Design and Delivery of Level Three Energy Efficiency in Traditional and Historic Buildings

Ingleton Wood were commissioned to devise and deliver the Level Three ‘Energy Efficiency in traditional buildings’ course by the Tywi Centre and Carmarthen County Council.

Our methodology was to utilise a blended learning approach to the course content, resulting in an engaging and interactive curriculum. We provided opportunities to get hands on with materials and buildings; focusing on experiential learning, complemented by a range of online and printed resources that enable the more complex topics to be revisited and discussed.

Site visits and practical experience are a central part of establishing competence in this area and therefore we incorporated visits to suitable buildings and locations.

A visit on the first day to a high street, town, or village provides an ideal backdrop to focus on the course content for module one; identifying the different types and ages of buildings, listed and non-listed buildings, conservation areas etc. This provides an important opportunity to identify building defects, regional typologies, and materials, along with regional risks such as flooding or exposure.

Working in teams in this way allows peer-to-peer learning and promotes the collaborative mindset required to deliver successful energy efficiency projects in practice.

Ingleton Wood supplied a range of real-world before and after retrofit case studies that the course leader has been directly involved with and can discuss in detail. This includes listed and unlisted buildings to develop an understanding of the difference between buildings of traditional construction and the legal meaning and implications for listed buildings and those in conservation areas.

We believe that a key part of successful delivery is to balance an established understanding of traditional building performance, and conservation practice where applicable, with cutting-edge research and knowledge. The range of national scale research projects our team has been involved in allowed us to supplement the course to include findings from the latest studies from CIBSE, universities, and government. Pre-recorded webinars were generated covering the performance of retrofit measures for traditional buildings, building performance evaluation and long-term retrofit performance, and impacts of pre and post-retrofit maintenance.

The design of the course was undertaken over two months, and we then delivered two courses through the Autumn of 2024.