Speaker 1 (00:00.526)
Hello everyone and welcome to the My Local Marketer podcast. I'm Maria and today I'm speaking with Tony Cowling and Tricia Marcuse from Draughtbusters. Tony, Tricia, welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Maria. We're happy to be here. I think first and foremost, the question is, what is Draughtbusters? Draughtbusters is an organisation that supports people who are in energy poverty in a very practical way by actually going into their homes and draft-proofing them for them.

We provide the service and the materials and administration and backup behind. How did it start? Because it's a charity, is that right? Do you charge people for going in? We're not a charity, we're a community group and we don't charge people for going in, although they sometimes offer to pay us. The program started with a call from Reading Borough Council to come up with a good idea.

that would be useful in the town to help in the green domain. And we applied for draft busters and we won a reasonable amount of funding and started from that was probably about 2013-14. So we've been going 10-12 years now. So it started as a community project and been going for a long time so clearly you must be making an impact. Yes.

probably impacted on a thousand people, 500 homes in Reading, but we're having an influence further afield that we'll tell you about later. leads into sort of a next important question, which is what are the most common causes of draft in a home? It's really difficult because every home is different and we have a lot of trouble in an increasing number of homes now with something called trickle ventilators, which are there to provide ventilation. They're either supposed to be

fully open, half open or closed and what we're finding is that they're drafty when closed and it's driving us insane. We also find leaky loft traps, holes in the airing cupboard ceiling, increasingly commonly drafts underneath quite often newly fitted front doors with a draft coming under the threshold and out right beside the doormat because there's a crack and gap underneath it. It's just too difficult to say

Speaker 1 (02:19.084)
what you're going to have in any particular house, but those are some of the common ones. We find drafts around pipes from kitchen sinks going to outside, all sorts of horrible air vents that have been discontinued and not used anymore, but are still there and letting drafts into homes. We've got a whole list of things on our website that you can look for and a good lot of help about how to find them if you're not in our category. So in Reading,

Do we have a mix of older homes and new builds or is it like 50-50? What do you find is the mix in Reading with what people are facing the issues? Probably both in Reading and nationally the vast majority of homes have been there for a long time. The number of new homes is only a percent or even less than a percent of the housing stock. So the vast majority of our homes are older.

Unfortunate thing is that it doesn't automatically follow that a new home is not drafty. We find drafts in new homes, which is seriously disappointing. Someone has a home whether it's a new home or an old home by the sounds of it. It could be drafty. They think, I've got to call Draughtbusters and call you in. What is the process for how someone contacts you or books in? So we have a referral system which comes via Reading Borough Council.

via Reading Citizens Advice and via Reading Berkshire Hospital and through various doctors, debt advice, surgeries, some churches and community organisations. And those referrals, in theory, come to us automatically checked for energy poverty. And then we arrange to go and visit them. And when we visit, we explain before we come that we'll be looking around your property.

We'll be assessing it for drafts, we'll come and talk to you about what we'd like to do and if appropriate we will do it there and then. We're usually gone within an hour and leaving a reasonably draft-proof house and the clients are over the moon. We got some good feedback through the website. So quick question before we go to Tricia. I've seen the video online for the YouTube video with you going and you pointing out all these different things I'd never considered before.

Speaker 1 (04:33.984)
Did you gain all the experience to do this? Is it just you're interested in drafts or did it you started and then you had to do research into drafts and causes because there was a lot that I wasn't expecting in that video. I'm going to go off on one. When I was first married, I was lying on my sofa and I thought I was going mad because the carpet seemed to be bulging up in the air a bit like a wave and the gas fire was flickering and then it would go down again. And each time I'd feel colder and colder and that kind of made me

next day take the carpet up and do masking tape between all the joins between the floorboards which put an end to that draft and then when I retired I thought these things are still happening today we've got drafts coming in under skirtings through floorboards round window frames loft hatches everything and the call from Reading Borough Council kind of galvanized the action saying let's do this and I was a builder for 29 years so I know

