Bedminster Quakers

Hello, um, hi, nice to meet you both. Um, I'm Callum, Helen from the CRF, um, and so we're gonna just be asking you some questions today about um how the Community resilience fund, um. How the support that it gave you affected your, your organisation, let's say. So I guess I would start with quite an open idea question of in your own words, what did you apply for and what did you get? OK, our aim was to um reduce our carbon footprint, so to make it more sustainable for the future, which is, An ambition of Bristol area Quaker meeting as a whole, so that applies to our, we have 6 meeting houses altogether, so we've done work at 2 others to reduce the carbon footprint, and this is we've been very grateful for the help you've given us with this one

I mean some years ago, even before the Community resilience fund came along, we had a, a carbon audit of all our meeting houses and suggestions as to what we could do to reduce the carbon footprint, and one of those was the installation of the SLC pumps. So when the opportunity to apply for this came along, um. We did put in an application for air source heat pumps uh for, for this building

Uh, also, of course, if you want to reduce the carbon footprint, the first thing before you change all this, all the kit is to actually insulate the building as much as possible, it's called um um fabric first. And so. Most of this building had been insulated, but there were bits of the flat roof that hadn't been, so as part of the fabric first idea, we uh insulated the bits of the flat roof that weren't insulated

Uh, and you've installed the heat pump. At one of our other meeting houses we have installed raiding. Electric radiant heating instead of gas central heating and we did think that we would also apply

Some radiant heating here because we weren't sure if the heat pump would actually keep the building warm enough, um. So that was it, uh the possibility that was included in our application uh as it's turned out, the heat pump has worked. As well as the contractors said it would and better than I thought it might, allowing us, you know, thinking they might be optimistic, uh, but it has actually worked really well and we've actually decided that we don't need the radiant, we don't need the addition of the radiant heater, um

Uh, so we still have some old ones we do as a backup we have some rather ancient ugly, uh, sort of radiant heating here which is the old fashioned sort of radiant heating, which is very burning red and burns the back of your head, um, the more modern sorts give a uh longer wavelength, which is more calm and. And, and gentle, and we, as I said, we've installed that as our friendship at our Redlands meeting house and. It's reasonably satisfactory, there are slightly mixed feelings about it

So when you say the um the air source heat pump um was really successful, yeah, how do you mean, how are you measuring that? um. Well, it in it was installed in time for the last winter, so everyone says it feels warmer now than it used to be gas. I, I, I know that is not very um

That is not very scientific, but I, I think that's the general comment would you get Gillian is of course here much more often than I am on for Sunday worship and of course the hiring who hire the building, they say it's um it's warmer. So uh and. I mean, As well as the heat pump, we've got um digital thermostats, so I, I, you know, from home on my smartphone I can monitor the temperature of all the rooms and and more importantly, turn them on and off uh from the comfort of my own kitchen

How has this made a difference to the cost involved in um paying the electricity bills? I'm afraid I can't answer that at the minute because. This is a slight sidetrack that. So the whole of the system as a whole because we only have the last bits installed quite recently so we've got the air source heater, the whole building is now

We've pulled out the, the water heaters and the gas boiler, but we've all. Also added to the photovoltaic panels that we had on the roof. So the air source heat pump runs of electricity, uh, supplied by the PV panels, but of course they're never both um in sync with one another

So another important part of the system is a uh a double storage battery, electric battery to store that. And uh, so. We have lots of metres, which uh I mean I, I'm local to this meeting

I've been shown around the metres by by Jonathan, and so we're looking forward to actually monitoring. The flows of electricity, how much is coming from the photovoltaic panels, uh, how much is used by the air source heat pump, um, we also use some electric, we've switched over to, uh, electric water heating for the taps in the, uh, in the toilets, um, and then excess electricity will be sold to the grid. When did, when did everything finish? When was it April, I think

Um, April we got the, the, the main, uh, the air source heat pump that was last year in July. That was last July we had the PV and the battery and all the connecting everything that was. April this year, so we haven't, we haven't been able to gather all the data to actually answer that key question of how, how is it affecting so what that means for the cost is that last winter we can say yes, the heat pump worked and kept the building warm

It it was obviously using a lot of electricity, but we didn't have the solar panels to, we didn't have the battery we did have some solar panels, but part of this project was tripling the amount of solar panels we've got, so we've gone from. Roughly 4 kilowatts, 1212 kilowatts. So you have uh yeah, it might be 11

7 instead of 12, but uh I think we'll let you off that. Something like that, and the battery has a capacity of about again about 11.5 kilowatts you know it's a big battery, we'll show it to you later, um, if that means

