Cotentin, Paris, France. Lelystraat, Delft, Netherlands

Transcription

1 Month/Year: January/2012 As the Christmas tree LED lights bravely fights the darkness and rain that marks January 2012, the tenants can now hide behind warmer windows and under insulated roofs. Around 1800h they may be visited for the inspections of their installation. In some cases, during work hours, some carpenters are fixing the left-overs from the refurbishment. It is fair to say that it will only take a snow-blanket to have peace fully return to the area that has been such a site of activity since August. Things are less peaceful at Woonbron s office where proposals to install the condensing boilers in a different place in the dwellings fight for priority with proposals how to install the solar panels without any risks for leakages and other problems such as guarantees on the roof that was installed by the building-contractor, not Eneco, the foreseen installer. Furthermore the work of Eneco needs to fit to the preferred supplier contract that it has with Woonbron, which needs to be transferred to the 108 situations proposed at dwelling-level. On January 24 the place for the installation is tested in an apartment and approved. In the meantime Eneco starts its communication actions regarding its Display (feed-back system) on a national scale. Although not available directly, clients can pre-order and the Display, named TOON, (which is a Dutch first name that also means show ). More information on the device can be found here: The above website has a short movie that is viewed on the tenants evening January 25. The evening combines the technical work group that has been reflecting during and on the refurbishment works and the Beem-Up group that has been working on neighborhood improvement with Evert Hasselaar (OTB) and Zeno Winkels (Woonbron). The tenants express their interest in an installation offer, and the evening also has some refurbishment-evaluation characteristics that may be input in other refurbishment projects. The tenants also re-express their interest in the solar boilers, quoting that it would shield them from rising energy prices. Although it is only a small group these insights show some of the work that is being done through Beem-Up. Photo enclosed (optional) (jpg, min 300 dpi) Description: 01_2012 Delft before 02_2012 Delft before window 03_2012 Delft after

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5 BEEM Up WP2 Monthly Update template, material for the official website Covering (Month/Year): February /2012 Submitted (date): 06/03/12 The urgency of the tenant group to keep the solar boiler promise is a good motivator and in the beginning of February Eneco makes its offer to Woonbron. In the same week an independent construction advisor gives his blessing to the roof-installation. This starts two procedures within Woonbron. The first is a rather standard alignment to see if the offer is within earlier agreements and expectations. The second is more complex and deals with the fitting of the offer into the earlier investment decision by the board of Woonbron. Due to the right of the tenants to refuse the offer the total costs of the installations is unclear so all estimations need to be based on percentages. Furthermore it is not normal to check the rentability of a refurbishment project on one aspect (such as installation) so the analysis is merely done to check if the current offer and actions are within the boundaries that were used for the board decision. With the latter in mind the exact offer to the tenants is developed. February 21, the management of Woonbron Delft decides on a couple of important aspects of the offer: The European funding will be used to lower the tenants cost The solar boiler will be installed without rent increase The feedback system will be installed without rent increase Tenants will pay 55 a month for a full new installation Tenants will pay 26, 10 for a new condensing boiler depending on their current installation Tenants with an existing condensing boiler will pay 5 for the solar- and feedback system Floor insulation is offered starting from 5 a month February 24, all tenants receive the first ever Dutch Beem-UP newsletter that discloses the information listed above. The newsletter also promises two evenings in March to see examples of fitted solar boilers and the feedback Display. Behind the scenes Eneco plans the first installment and orders the Toon for the information evenings, quite a job because there s only a small batch available. Woonbron develops the contracts that will be sent out to the tenants on a personal basis. February 27, Woonbron and Eneco visit the last tenants for the inspection of the current installations. Once again it becomes very obvious that all people are happy with the increased thermal comfort of their houses. Now all I need is a warm shower one tenant insists.

