November meeting notes

The December meeting of Sustainable Charlbury will be at the usual location of the sofa area at The Bell Inn, Chalbury, on Monday 5 December at 8pm.

The meeting will be a short one as we get in full swing with our thermal imaging project.

We hope you can make it. The agenda will be published on Monday – here’s the minutes from the last meeting.

On such a glorious autumn Sunday, and in such a glorious place as Charlbury, what could be more charming that to open your home to visitors!

According to Liz Reason, owner of the low energy home Lower Watts House. “After a very quiet 12-2pm, I thought we’d got Open Homes all wrong. But then they started coming!”

“We think we had between 25 and 30 visitors.  We simply lost count when a lot arrived within a few minutes of one another.  But it felt very worthwhile.”

Tim Crisp’s house is something of a landmark, perhaps you could even say, a ‘Hollywood Home’, but it too was purposely designed to be heated, and on such a day, bask in the afternoon sunshine.

“We’ve had a great afternoon. Lots of really motivated people, similar numbers to Liz, and all wanting to engage in interesting discussions about heating systems, house design, their own projects etc. [It] was a really enjoyable afternoon and I think a very worthwhile exercise.”

Frances Mortimer’s Cherry Tree Cottage is more of regular Cotswold country cottage, but features a very impressive heating system, including solar pre-heated, wood chip powered burner, all make more homely with a still-not-quite-dried out, hemp wall insulation…

“I think we had eight visits – from either individuals or couples – not bad all the way out in Fawler!  Two sets of people seemed really serious about getting a wood pellet boiler and finding out all about it.  Another was planning to get solar thermal and took details of our installer.”

“I thought it was a great thing to be part of” said Frances afterwards.
Madeleine Wheare demoed her solar panels on her period Charlbury home.

“I had my first visit at 3.10pm. I thought nobody was coming so I started to bake a cake.
It finally got in the oven at 6pm!”

“Once they started coming, I had a steady trickle of pairs of visitors who were interested and interesting.”

“I ran out of promotional flyers from Suscha and from my installer Witney Solar. I was ably assisted by John Kearsey who was able to handle a lot of the technical questions and explain the difference between my solar PV panels and his (on a house in Marlborough Place).”

“Just as I was taking my signs down at 5pm, another couple arrived, so we gave them tea and biscuits and a long chat showing them the computer monitoring system.”

“On the whole a very worthwhile afternoon. Beautiful weather helped a lot. Very glad to have been part of this excellent venture.”

To download and print a guide to the homes, and suggested route, click on the image.

We look forward to welcoming you…

David Shukman (environment and science correspondent for BBC News) will be speaking at St. Mary’s on (Thursday) 13 October beginning at 8:00pm.  His audio/visual presentation will be on some of the environmental challenges facing the world today.

Since most environmental tragedies occur in far-flung corners of the globe and only come to our attention via the medium of televised reports, Mr. Shukman is uniquely qualified to bring green issues vividly to life.  The event is being sponsored by CTC, UNA, SusCha, and CWAG.  Admission is free.

Click the header if you’re seeing this on the front page!

At the Farmers’ Market we collected expressions of interest in Thermal Imaging next winter, a
Wood Buying Group and our mailing list.

Click the thumbnail image to download the 9 May 2011 meeting notes.