how difficult it is not to leave cracks and gaps when you build something. And I've taken apart other people's building work and found the most horrendous gaps and cracks behind what we've been taking apart, even in relatively speaking, new houses. And so we've learned effectively on the job. I was experienced before I started and I could do draft proofing because it's part of a builder's remit. But it's really not any more difficult than looking

seeing, understanding what you see and then deciding what the best solution to curing it is. Curiosity. It's really the best thing for driving any successful venture. So well done on that. Trisha, I think over to you now. One of your main roles in Draughtbusters is you help to promote what Draughtbusters do and you help with the admin side. Is that right? So how do you try and promote Draughtbusters?

Well, we've done it on various methods. We have leaflets and posters and the leaflets are in Citizens Advice Bureau and some libraries and various churches. And those are to get people to grab one and then maybe they will then contact Energy Support Unit or Citizens Advice. Those organizations in particular have got their own advertising strategy to get people.

Speaker 2 (06:56.99)
fuel poverty to come and talk to them. So most of our work comes through referrals and they just email us name and address and telephone number. Occasionally we get a little bit of extra information at the start but usually it's up to me to make that contact and try and grab some information about the type of problems people are having. Then we've done things last year we paid for

You know, on Reading Buses, there's that video screen in the bus. So we had an advert up on there for about a month. Can't say it seemed to do much good, but I would also have to say that the first two weeks our advert suffered from quite a lot of the problems that many of those adverts do, that there's too much information and you don't really get time to process it all. So I don't think we'll try that one again.

I was at an eco-fair at St James's Church a couple of Saturdays back and various events around the town that we just go to and put up our display boards and hope for the best, including, we had them up in the Minster Church for example during the carol concert season one winter. You're trying to find somewhere where people are not rushing past and that's quite difficult because either people are in a hurry

or they're sitting down looking at their mobile phones. So finding that gap in the organisation is a little hard. So this year, we will continue those processes, but we also want to try and promote our website to people who aren't in fuel poverty, but could make a major difference in their home by doing the DIY work themselves. But almost everyone

has a problem that if you go to a DIY superstore, it's a bit like yogurts in the supermarket. You have an entire aisle full of all sorts of plastic or rubber or this or that and this size and that size and do you want one of these or do you want one of those? The starting point is I'd like to do something but how do I choose what to buy and how to apply it? And that's what we would like to be able to promote with.

Speaker 2 (09:22.016)
some of those organizations. If you go onto our website, the first video you can look at is Tony going around a house, showing people what to look for, how to tell where there are problems. And maybe he'll give those super tips in a moment. And then we've got lots of other videos saying, you know, if it's a problem with your windows, this is exactly where you put the draft briefing strip. Because

It's been extraordinary just how many YouTube bad advice videos are out there saying, this is what you do. And you could think, no, it isn't. That's entirely wrong. So those sorts of things we'd like to do. And also going to try seeing whether we can get some companies interested in not so much having a Draughtbusters team to go out to the wider environment, but to

help their own staff. If you've got 50, 100 people working in your organisation, that's a lot of houses that can be done. But I'm going to just hand back to Tony because we've gone out of Reading.

So probably for about 10 years of Draughtbusters we didn't have very much interest even in Reading. My dream was to have 10 groups in Reading. We've now got three, possibly four in Reading. But over the last two and a half years we've seen 15 groups forming the towns immediately surrounding Reading. And we've helped them to start their groups by going out and doing a talk, doing a presentation, a workshop.

and a seminar and then a practice draft buster and then their groups are autonomous and running and functioning. And further afield we've had inquiries from the Isle of Wight who run a slightly different way of doing it which we don't wholeheartedly approve of but we like that they're doing something. And in Scotland in both Dumfries and Galloway and Edinburgh we've got draft busters groups. Dumfries are leading the way with kind of green and eco stuff and they're very enthusiastic.