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7 BEEM Up WP2 Monthly Update template, material for the official website Covering (Month/Year): March /2012 Submitted (date): 05/05/12 March starts with two presentation evenings in a new example dwelling. Eneco has installed the solar boiler & panel there, and shows its feed-back system, although it is not connected yet. The first evening draws some 30 interested tenants that are also treated to two short films about the actual working of a solar heating system. The second evening brings 20 guests. The tenants ask many good questions that relate to Woonbron s offer and to the technical details of the installation. Regarding the latter there are questions on over-heating of the system, actual savings, actual location of the new boiler in the houses and many people ask questions on PVsystems as well. All are answered by Eneco. Questions to Woonbron relate to financial aspects such as rent subsidies on the rent-increase (yes it is possible), the inclusion of the rent increase in the yearly rent increase (yes it will) and so on. The most difficult question however is posed by the tenants that own their own installation and somehow want to be part of the project. (to foreign readers: these are tenants that have installed central heating systems in their own dwelling, which is home-improvement, so usually accepted by housing associations). Woonbron does not want to offer the solar system and add it to a private installation. Maintenance and functionality of the total system with shared ownership would pose too much headaches. Therefore Woonbron develops an alternative offer where it buys the existing installation from the tenant and improves it. After that the tenant rents the system for the same price that has been offered to the others. This method guarantees that all tenants are treated in the same way and keep the possibility of owning their own system, or step over and join/ use the Beem Up offer. In the meantime the Board of Woonbron visits the project as well as two groups of employees. The message how the Energy Label A is reached with the added floor insulation, the new roofs, the new windows and the new installation is received with applause. End of March the first orders from tenants start coming in and are being transferred within Woonbron s internal circuit. The tenant group starts talking about a spring party, OTB starts with its analysis of the questionnaires, Woonbron investigates how the area can become greener and better lightened and Eneco starts up its workline.

8 BEEM Up WP2 Monthly Update template, material for the official website Covering (Month/Year): April /2012 Submitted (date): 01/05/12 As the tenants were offered a 30 day period to react to the offers made April sees a wave of contracts come and go, although it hasn t totally stopped yet at the moment of writing this update. Since the Beem Up project is a 4 year project Woonbron has no intrinsic reason to stop accepting requests, the 30 days were merely called for to stimulate action.. But in fact in all its dwellings Woonbron takes improvement proposals by tenants seriously and the Beem-Up internal procedures followed are being aligned to the normal ones. What is clear, however, is that when a tenant demands something, he s had some thoughts on it, or marketingwise, there is a bit of a pull-factor. In the Beem Up situation, where Woonbron pushes the boilers (and solar heating and display) not all tenants are interested or receptive to the information at the moment it is supplied. People from the tenant-group repeatedly tell Woonbron about forms that are misunderstood, unread, signed without address and so on. At the end of the month some 30 contracts have been signed but the situation is still dynamic with Woonbron planning to somehow speak to more people about the offer. Malcolm Gladwell s Tipping points come to mind when the older tenants start re-expressing their interests. Woonbron prepares attention in person when people living in a dwelling under or above a participant need to be warned for the noise and work anyway which should be somewhere in May. Not all owners of private installations are open to the offer Woonbron wants to make to them. There is a bit of a feeling of disappointment since the solar heating offer was very welcome but they do understand how the project works and what the position of the landlord is. As the Displays will be available for everyone they are still keen to stay involved.

9 BEEM Up WP2 Monthly Update template, material for the official website Covering (Month/Year): May /2012 Submitted (date): 01/06/12 Since the April update ended with a comment on the tenants that actually own their heating installations, it seems fair to describe what happened next. Woonbron investigated its own offer and came to the conclusion that a tenant that goes from no installation at all (gas burner and small geyser) to a new one with added solar boiler pays 55 extra rent in this project. Obviously the cost of the new installation comes in the form of a bill to Woonbron. In the Beem-Up project this bill comes from Eneco, the installer. For Woonbron, it does not matter who sends the bill. This is an important observation. It means that Woonbron could also actually buy the installation from the current tenant, if he owns it. After that deal the tenant must be ready to pay 55 extra rent per month after the transaction, since the installation is owned and guaranteed by Woonbron from that moment. The installation itself needs to be checked of course, and the proposed value excludes the depreciation. After buying the installation Woonbron upgrades it with the solar boiler from the Beem-Up project. If the condensing boiler needs an update that would have been shown in the depreciated value, so there is budget left to install a new one to. The above was proposed to the tenants that own their installation and had shown interest. For their boilers a depreciation of 18 years was used and for the radiators 40. This led to quite a good offer to the tenants since they had never depreciated on the labor put in when they build their installations. (most owned installations are installed by a friend ) On May 2 our tenants group met with consultants from Ecorys. Ecorys had been hired by Amsterdam housing association Ymere to write a report on societal advantages of refurbishment. This has to do with long term effects of living in more comfortable houses like less sickness. The tenants appreciated the workshop and in the end gave the refurbishment a 8 out of 10 regarding their new comfort. Half May the first deadline of the orders for installations was set and the counting stopped at 30 new installations. Eneco ordered its first scaffold.

