Home Energy Saving Kit
About this good practice
The Home Energy Saving Kit (HESK) can be used to encourage citizens to carry out actions by monitoring their own household energy use activities. Additionally given the cost of energy upgrades, the HESK enables the user, identify low-cost measures that can be installed, resulting in cost savings.
The kit contains a thermal camera, thermometer, stopwatch, radiator key, humidity/temperature monitor and plug in energy monitor. Additionally, the kit has a user manual, feedback survey and advice to reduce energy use in the home.
The stopwatch focuses on water conservation by measuring the water-flow rate over 10 seconds to ensure optimal water usage in household outlets. The energy monitor measures the final energy demand of an appliance. The radiator key is used to ensure the radiator is working correctly. The thermometer is used to check how well the fridge or freezer is working. The temperature/humidity sensor highlights if the heat is too high or if dampness is affecting the air quality in the room. The thermal camera is used to identify cold bridges in your home. Identifying high energy uses can empower citizens to carry out simple actions. For example, replacing draught stripping in windows or a fridge that is working overtime due to age or malfunction.
Citizens benefit from the activity through increased knowledge of energy use, building self-sufficiency actions and installing low-tech/low-cost actions in their own home to reduce resource costs.
Resources needed
Each library that has the HESK available for rent is offered free training in its use to disseminate the information to citizens. Maintenance of the kit is very low-tech with batteries for the items as the most common requirement. Citizens can borrow the kit for free for approximately two weeks.
Evidence of success
The Home Energy Saving Kit (HESK) is a citizen engagement tool to enable citizens to self monitor energy use in their homes. First rolled out to 10 public libraries in Dublin in 2015, the HESK proved easy to use and popular as a method to empower citizens in identifying high energy use in their home. The initiative was expanded nationally to public libraries in 2021. Waiting lists are common in libraries to borrow the kit. Currently, there are 582 HESK’s available to rent in Ireland.
Potential for learning or transfer
The HESK is designed to highlight the most common areas of wasted household energy use in Ireland. Other European regions may need to adapt the energy kit contents to the geographic region given the different climatic conditions. In Ireland, the temperature and humidity sensor is important to ensure the home is properly heated and ventilated. However, in warmer climates, ventilation and heating may not be as important given the external factors.
Additionally, the kit could be expanded to include items such as tap flow restrictors, pipe insulation, or draught stripping to implement low-tech actions.