Speaker 1 (11:32.558)
and they live in quite a cold part of the country where the need is great. We've recently been to Royston near Cambridge and done some training there and they will probably set up two groups there during this winter season. And just north of Oxford we've helped them set up a group. It's sometimes a little bit difficult between Reading and Oxford so we're pleased that there's some kind of cooperation and interest coming from the Oxford area and they do know about draft busters there.

That's brilliant. The research that you've done and how you've been able to go further afield. And I think you're absolutely right. Learning from people who live in Scotland or these colder places, they'll have tips that they naturally just do because they have to because it is much colder up there than it is down here. So yeah, that's really good. You've given a lot of good tips there on how you promote the group or how you've been able to get word of mouth out there. What challenges have you faced? I think you touched upon some of those.

before, Tricia, could you just go into a bit more detail with the challenges that you've faced in running the group or getting in front of the right people?

I suppose the biggest challenge is getting people to accept the sort of work we do and that we're for real. There are so many scams out there these days that you turn up as an event and say, we're going to come into your house and we're going to do all this work for you free of charge. And they say, come on, we've heard this one on the radio. No way do we want anything to do with you lot. So.

Being referred through Reading Borough Council and Citizens Advice is really crucial because if we just went out there and said, hey, look what we can do for you, I don't think many people would take us at face value. And quite rightly so, because I'm sure there's somebody else who's trying to get into their house. The other slight problem we have is there is a sort of magic wand feeling.

Speaker 2 (13:32.736)
I have had a couple of very disgruntled people who say, all you're doing is standard DIY stuff. And I say, absolutely, anybody can do that. This is the entire point of the exercise. There is no reason that any person cannot do this in their own home. We are simply offering to do it for people in fuel poverty, but that website is there to help everyone do it. So those would probably be the two biggest challenges.

It would be nice if more GPs. We have this sort of social prescribing things and this is one of the health issues and it's a shame that it's not just picked up. The other thing is expectations. There is a strange thing of if you're only going to save me 10 % then that's not enough type of thing. We're not offering to make your house

beautifully warm without any requirement for energy to be put into it. We're simply saying we could possibly get your house warmer by two degrees without you having to spend anything on extra energy. And you may think that's not very much, but all of the advice on saving money for energy is turn your thermostat down by one degree. So if we can get you to a point where you can turn your thermostat down by two degrees,

That's actually a significant thing on your bill. And that's maybe is that's the sort of thing we can do for you, but we can't suddenly find the money for putting in full insulation, double glazing, this, that and the other. This is the starting point. And it's the starting point for anything that you're going to do in the future, whether you're going to do it yourself or you're in fuel poverty. But if you want to think in terms of having heat pumps or

this or that. The first starting point is draft proofing followed by insulation. And if you're very lucky and come to one of our events, you will be able to buy a book written by the man sitting next to me on draft proofing and insulation, which covers absolutely everything you could possibly want to know. And it's had recommendations from people in America saying this is the greatest thing they've ever read. So

Speaker 2 (15:57.966)
and that's only 15 quid, what better investment could you have? So, I mean, those two things are really where you need to start. But all of the talk is about these bigger, high capital projects, which are not going to work usefully unless you've done these basics first.

So you mentioned Tony's excellent book on draft proofing. Do you have any other tips that you'd like to point people towards? Maybe you don't qualify for your scheme, but they're interested in making their home less drafty.