So, um, so it's a sort of double thing, yes, we're using uh. Electricity, obviously we're using much, much more electricity than we were, um, but we're not using any gas, um. Not using any gas and this summer we're sending huge amounts of electricity back to the grid absolutely

I mean, have you received your first payment from? Well, another again now you've come, well of course we were already on a feed-in tariff for the existing panels and there's a lot of jiggery poy to keep that because you know feed-in tariffs, you can't get them anymore, you get um. I've forgot what it's called, you get some money back, but not like the old feeding tab, so the new panels on a different system, uh, so we'll get the. I'm trying to think of the right word for what is now a feed-in tariff, uh, but last this summer we've used about 2 kilowatt hours of electricity from the grid and sent about 20 kilowatt hours back I mean it's uh the other thing when you asked about cost is the whole of the area meeting we have one contract for for well

You've got one contract for gas and electricity, you know, one company who contracts it, and they have got themselves in a terrible mess with bidding. And when we changed the metre here, nobody was they've only just realised we're connected we we know. Nobody's been billing us for the last

Yeah, uh, but now I sorted that. The other thing I have to say is that in order to accommodate all this extra electric. We've gone from a single phase supply to a three-phase supply, which meant negotiating the national grid, digging a trench across the front garden, um, the spending muddy hours down in the trench fixing the ducting they want to put there in advance, so, um

There were a lot of stages, I mean to get the new electricity supply involved I think 5 different contractors, National Grid, the people who dig up the pavement, the people who dug the trench for me, the people who supplied the, Deducting the um ele electrician to no so their electrician to connect it up to the metre, our electrician to connect the metre up to the inside, and we've got that the right way. And meanwhile we've had lots of hirings going on and relatively little disruption for them. So it's it's actually worked quite nicely

In fact, we feel it necessary to put up a poster which the job is with me to do that, to actually tell people that they're in an all electric meeting house, because when you're here, if you look closely, you will see that there are more radiators and. Slightly bigger. And actually, as a side effect, because air source heat pumps run at a lower temperature, the radiators are safe to lean against, whereas the previous radiators, they had to have guards around them, um, in case, you know, small children

So, um, so you notice that you may be noticed that we have some ceiling. Fans in the room, um, to bring the, the warm air in the winter, you tend to get more warm air in the ceiling. I mean you wouldn't have any eating and this just pushes pushes the air down

So you see that, but unless you go out in the garden and look around the corner, you don't realise we've got SSC pumps. All, all you know is that you've got a, a warm place. The fancy name for the fans are destratification fans because it

Cos the temperature stratifies with the heat at the top and and we're at the bottom in the cold and the idea of the fans is to stir, stir it around. Uh, the dual direction so that in the winter, you want to push the air down from the ceiling. And if it's hot weather and you just want better circulation and you can have them rotating the other way and they sort of make a bit of breeze, yeah

On the, on the rentals that you mentioned, I, I feel like we could talk about the science of air for a long time, but I do get quite a lot. That I did gather. I, I, I'm not an engineer

I have, I have an interest in physics and engineering really I'm a medic. That's enough. That's, that's much more than me at least, um, but yeah, the rentals

I was, I was curious, um. Because a lot of the CRF's aims are around community and and and accessing communities, supporting communities, access you and all the different kind of variations there. I was wondering pre CRF, how would you describe the communities that you support or the communities that use your space? Well, we've been gradually increasing the number of hires

This, this is sort of. One thing Quakers like to do, we don't have a, a, a very specialised place in which we meet. It's, it's just a hall of rooms, um, and so we like to be able to share it with as many people as well

Uh, it brings us in some money as well. So we have a mixture of um. Uh, well, there's some Quaker activities go on

We have, uh, community type bookings. Do you know BS3 community group, for instance? So they, they have sessions here. They have a, a clothes swap, for instance, and a seed swap, um, and so those sorts of things we have and

I was looking at our bookings list just to see uh the range of people. So, um, autism support, they use the premises and we have another group which is, um, I think it's a kind of arts club for home educated children and for neurodiverse children children. So, um, a number of more commercial, um, Things, so I think we have several groups running yoga classes and um there's antenatal classes of one sort and another

Um, we have a group of, uh, professional actors that, um, use the place, I think quite regularly, once, once a week, sort of all day to do their rehearsing. Um, So is uh oh we're very popular with birthday parties. So as you can see through the door, we have a lovely garden

It, it extends into some woodland as well, um, and you can't escape onto the road, so it's, um, safer for children. So provided you're not the sort of party that wants to drink alcohol, which we, we don't, um, allow in the building, then, uh, it's, it's a great location for parties to has, and that sounds fantastic, the amount of people you are this, this, if, if you like, this is. You know, each line is this is this month's booking, um, you know, the day is down there Monday Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, um

