22 CONTEXT 182 : DECEMBER 2024 in which they wish to use their buildings? Recent research is giving us clues. Our own project is proving particularly exciting: ‘Historic Heat’, a collaborative programme between Cheribim Ltd (founded by Katie Steele) and the Diocese of Sheffield, part funded by Innovate UK, which responds to the Church of England’s aim of transitioning to net zero operation by 2030. The aim is to trial a people-first approach to retrofitting, with a particular emphasis on maximising the use of the buildings. Early indications are that the approach we have been testing could serve as a model for other types of building under other types of use, so we thought it timely to provide a brief summary here for Context readers. The project team is working directly with diocesan support officers and more than 100 managers and volunteers in 85 churches. The 20-month project is bringing front-line volunteers together with experts, through: • workshops, where the emphasis is on exploring the basic assumptions around comfort, and on co-creation: developing potential solutions for context-specific problems, inspired by history and the latest thermal physiology research • easily accessible background support via site visits to every church, a series of information videos, and continuing one-to-one support for questions and ideas • environmental monitoring using simple exterior and interior thermohygrometric parameters, and sharing the results on a realtime dashboard. The Cheribim team make the initial sensor installation during a site visit to the church, in the course of which the building and the needs of its users are discussed in detail with the church managers. We have found that empathy is perhaps the key factor in gaining stakeholder engagement. The monitoring helps the volunteers understand their building, and learn to recognise problems such as hidden water leaks that will affect the absolute humidity or how humidity responds to air-temperature changes. Since heating accounts for on average 80 per cent of a church’s energy demand,⁶ it is clearly a central target for sustainability action. At the time of writing, some 67,500 hours of space heating have already been captured through the sensing data. The dashboard graphs confirm that heating the air is a complicated and unreliable approach to thermal comfort, as well as being expensive (especially for mass buildings with tall ceilings). Some problems went unrecognised until revealed by the monitoring. For example, one churchwarden believed that their heating was responsive within about an hour, but the monitoring showed that for a 10 am service the system came on at 2 am (despite the temperature already reading 16 degrees centigrade), before reaching a peak of 20.5 degrees at 7 am, when the building was still empty. Data can be collated to extract broader insights for support officers, energy auditors and conservation architects: for example, the proportion of churches with relative humidities above 80 per cent. Algorithms have been developed to estimate never-before-known information such as heating-use hours; and AI-enabled software is helping to analyse key factors in environmental performance (anything from the building’s overall condition to the wall materials in specific areas). This is helping the diocese to plan effective use of its own resources, for example distributing funding for energy audits. The workshops have given the team the chance to work closely with a wide spectrum of stakeholders, all of whom showed themselves to One of the workshops held as part of the ‘Historic Heat’ programme in the Diocese of Sheffield to explore assumptions around comfort Environmental monitoring using simple exterior and interior thermohygrometric parameters ⁶ www. churchofengland.org/ resources/churchcare/ advice-and-guidancechurch-buildings/ heating
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