ABSTRACT
The chapter focuses on questions about the affordability and effectiveness of new heating which is intended to offer energy and cost-saving relative to old expensive and ineffective electric storage heating. Successive programmes, funded sometimes through general taxation and more recently from levies on energy bills, have pursued improved standards for social housing, including replacement heating systems, draught proofing and building insulation. This chapter focuses on energy costs and the coping strategies employed by people living on a north Glasgow estate, one of the ten per cent most deprived areas in Scotland. The scheme was financed in part under the Community Energy Saving Programme (CESP), a UK-wide scheme that required energy companies to achieve carbon savings in deprived areas. This chapter examines how people on a Glasgow housing estate experience living through housing innovation and the replacement community energy systems for heating. Both before and after installation, people asked residents what was most important to them about the new heating.