Tony mentioned an awful lot of places where draughts can be found. I'm going to add one to it, which is modern houses don't have them, but an awful lot of the housing stock have hearths and chimneys, and this is a way of losing an enormous amount of heat very quickly from your room. You can buy a proprietary product called a chimney sheep, which is basically a wadge of

stuff which you stick up the chimney with a loop on the bottom so you can pull it out in the summer. Tony will say well yes you can do that but if you've got an old pillow and a plastic bag put the pillow in the plastic bag and stuff that up the chimney but don't forget to take it out in the summer. There is also a potential for a lot of damp to get into the house if you've just got something blocked up that used to be an open ventilation channel. I would also say that

If you have the kitchen fitters in, they're the people who left the air brick behind the kitchen cupboard that you can't see any longer. You just know that when you go into your kitchen, it seems to be incredibly cold and there's a draft coming from somewhere. Have a look at our video. This is what to look for because the first thing is to identify what it is you need to do. I'm also going to talk a little bit about condensation. We have had

Speaker 2 (17:57.838)
a huge number of houses in the last winter, which was a very wet winter. Problems with condensation and mould, so a health problem as well as a what on earth do we do with this? If you are going to have a more airtight house, you have to do some proper ventilation. All of us produce moisture just by living. Cooking produces moisture, washing produces moisture. That has to leave the

So, yes, there are some properties where the problem is, it's a leaking roof, it's a problem with the mortar, it's a structural problem. But there's an awful lot of people who actually are adding to their condensation without really realising it. So, the sort number one tip, I suppose, would be do not dry your washing on the radiator and open the windows.

every day. I for certain tend to ventilate my kitchen while I'm cooking. You can set your own pattern. The German system is you run down the house, fling open every single window for about five minutes and then shut them all and do that every day. And people are worried about doing that because they say, well, I'm going to lose heat. And yes, you will. But the other thing to remember is that if you've got a lot of moisture in your house,

then you're heating the water as well as the room. So getting rid of the moisture is actually going to reduce your heating costs as well to get to the same temperature. I'm not saying you have to have the windows open all the time, but you mustn't allow that to accumulate.

Brilliant tips there, thank you Tricia. So what is coming up for Draughtbusters going forward? Do you have any plans to develop it? What are your thoughts? We will continue to develop locally in the area and probably a little bit beyond. I foresee doing more training and workshops and practice sessions and helping people to set up Draughtbusters groups. I think I'd like to digress for a moment onto the economics of Draughtbusters because

Speaker 1 (20:10.574)
We help people in energy poverty. They cannot afford to buy the draft strips. They're usually two or three times our cost if they buy them from B &Q or a DIY store because we buy direct from manufacturers. Our costs per home are £22. We don't charge any labour and that cost has basically been the same since we started because we're buying cheaper now than we were when we first started. If you draft proof your home, you will save hundreds of pounds.

We've had people who've been saving 600 pounds a year, some people 200 pounds a year and that kind of 200 pounds between 150 and 250 pounds is an easy saving to make by draft proofing your home and it only cost us 22 pounds to do it so that's a one-off cost for a repeat saving so you'll get that saving certainly for five years and probably long

So I love the economics of Draughtbusters. There's a business there for somebody to start at some point if you can get at the money that's been saved. And if you can't, it's really a good thing to do to draft-proof your home. So what forwards would you like to give our listeners today? We would love people to volunteer to help us. There's loads of things to do. We could do with help with managing and organizing visits, help with our communications.

and you could become a draft buster and I've found being a draft buster enormously satisfying and worthwhile. And I generally only do a few hours on a Friday afternoon during the heating season so it's only five or six months a year and help from you would be absolutely brilliant even once every few weeks on an afternoon would be great and the clients that we see, to them it's invaluable. At the moment we're covering

there's an increasing demand. There's more people in energy poverty now in Reading than there ever has been. Well, like you said, it's satisfying, but I suppose you gain a lot of skills at the same time that you can apply to your own home. So beneficial for everyone. Tricia, Tony, thank you so much for your time today. I'm going to point everyone directly to the Draughtbusters website because I think, Liza, I've had a look and you do have some brilliant tips on there, which I think everyone needs, whether you're in energy poverty or not. It's just a more sustainable green way that I think everyone needs to go in. So thank you.

Speaker 1 (22:33.698)
Thank you Maria, that's been lovely today.