The purple ones are actually it's important to say, but all the rest are here, uh, well, you know, it's, it's quite blocked out, yeah, we have a a long, long term hirer who run therapy sessions. In the far room, not in the main hall. No, they, they have sort of permanent, um, use of that space

Then we have the main hall on the side room, and so we can either have two groups at the same time in two rooms, or if you've got a bigger event or if it's a party then. Because the doors open. I notice in your application we're talking about cost saving as far as cost saving of electricity, but also cost saving is in the cost of using your space

Do you think it's made a difference to how much you're charging people to use your space, or, um, I'm not sure. I think we, we do have a, a, um, a booking system. Uh, for several of the meeting houses that are all put together and so we have kind of equivalent rates

It could be that somebody wants to hire here and we say, well, actually we haven't got space, how about let them. But the rates are not the same. No, the rates depend on the, on the area and the area, so we haven't, we haven't actually thought about whether we would be changing uh at the moment, we want to see how we go see the bills

Well, I, I think that um the other thing is it also depends on what's what's in the area, for instance. If businesses want to our central meeting house you know by Cabot circuits has got some, until somebody nicked it has got some quite good audiovisual stuff and so they can have office people come and have, you know, fancy uh meetings sort of charge more they can charge more for that because it's in the centre of Bristol than than we can charge here or or want to charge here and. So, and

As well as the sort of actual rate we. We have a uh a sort of discount for um community groups and charities, um, so recently revisited that to uh. Because it was all a bit hit and miss and some people got huge discounts and not very much and now it's been sort of more formalised, but certainly the idea is to keep the rates as as as low as we can really, and I think um

You know, our, our treasurer does keep count of what hirings, the money hirings bring in and what the costs of owning the meeting house are, yeah. So, um, I look since you've got a very full diary, you've got lot to coming into some space. Do you feel that having, following this changes to the um He did things like that

Has there been opportunities to open up to more members of the community? It's difficult to say, we, we have noticed over the last couple of years we have gradually getting more and more hiring it's quite why it is, um. Uh, we don't, we don't really know and quite difficult to analyse why. It's just nice that more, more people are able to come, and I think there's a certain word of mouth, um, goes on if somebody attends here as a member of one group and think, hm, I could run my

Are there other spaces like this at the same similar rates around here? No, I think, I think there are very, very few spaces around here actually, but in quite a residential area, really, it's 10 minute cycle from, you know, to proper. I don't think there are, I don't think there are a lot, I know, and I. Yeah, um, just one little side, rather silly side thing, but Gillian said we have some yoga groups

Some churches won't let yoga groups use their church halls because it's not Christian. I see. Uh, well, it's, it's a different, you know, some churches will say, well some churches will say, you know, yoga is, it is a non-Christian religion and therefore it won't happen

Whereas we say we won't have people drinking alcohol. And we won't have raffles, but, um, you know, if you want a birthday party here, you can't have a tonne. Interesting, is it because it's gambling, yeah, it's gambling but and the same, uh, that would be the same in the Methodists

Yeah, you, you couldn't have a, you know, tickets and and get a bottle of sharing that, that wouldn't be wouldn't be the thing, um. Whereas, you know, we're happy to take people of any faith, uh, I mean we used one of our other meeting houses we used to have Jewish people out there trying to worship, I think, and another meeting house they have Muslim people, um, so I, I think what you've done here seems to be really exciting great things going on, and it feels that the heat pump has also really made a big difference. What do you feel would be the next aspiration, what's your next goal, do you feel that you're working towards? Well, the next goal, I, I think is is what Gillian was saying, we actually need a um

A poster and say, look, heat pumps work, you can do it, um, Gillian's been tasked with making the post and it did, I think it, I think the phrase in our application is we want to be an exemplar. Yes, I um I, I feel that um uh in going low carbon, uh, you're doing it for yourself because it's the right thing to do, but also. You sort of have an obligation to tell other people about it, um, and be a case study so that if another

Village hall or something, was thinking of doing it, um, they could come and have a look, so I, I'm, I'm sort of looking for opportunities, um. To do that, but we kind of need a little bit more evidence behind it because one of the first things people are asking, you're asking, uh, yourselves is, uh, what's, what difference in in your bills is it making? That's what matters to a lot of yes yes how how much did the whole system cost fortunately we were able to get a grant, but. Uh, I mean that needs to be thought about where it's coming from, but also how, how much do you save and

