Loco Home Retrofit is trying to answer this through a new citizen science project, delivered in collaboration with the GALLANT project at the University of Glasgow. Here, Chris Carus, managing director of Loco Home Retrofit, explains more about the project, and how they’re calling on university students and public health researchers to get involved.

A healthy home is about much more than having four walls and a roof. It is about whether we can keep warm without worrying about the cost. Whether we can breathe clean air. Whether our homes are dry, comfortable and quiet enough to sleep and work in. Whether the way we heat our homes supports our wellbeing rather than contributing to anxiety about bills or climate change.

That is why this year’s theme for Scottish Housing Day – Healthy Homes, Healthy Futures – feels particularly relevant to a project currently underway at Loco Home Retrofit in collaboration with Gallant Project at Glasgow University. We’re calling for university students and public health researchers to participate in our citizen science project.

What is actually happening inside our homes?

We know that Scotland has a huge challenge ahead in improving the performance of its existing housing stock. Loco Home Retrofit is a Glasgow-based, member-led cooperative and Community Interest Company. We work with households, tradespeople and professionals to make retrofit more accessible, helping people navigate the technical, financial and practical challenges of improving their homes. Our approach starts with the whole building — looking at condition and repairs, insulation, airtightness and ventilation — and then considers low-carbon heating such as heat pumps as well as solar PV and batteries.

But when we talk about retrofit, we can sometimes become focused on energy consumption, carbon emissions and energy performance certificate (EPC) ratings. These things matter. But ultimately, people live in homes, not EPCs.

Much of the existing research has been focused on those in fuel poverty, or where there is a proactive social landlord. However, evidence is also needed from mainstream, non-fuel-poor households – especially as the country needs better ways of supporting those people to make cost-effective investments on the road to net zero.

How do you get good ventilation if you live next to a busy road? What happens to indoor air quality when windows are closed? How do gas hobs affect air quality? How humid does a home without mechanical ventilation become? What are the noise and light levels? And how do all of these environmental conditions affect the people living there?

We want to find out.

A citizen science project for healthier homes

With support from the Glasgow as a Living Lab Accelerating Novel Transformation (GALLANT) project at the University of Glasgow, Loco Home is beginning a citizen science project that will install environmental monitoring sensors in a range of property types including both tenements and houses, old and new.

GALLANT brings together the University, Glasgow City Council and partners to explore sustainable solutions for the city, with an explicit focus on the connections between environmental change, public health, wellbeing and social inequalities. Citizen and community participation is an important part of that living-lab approach.

Over the next 12 months, our household volunteers will help us collect measurements of:

• Indoor temperature
• Particulate matter and other indicators of indoor air quality
• Humidity
• Noise
• Light levels.

Combined with context from monthly questionnaires and smart meter data, these sensors will give us something that is often missing from discussions about housing: an open (but anonymised) data set available for investigation.

Retrofit is about health as well as carbon

At Loco Home, we are passionate about the climate benefits of retrofit. Reducing the energy demand of our homes and moving away from fossil-fuel heating is an essential part of tackling the climate crisis. But climate action and health action are not separate agendas.

Good retrofit can improve thermal comfort, reduce exposure to cold and damp conditions, improve ventilation when properly designed, reduce energy costs and create homes that are simply nicer places to live. There can also be less obvious benefits.

Within our membership and among households we have supported, we have heard stories of people experiencing improvements in their mental wellbeing after insulating their homes. For people working from home, spending long periods beside cold, poorly insulated walls or windows can make it remarkably difficult to achieve thermal comfort during winter — even when they can afford the heating.

And we have heard another kind of story: people whose climate anxiety was affecting how they heated their homes. One household told us that their motivation for installing a heat pump was, in part, the anxiety they experienced about contributing to climate change. They had been restricting their use of heating and hot water because they did not want to burn more fossil fuels. The heat pump did more than change their heating system. It changed their relationship with heating their home.

These are individual experiences, not scientific conclusions. But they raise important questions. Could better homes support better mental health? Could decarbonisation reduce climate anxiety? What is the relationship between thermal comfort, indoor environmental quality and wellbeing? We need better evidence to answer those questions.

Get involved

Over the next year, Loco Home will be working with volunteer households to build this new data set and develop opportunities for students and researchers to use it.

If you are a master’s student, final-year undergraduate, public health researcher, academic, teaching department or other researcher interested in using the data, helping to design experiments or contributing to the development of the project, we would love to hear from you. We are particularly interested in hearing from people who can help us explore the links between indoor environmental conditions, retrofit, health and wellbeing.

We are grateful to the University of Glasgow for providing the sensors and to the GALLANT project for supporting this work through operating grant funding. GALLANT’s wider mission is to use Glasgow as a living laboratory for sustainable transformation while considering health, wellbeing and inequalities — a vision that fits naturally with what we are trying to achieve through this project. If you would like to get involved, please contact Loco Home Retrofit at info@locohome.coop. Because the future of Scottish housing should be about more than keeping the rain out, it should be about creating homes where people can thrive.

And sometimes, the first step towards creating healthier homes is simply to start measuring what is really happening inside them.