10 BEEM Up WP2 Monthly Update template, material for the official website Covering (Month/Year): June to August/2012 Submitted (date): 10/09/2014 Delft project had two parts: envelope and installations. These 3 months don t have progress reports as there were no reamarkable/or ongoing works to be reported.

11 BEEM Up WP2 Monthly Update template, material for the official website Covering (Month/Year): September/2012 Submitted (date): 13/01/2014 September truly showed the inside story on working with innovations. By definition an innovation is not only something that is new; it is also its successful implementation. Nobody in Europe would claim that solar boilers are new in the Netherlands but their actual installation in our particular refurbishment did give a couple problems. As an observant one may say that most solar boilers that are installed in refurbishment situation have been installed in private houses where the owner had a particular interest in the product, ordering the extra installation. The product is installed on a special day, I would almost say: his birthday and the new owner are satisfied with the new technical greening of his life. For this project this is not so much the case. Woonbron offered the product to the tenants, of whom some 40% have accepted it, but it remains a low interest product. Basically the house must be warm, and if a solar boiler can help do it cheaply, that is welcome, but first of all, the system must function, hassle-free. Then Woonbron ordered the solar boilers within its contract with Tempus-Eneco. This contract has a strong maintenance character and did not really fit the technology of which the extra work in refurbishment is not standard, or repetitive. As Tempus-Eneco also failed to realize this, the installation became quite a mess which became less manageable because the tenants were not really interested in the product. They quite rightly expected a quick fix on their installation, as planned but the installer was not able to supply this. As the described green private-owner would probably have loved some technical solutions that took a week to deliver the tenants absolutely hated it. And as always when you have one problem there were a couple of other issues such a planning-problems, a couple of repetitive mistakes, and the esthetical problems when tenants were receiving a total new installation in their house and the piping had to be more visible than expected. There is one more example that very much shows how difficult it is to do the successful implementation part of innovation. Please read on. The first solar panel on the roof had two rather large pipes sticking out and Woonbron asked Tempus-Eneco to find a more esthetical pleasing solution. The installer fixed that and installed the first 30 panels in the new method. However these systems did not work. One tenant found the installation manual and he saw that the new method was not correct, and the reason for the defect. The installers then claimed that they had to install to Woonbron-instructions. The tenant probably showed no surprise to that. It is clear that in a situation of time-pressure and technical failure in the private area of the tenant, both he (or she) and the installer have a short term interest to deviate their pressure to a third party

12 and Woonbron is an easy candidate at such a moment. I do feel however that both men, in this example, must put their feelings in perspective. The installation and use of a solar boiler is a long term action as is the necessity to do it esthetically pleasing. One, two, or three problems on our path should not derail attention to the actual fact that once the solar panel is there, it is going to save energy for more than 20 years though. Pictures (at least two photos and/or videos are to be uploaded each month): 2 Photos enclosed (jpg, min 300 dpi) Description: : Scaffolding for solar boilers : The boiler reservoir is installed in a closet

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14 BEEM Up WP2 Monthly Update template, material for the official website Covering (Month/Year): October/2012 Submitted (date): 13/01/2014 Wickipedia on Murphy s law: According to the book A History of Murphy's Law by author Nick T. Spark, differing recollections years later by various participants make it impossible to pinpoint who first coined the saying Murphy's law. The law's name supposedly stems from an attempt to use new measurement devices developed by the eponymous Edward Murphy. The phrase was coined in adverse reaction to something Murphy said when his devices failed to perform and was eventually cast into its present form prior to a press conference some months later the first ever (of many) conferences given by Dr. John Stapp, a U.S. Air Force colonel and Flight Surgeon in the 1950s. As the September update ends with the conclusion that the 20 year life-span of a solar boiler is worth a couple of problems then October should certainly start with the identified solutions. One of the more peculiar problems was that the installations were listed as PV-systems in the administration. This led too various misunderstandings when tenants rang because the telephone operator would have the script for PV installations, and the tenants hardly the knowledge to identify his installation in the first place. Other complaints regarding the installation were dealt with on a case-for-case basis. A challenge at the more strategic level for Woonbron deals with sustainability in a different perspective. In its for living concept Woonbron offers its tenants the right to buy the dwelling under the condition that Woonbron has the first right to buy when the house is for sale again. This is interesting for the tenant sometimes because he/she can accumulate ownership/property that way and because in the Dutch situation it might be cheaper for the tenant (mortgage interest is taxdeductible in The Netherlands). For Woonbron the concept is good because home-owners in general take better care of their house and neighbourhood, because people with rising income can stay in the neighbourhood in the concept and because the sales create cash-flow. However investments in sustainability are not transparent in the pricing of a house. In other words: if Woonbron invests 5000, the value of the house does not raise with the same amount. If Woonbron then sells the house, there is a clear loss. This raises the question how far Woonbron s investments in its stock should go, when using the for living concept. In the case of the Beem-Up project the answer is clear and every house possible gets the full installation. However for the full organisation ( dwellings) the answer is not so easy and should probably incorporate a vision on the total specific area and strategic vision on it, when investment decisions are being made. In the Beem-up streets the work is continued and improved as the winter approaches. Before the

