump, you know they're going to want to see what sort of efficiencies and what sort of running cost they're going to get from that.
Marc Smith:Yeah, I've got a couple of topics. I want to discuss the first one. I was unsure if it was going to be worth talking about, if it was relevant for village halls, but it's heat recovery. So well, number one what is heat recovery? Uh. And number two do the work in village halls and does the village hall? Would it have to be a brand new passive hall before you put it in?
Phil Stricland:Okay, so what is it? So? Heat recovery is a ventilation system which enables you to extract the stale air from a property from building to the outside, bringing fresh air, and recover the lost heat from the outgoing air to the incoming air. So it's a very efficient way of ventilating property and making it the air very comfortable and balanced within a property.
Phil Stricland:So typically you'd install that into a new build, especially when the when the air leakage within that build is kept relatively low yeah let's put it and certainly when you're getting up toward what we call passive health standard, which is a very airtight, very well insulated property, then you would definitely need some form of mechanical ventilation system that we're talking about. But yeah, it's very you know, we would normally recommend it in a well-built, new-build property, right, because it's a very efficient way of ventilating the property and it does mean that you don't need trickle vents in your windows.
Marc Smith:Oh really.
Phil Stricland:Which are a poor way of ventilating a property. And you don't need extractor fans in your bathrooms or kitchen Because it replaces all of that. Because when you're building a property, you're basically, you know you're insulating it very well, you're getting rid of all the, because you're building a property, a new build, you're getting rid of all the air leakage hopefully. So you're building a nice, you know envelope, you're insulating it well, and then, from a building perspective, you need to ventilate that property.
Phil Stricland:So building regulations basically then say so, you need to ventilate this, so we're going to bash holes in it, so we're going to drill holes in it and we're going to put ventilation extractor fans in the bathrooms and kitchen and we're going to insist that you put these little vents above all the windows which you need to have open all the time. You put these little vents above all the windows which you need to have open all the time, which means that when it's windy, outdoor air whatever temperature it is in the middle of winter could be minus three, minus five is going to blow into your bedrooms and living spaces and cool the house down, and that's your ventilation. And you need ventilation, otherwise you'll get damp and the air will be stale and you'll get all sorts of problems. So you need the ventilation, but that's how building regulations say you should achieve it, which is a poor way of ventilating a property, but that's one way of achieving it.
Phil Stricland:That's a cheap way of achieving it, but it is by far the best way of achieving it all right having a ventilation system, a mechanical ventilation system, which is basically two fans, one in, one out, is a very, very efficient, relatively cheap way of doing it and running those fans. Um, there's a small cost in doing that. Yeah, it's completely offset by the gains you'll get from not having that cold air coming into your house and the savings you'll get from the uh, from the fact that you don't need to reheat that that cold air that's coming into your house, yeah, yeah, and you can put that in any property with a, with a small cabin.
Andy Mitchell:Yeah, there's a small limit to that. So, so you measure your house, um, in terms of air leakage and there's various targets. So building regs is five meters, cubed meters, squares of fifth pascals, don't worry about that. Um, uh, generally anything below three is where your heat recovery makes sense. Um, above three, and actually your building's going to be so leaky that the energy that you recover is kind of basically going to be working against the leakiness of the building. So the heat energy you recover will be kind of lost because of the leakiness of the building. So there is a sweet spot, although the other benefit is, as Phil's described, because it's ducted. Ok, so you're bringing, you're taking out stale air from wet rooms and you're bringing in fresh air into cold rooms with the heat recovery part. In the middle there's also filters in the unit, so you will.
Andy Mitchell:As a result, if you're a hay fever sufferer, then you usually have a marked increase in improved health in terms of hay fever suffering and, equally, there is plenty of evidence now around improved eczema and improved asthma for those who suffer with that condition. Because of the quality of the air that ends up in the property. You're effectively shifting away from uncontrolled ventilation to controlled ventilation and when you do that, you benefit from cleaner air, which is often sort of overlooked sometimes because you think it's all about energy.
Phil Stricland:And again, it's not just about energy, it's also about air, and there's also a benefit in cities as well, where the air quality is not so good.
Phil Stricland:Yeah, yeah, really good point and the other thing it does it also controls the humidity in the property as well. So the humidity in properties in an uncontrolled ventilated property is completely uncontrolled. You've got the extractor fans but they're just basically sucking out the air from your bathrooms and kitchen Humidity in the property as a whole is completely uncontrolled, whereas in a property with a kind of ventilation system you can control that quite well some of them very well and a property that's controlled there, with a system like that, property that's controlled there, with a system in like that, the humidity can be controlled pretty accurately and is much more comfortable for the occupants.
