From Spring 2010 Rachel and her family have been building a 1.5 – 2 storey family home approx 200sqm with straw bale walls in Newmarket. Their aim has been to build a low impact, energy efficient, healthy home, with a garden designed around the production of fruit and vegetables.  Once complete, they intend to measure the building’s performance. They are combining traditional materials like lime and clay; waste materials, such as recycled newspaper; natural materials, like straw; and modern technology, such as solar panels and a heat pump. In addition, they want to design the building to breathe, thus avoiding the use of moisture barriers, and minimise the use of materials with high embodied energy, such as concrete. They hope that the result will be a super insulated breathing building, that takes advantage of solar gains, encourages natural ventilation, and has a small environmental footprint. Follow their progress over the next 12-18months on their blog.

Their house is still under construction, and Rachel has been kind enough to offer CCF a tour of the site! If you’d like to come along please contact beejal@cambridgecarbonfootprint.org (booking necessary)

Friend’s Meeting House, Jesus Lane

Follow the Manhattan-based Beavan family as they abandon their high consumption 5th Avenue lifestyle and try to live a year while making no net environmental impact.

Mornings at the Beavan household look pretty ordinary. The Beavans have breakfast, brush their teeth and get 2-year-old Isabella ready for day care.

But look a little closer: There’s no morning paper, no morning television and no coffee. Coffee isn’t grown locally, so it’s off-limits.

The film screening will be followed by discussion.

Donations welcome towards the cost of room hire

Venue: St Luke’s Centre, Victoria Road,
Cambridge CB4 3DZ

Following on from our revamp meeting, interested volunteers will be meeting to discuss and share ideas for eco-renovations events and start planning to make them happen!

If you’d like to get involved contact beejal@cambridgecarbonfootprint.org

Are you interested in CCF’s Eco-Renovations and Climate Friendly Homes Projects?

Changes are afoot! At this meeting we’ll be discussing the future of the Eco-ren and CFH projects, it will be after our AGM where we will be discussing the future of CCF as a much more volunteer-run organisation.

We’d love to get a bigger, more diverse, group organising these two projects, and have them working alongside each other more, so we’d like to invite YOU to come along to get involved.

Thursday 26th May

7.30 – 9.30pm

Venue – CB2 (Norfolk St) we’ll be upstairs!

Email beejal@cambridgecarbonfootprint if you think you might come along so we can get an idea of numbers!

This meeting will be a discussion meeting and ideas generating session for interested volunteers to find out more. It’s not a commitment and you don’t need to come with ideas (although it’s great if you do!) So come along and let the creativity flow!!

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Eco-Renovations Team

As part of our Eco-Renovations project volunteers organise talks, workshops and trips. You don’t need to be an expert to get involved!

Examples of volunteer tasks include:
- Working with the eco-ren group to come up with new and fresh ideas for events
- Inviting and liasing with speakers
- Working with the office to book venues
- Working with the office to publicise events
- Organising places to visit for trips
- Organising transport for trips
- Setting up before events, meeting and greeting attendees, and making refreshments at events – Collecting donations after events

Climate Friendly Homes and Thermal Imaging

The Climate Friendly Homes Project provides a free service to householders to help them make practical plans to reduce your carbon emissions.

Volunteer surveyor training prepares volunteers so that they are able to offer:

• A free individualised report offering suggestions and advice about what can be done to cut the carbon footprint of your home, and save on bills.
• Free loan of an electricity monitor, and help installing it – because seeing how much energy you use helps you cut down
• Information tailored to your circumstances on grants, suppliers and discount
• Advice and support.

We also train volunteers to use our thermal imaging camera. This detects infrared   radiation and produces images like this one, enabling users to see the key areas where heat is being lost.

Once volunteers have been trained they are able to make bookings to borrow the camera.