15 real snow comes a number of 46 should be reached. Pictures (at least two photos and/or videos are to be uploaded each month): 1 Photo enclosed (jpg, min 300 dpi) Solar Panel Solar Panel

16 BEEM Up WP2 Monthly Update template, material for the official website Covering (Month/Year): November/2012 Submitted (date): 13/01/2014 There is absolutely no abundance of research-information on the effects of energy displays, energymonitoring equipment or energy feed-back systems at household level. The reason for this is quite straightforward; the equipment only just exists for usage at household level. Because of that there is no specific set of parameters that define the products, although they all have something to do with showing energy usage. Some feed-back systems only measure electricity use, no gas, but others fail to measure heat. Furthermore some systems provide straight kwh's or Joules while others convert the energy to money and yet other models may just use a colour scheme, usually implying red is bad, and green is good. The diversity in typology and in the solutions offered would by nature also lead to different efficiencies of course. A 'good one' might save 20% and a 'bad one' only 1%, but of course, real life is not that simple. Different people react differently to impulses and so the 'perfect device' may not be the same for everybody. And for everybody who is part of the household. Furthermore the early adopters of the new home-devices are usually volunteering which may give them a-typical behaviour. They may, for example, have more interest in energy saving than your average person. The Beem-Up target for the feedback system applied was set at 15% energy savings. This is 15% after the refurbishment, so a modest amount compared to the amount of energy that could be saved before the refurbishment. It is interesting though that after investing thousands of euros in the roofs, the floors, glazing, new heating installations and solar boilers it is still possible to bring in a 150 device and save 15% of the usage by influencing tenant behaviour. From the beginning of the project Woonbrons only interest has been to cooperate with Eneco and use Eneco's feedback system named the Toon. The device is a flat, touch screen wall mountable thermostat that takes its place on the wall like an old-school thermostat. Its extra functions are not only about showing electricity or gas use in time or current but there's also a real time weather forecast and traffic information link. Although both are of course available on a modern mobile telephone the extras are added to keep tenants coming back to the device, for example when they are about to travel and choose between bike and car. Pictures (at least two photos and/or videos are to be uploaded each month): 1 Photo enclosed (jpg, min 300 dpi) Eneco Toon

17 Eneco Toon

18 BEEM Up WP2 Monthly Update template, material for the official website Covering (Month/Year): December/2012 Submitted (date): 13/01/2014 At the start of November, the first mailing was send to the 108 households and the actual installing of the devices started in December. Although the Toon (energy-display) had been present in the example dwelling and at various meetings since the start of the refurbishment, its details were only to unfold now. Of course these details were know at the Woonbron office a little earlier and it was there that the details had to be put in a letter. One of the more complex characteristics is for example that the device has live updates to improve its functionality, or simply when new energy prices come into account. These updates are paid for during the Beem-Up project, but form the tenet has to pay the 3, 5 a month him herself. If they do not want this the device will work with fewer functions but still be a good thermostat. To sum up the letter had to contain: The functions of the device. The fact there is no costs for its installation. Free-updates for two years. Tenants had to buy electricity/gas at Eneco. Tenants must have wifi. To deal with the issue of privacy and other legal aspects the full ' product characteristics document' of 32 pages had to be included. At the end of December some 30 households had ordered the device and some 15 were already installed. Both Eneco and Woonbron were a little disappointed by these numbers and discussed this with the tenant group. These discussions were to be continued in January. Pictures (at least two photos and/or videos are to be uploaded each month): 1 Photo enclosed (jpg, min 300 dpi) Installed Toon.

19 Installed Toon