Let’s sort out your energy challenge with our champions
Our passion is helping everyone achieve warm, comfortable, energy-efficient homes and actively supporting a fair transition to a low-carbon economy. We do this by helping you with free and impartial home energy advice. For example this covers: energy bills, insulation, mould problems, solar panels, heat pumps or anything else about home energy.
Energy Champions is a Reading Hydro community benefit scheme.
What we do
Struggling with bills? Our Energy Champions replace your light bulbs with low-energy LED bulbs free of charge. We also help troubleshoot heating system problems and offer personalised advice on saving energy in your home.
We will address your challenge by putting your needs first. We offer thermal imaging and other home energy audit techniques. We can check bills and tariffs and give hints and tips on saving energy. We can give advice on larger investments, such as insulation, solar panels or heat pumps.
How we help
We provide help over the phone and in your home. Our advisors provide personalised, unbiased advice. We won’t sell anything to you and we don’t charge you anything. The scheme is only supported via charitable giving and our passion to help everyone achieve warm, comfortable, energy-efficient homes.
We are trained to a City and Guilds standard and have a great network of people, who are happy to share their knowledge and experience of making home energy improvements.
How it works
We always start with a friendly chat over the phone to discuss your challenge. Depending on what you need, we’ll arrange a home visit. We may also suggest other local services who could help you as well.
A team of two advisors will schedule a home visit with you, for 90 minutes. They will look at the paperwork with you and usually do a ‘walkaround’ inspection of the property. We bring all the equipment we need. After the visit, we’ll leave you with a personalised plan for your next steps.
More about our services for householders
Free LED bulb swap
If you live in Reading and are struggling with your bills, we supply and fit low energy light bulbs to replace older ones. Our volunteers will visit your home, fit a bulb you’re happy with and take away the old ones for recycling. Its as simple as that.
We regret that we can’t replace dimmable bulbs, non-standard bulbs and built-in lighting.
The giveaway is limited to five free light bulbs per household in the Reading area.
Help with heating systems
If you’re struggling with your heating system, our volunteers can come to your home. We’ll take a look at the problem with you, help navigate those fiddly controls and resolve any issue we can before using a professional service. We aren’t professional heating engineers, but we can help with many things such as bleeding air out of a system.
We reserve the right to withdraw this service at any time and we only operate in the Reading area.
Find hidden heat loss and draughts with thermal imaging
Thermal imaging is a fantastic visual tool that lets you see where your home is losing heat. We use it on the outside of a house to show where heat might be ‘leaking out’ of a building and we use it on the inside to look for draughts and missing insulation.
Our volunteers will help inspect the property with you in order to help interpret the photographs and suggest areas to look at. You can keep the images by recording them directly on any compatible smartphone (a downloaded app is required). Unfortunately, we can’t leave the camera with you because we’re busy using it at the next home! Please try downloading the app before your visit.
This service can only be offered in the winter when it’s cold outside and your heating is on. We reserve the right to withdraw this service at any time and we only operate in the Reading area.
Get energy advice for your entire home
Challenge us to help you!
We’ve got a great network of people who have experience in making all sorts of home energy improvements and will want to help. We also have memberships of professional groups that could help you with whole home advice or EPC certificates where necessary.
Interested in finding out more? Please contact us.
Contact us
Get in touch with your energy advice request:
Email us at energy.champions@readinghydro.org
Call us on:
(the cost is the same as a national call to a landline number and they are often included in inclusive call packages on mobile and landline plans.)
Meet the team
The volunteer Energy Advisers (pictured) worked together to devise new services to help anyone facing an energy challenge in Reading.
Austin (third from right) began Energy Champions as part of Reading Hydro’s innovation group: “At the start, the aim was simply to pool local advice from people who have pioneered energy solutions at home. Our friends and neighbours naturally tell us the ups and downs of what they did and of course both are valuable. What we’ve ended up doing is training volunteers so that what we offer is qualified advice and we remain independent of any suppliers. We’re growing our team of experts; its incredible just how readily people have signed up and given their time for absolutely nothing. We’re sticking to the mantra of free services at point of use and we’ll see how long we can keep that up for!”
Volunteering opportunities
We take a lot of time to onboard and train our Energy Advisers to a high standard. We also have other supporting roles and there’s more opportunity across the wider hydro scheme.
If you’re interested in volunteering, check out our current vacancies. If you don’t see a vacancy that suits you, feel free to get in touch.
Financial support and partnerships
The Energy Champions scheme startup was funded by Younity, through their Powering Communities Fund. It takes the profits from wind, solar, and hydro energy and uses them to support things like keeping food banks stocked, helping neighbours stay warm, saving on energy bills, teaching kids about the green transition, and more.
In partnership with:
JUST-Systems aims to place people at the centre of change, accelerating action on decarbonisation, vibrant local economies, wellbeing, and social justice. This will reduce emissions and grow places as part of a people-centred transition to Net Zero.
The partnership with Reading Hydro will help JUST-Systems to inform other communities, businesses, and decision makers and offer Reading Hydro insight into solutions that could be trialled or scaled up.
JUST-Systems is funded until 2030 by UK Research and Innovation and delivered via a partnership with Universities.
CEE provide Reading Hydro with access to the Fairer Warmth platform.
This provides Energy Champions with a customer data management system and it allows householders to explore ideas for their property via the online portal.
Reading Hydro is an advocate member of Retrofitworks.
Retrofitworks provide an end-to-end green home improvement service for homeowners who are funding their own works. Their professional Retrofit Assessors and Coordinators have been helping homeowners to plan and refurbish their homes since 2012.
