Estimating the environmental impact of home energy visits and extent of behaviour change

The environmental impact of the programme was estimated in terms of carbon emissions abated and on average, for each household in the study, a visit led to an average carbon abatement of 146 kgCO2. The majority of this was achieved through the installation of small energy saving measures. The impact of the visits on the installation of significant measures was negligible, as was the impact on behaviour change. Therefore, these visits did not overcome the barriers required to generate behaviour change or the barriers to the installation of more significant energy saving measures. Given this, a number of recommendations are proposed in this paper, which could increase the efficacy of these home energy visits.