Marc Smith:Yeah that's amazing.
Phil Stricland:Yeah, so often you'll find that when you're showering in the bathroom, the mirrors, the windows practically don't steam up at all do they really all?
Phil Stricland:right, so easy because the humidity is kept, you know, pretty low all the time. Yeah, so there are quite a lot of benefits to it, yeah, but, as I said, you know, you asked about village halls, but yes, you can put them in village halls as well. Um, so if you've got, uh, you know, we we put one into a village hall that was used for sports, so they had showers and stuff there for the sports facilities, which was a new build property. So, yeah, there was benefits from because they were used quite a lot for the sports showering.
Marc Smith:Yeah, very interesting that. So basically don't do what I did and put spray foam into the window vent to stop the rain coming in.
Phil Stricland:No.
Andy Mitchell:Otherwise you'll Absolutely not.
Marc Smith:So yeah, the last topic I'd like to discuss is, I suppose, electric vehicle chargers. I suppose obviously the world is going that way with cars and I think a good thing for village halls to do is to actually have charging stations on their village hall. Because you say, if you come to where I am, there's probably about I don't know, maybe five charging points in the whole of the isla sky. And so I know my partner's father drives over from holland in his electric car and he's always like where do I charge up? And everything's like a stress. So all these little rural communities could really benefit from having electric car chargers on their on their building. But how easy is it to do that? Because obviously they they take a lot of energy and and they might cost a lot to put in. So what's the process of of getting started with ev chargers for village halls?
Phil Stricland:yes, so, um. So yeah, 21 degrees. We do install um electric car chargers and they can be installed pretty much on any property um or even standalone um. But yeah, I mean they're relatively easy to install. Um there is that they obviously need power. So we need to look at the power availability on the property. So if you are remote, you know that can be a limitation. But in most cases that can be dealt with by talking to the electricity supplier. But it depends what you look. I mean, if you're looking to put in a bank of them, you know that becomes more of a challenge.
Phil Stricland:For a village hall, you know, typically you'd only require, you know one or maybe two, so that's normally not a problem. And on a domestic property, that's, you know, you normally only put. Look at putting one on, so that's not an issue at all. On a village hall, you might also be looking at how you would possibly recover some cost on that, so you might.
Marc Smith:You might be looking at some payment system around that and there are charges which do that as built in so you don't have to find an external supplier, you can just if it's built in there, you don't have to there are charges that have systems as part of that, or there's various apps and that you can also sign up to that.
Phil Stricland:Do that separately as well. So there are solutions around that that aren't too costly um, that can be combined with that as well.
Marc Smith:Um so yeah, it's not, it's not too, and there are grants as well.
Phil Stricland:Excellent, yeah, yep. So there are grants for commercial um. There were more grants, but they've scaled them back a bit. But there are still grants available for commercial situations and for people in flats and also for people who don't have driveways. So if you're parking on the road and you need to get a cable across a pavement, so there are various solutions out there where you um, with permission from the council, you can actually drop a, a kind of flap across the pavement which you can lift the flap up oh really, the cable in the flat back down uh, it does need.
Phil Stricland:Does need council permission to actually get that installed, but you can get a grant towards that as well, assuming that you can actually get your car on the road outside your house because they don't have control over who's parking outside your particular house. But yeah, so there are grants that help towards that as well.
Marc Smith:Excellent, and can you so obviously you'll also do solar. I was going to say that obviously links towards that as well.
Marc Smith:Excellent, and can you, so obviously you'll also do solar I was going to tell you that obviously links into soda as well, because yeah, so on the roof, can you charge a car directly from solar, or does it need to go into a battery bank first so you can? I'm not unsure if it's like a, if you need regular voltage and if solar panels can give you that steady supply, or does it need to go into a huge battery bank before it?
Phil Stricland:goes to the car, yeah, it does not need to go straight into it. It doesn't need to go in a battery bank. So you can team it up with solar and or a battery. You can do either, or Right. If you don't have a battery, then it just depends whether the sun is shining or not, whether you have enough solar to charge the car. So there's a limit on how quickly it will charge the car. If there's not enough solar, then it will take whatever it comes from the solar and top it up from the grid to charge the car right right, so it's automatic.
Phil Stricland:You don't need to do anything. So the ev charger will deal with all that for you. So that's not an issue and it depends how big your pv array is. So if you've got a large roof, um, you know you, you could have a large pv array on the if it's a village hall, for example, you could have a large pv array.
