We’re getting good interest in engineers and community groups wanting to take part in the programme, and an unexpected surprise – some of them are outside the UK. They are very keen to take part, and we’d love to be able to support them, but it’s not something we can do at this time.
HeatHack’s experience so far is entirely based in one small part of Scotland. One reason why we have to limit participants to the UK is we know that climates, building construction, and how community groups operate is very different elsewhere. We also would be unable to match engineers to community buildings in other locales because we do not have any local networks for finding them.
We will be releasing our materials openly for re-use on the internet. Anyone can follow along using a commercial logger, but we will also release instructions for building cheap thermal monitoring devices from electronic components, as these are very useful for diagnosing inefficiencies in energy systems. That will make it possible for anyone to follow along, but without the same level of support as the groups that are officially involved. The experience on less support should be very much better from September 2023, because then the supported groups will have told us where our written materials fall short!
In around a year, we will be discussing with our partners what our next steps are. Some engineers outside the UK have already expressed an interest in taking our materials to see whether they can be adapted. We have to see how this programme goes before we can say anything about what happens next, but this is something we can begin to explore next year.