Phil Stricland:On the village hall, for example, you could have a large pv around the roof. So you know, if it was an overcast day you might get half of it off the roof and half of it off the grid. Charging the car right and then, or a cloud could go across and when the cloud had disappeared then it would all be coming off the off the roof again. Yeah, we don't get clouds in scotland. You don't get clouds, that's lovely, it's sunny all year.
Phil Stricland:But if you had a, battery, as you said, then obviously that gives you more flexibility. Yeah, the battery could then be charged from the solar um and you could keep the battery topped up, and if someone came and came along to charge their car, then it would obviously charge from the battery first and then, when the battery was discharged, it would then take it from the PV.
Marc Smith:Oh, that's very smart and it all does that automatically, automatically, yeah.
Phil Stricland:Then you wouldn't need to do anything. It would all be automatic. So it would be set up to be.
Marc Smith:That's amazing. So are solar panels as efficient? Sorry are they. Can they absorb um energy when the clouds are there? Is it just reduced or? Is it completely zero.
Andy Mitchell:No, no, I think people think it's always to do with, you know, direct sunlight and all the rest of it. I thought that, yeah, there's optimal times and obviously you get a lot more energy when it is uh, when it is a clear day, but, um, no, uh, you, you get um varying rates, but you, you still get it. And there's, there's some panels actually, which um will pick up um, uh, solar, uh energy, even on the reverse, assuming that you space them correctly and stuff.
Andy Mitchell:So, um, oh, very cool the technology is developing all the time, uh, but they do do run hand in hand very much with the battery for sure, as Phil's been explaining.
Marc Smith:Yeah.
Phil Stricland:And actually the most optimum is not the height of the summer, because as they get hotter they lose efficiency slightly. So you want a nice, bright, sunny, cold day. It's the optimum day.
Marc Smith:Yeah, that would be the opposite of what I would do. Yeah, it's the optimum day.
Phil Stricland:Yeah that would be the opposite of what I would have thought.
Marc Smith:Yeah, it's interesting, cold and bright.
Phil Stricland:Yeah, yeah, no, it's true yes, any sunlight helps, but the brighter it is, the better.
Marc Smith:Excellent, so 21 degrees. So where about in the country, do you cover?
Andy Mitchell:Well, it really depends on the solutions that you're looking for. So, in terms of performance, windows and doors, that's national. The same with mechanical ventilation, heat recovery, that's also national. That's in terms of design and supply with windows, we installed too. If it's the renewable technology, so that's heat pumps, batteries, voltage, solar and ev charges, then we're more geographically based, predominantly in england rather than the whole of the uk, but we also in those instances we also install. So it's the whole package together in that case, and we're constantly growing and developing all the time. So actually we are looking at developing into Scotland fairly soon.
Marc Smith:So can you do. At present do you kind of remote site visits if it's a bit out of the way, if you've got anyone in that area, if someone was asking about their village hall At the moment we're a bit limited with that.
Andy Mitchell:It really depends on the technology that you're looking for. So certainly with things like PVs and heat pumps we would struggle. We don't cover those areas. So, for example, at the moment we don't actually cover the northwest of England. So that's outside our limit. But we do, um, we do do some work with the ventilation uh systems and we do do some work with the uh the performance, uh, the windows and doors that's great.
Marc Smith:So what I will do, though, for everyone, I will put a link to your website onto the podcast page so anyone that is looking for um energy efficiency, uh help can go on there and see what you guys do, because I've been on the website a few times now before our um podcast. It is, it's a lovely website. It looks really nice actually, uh, but it's actually filled with information as well. Uh, it's a brilliant website actually. I can see the effort that's gone into that, uh, so, yeah, well, thank you very much, uh, for your time. Uh, today. Phil and andy is really, really appreciated. I've probably got twice as many questions still in my head, um, but yeah, it's well. Thank you so much for coming on. It's been a real pleasure to speak with you thanks very much thank you very much no problem.
Marc Smith:Many thanks to our headline sponsor and specialist village hall insurance provider, Allied Allied Westminster, the home of Village Guard, for making this podcast possible, and to online booking system provider, Hallmaster, who also sponsor our podcast and can be found at Hallmaster. co. uk. You've been listening to the Village Halls podcast, a unique listening community for Britain's village community and church halls and anyone interested in the vital services they provide. Don't forget entries for the Village Halls Inspiration Awards 2025 are open now until the 30th of September, so visit our website to find out more and get involved. We will be back again soon with another episode. For more information, visit thevillagehallspodcast. com, where you'll also find links to our social media pages. Thanks again for listening in and until next time. Goodbye for now.