In what way is it nicer, so we need to build up that evidence a bit more. I, I will in due course analyse that because I mean we know from previous. Winters How much gas we use, OK, a little bit of that went on hot water heating, but nearly all of it was heating burning cos there was a gas heater in the kitchen or

Um, but, uh, and then we can look at those deals, and of course you'd look at it not in money cos of course the prices go up, we can put it in kilowatt hours and then convert that to prices. Yeah, money is important though, because one of the things at the moment is the, the difference in cost between electricity per kilowatt hour and gas per kilowatt hour, which is wrong. But it's no good saying 2 years ago we paid this much and this year we're paying this much because you've got to

Work it out what it would be at current classes. The other thing I will do when I get round to it when I've got the figures, because of course you can have cold winters and warm winters and uh there's a thing called degree day analysis which you get a measure of. The temperature each day and how much heating you need and you can compare your degree days from last winter with this winter and you can then calculate whether you you should have used more Jonathan, you're gonna have to factor in how many we have a couple of years ago

we don't have the heating on unless we need it too many variables, so we're going to have to do something a big spreadsheet. Well, I did a big spreadsheet for for the meeting house when they went from gas to the radio heating, you know, this data analysis, um, so I would love to ask some more personal questions from Gillian, probably, um, we've been talking a lot about how. The application to CRF getting the heat pumps and all that kind of stuff has affected the Quakers or the the meeting house itself, but as a member of this meeting house specifically, I was wondering how the maybe small changes to

The way this building works, how that's affected you personally as a representative of the people who use the building, potentially. Well, it hasn't really made much difference at all, um. The meeting house is warm when we come into it

Um, yes, people are aware that we have the system. There are one or two things which require some manual intervention like the funds I talked about. Uh, I mean, most people would be unaware that they're there and that they might help

And I think the same is true with any strange system, um. That if you're. That way inclined, then you may want to try and get the best out of it

Um, but if you just accept that it's there, you might programme it to come on and off, but that's about it. So, um. That's another hurdle

But um, no, it really hasn't made much difference at all. We have some, some members of our community who are particularly interested in it. Um, so we show it to people

Well, there are some who are interested in the technical side, but I, I think environmentalism is a big thing among among Quakers general, um, so. Even if they don't understand what's been done, or the technical is the thought that we're reducing our carbon footprint, particularly, even if we haven't reduced costs because of course the trouble is electricity consider electricity is 3 times the cost of gas, even if it's 3 times as efficient, you know, better off. But the fact that we know it's it's reducing the carbon footprint that will

Make many members of the meeting feel better yeah, yes, and I, and I think in in doing our bit in publicising it, it's also publicising it within the community. Um, Because we Uh, every meeting house is a bit different. I think Bristol as a whole, um, the, the different measures that have been taken at different meeting houses can all feed into a sort of giant database, and, uh, yeah, they're all very

Well, as I say, 2 listed buildings, two buildings like this, this age, one Victorian building, one Edwardian building. One meeting went for the radiant heaters and we went for the because it's different kind of building. Well, in Redland there was nowhere to put the heat pump and um

It would have made so the alterations to the pipework would have just been horrendous there, whereas the alterations to the pipework here haven't been so bad. With the er to bring it to the CRF itself as a specific process, how did you find the process of applying to CRF, going through the hurdles and all the talks and. Applications and stuff

Right. I wasn't involved, so I don't know. I was a bit daunted, I was a bit daunted by some of the uh documents um

Some didn't seem particularly relevant to us, um. I did my best with them. Uh, I had some help, but the other members of the project team also helped me a lot with that because I'm not really

I'm more keen to get down in the muddy trench than I am to fill in these forms, to be honest, but I went to meet some of the things were helpful, you know, the, uh, I had a, I got a little bit mixed up because we had, well at least not mixed up, but I have to think carefully. We had one meeting with an organisation called Space here who I think sort of reviewed the. Um, project and sort of said, you know, is this technically feasible? Are these guys off their heads and doing something, so they basically said, yeah, everything we're doing is right, and I think it was them who's, because I heard about these stratification fans and I thought maybe they're a bit of a gimmick, but they said no, they're a good thing

And um So that we also had a meeting with. Some Green energy thing, uh. Some some Oh gosh

You can give me a clue who who we were offered, um, somebody offered by Bristol City Council who were offered energy, you know, advice on energy for sustainable. It probably was, yes, certainly I remember that name. We did have a cheese survey, but that was uh that was part of our own work back in 2021, I think, the cheese survey and the anthesis energy or um

So, uh, Yeah. So coming back to your question, you want to know how do we find the process, yeah, um. Uh, a sort of bit A bit daunting, but I think um, I think Robin was quite helpful, to be honest, when I emailed her and asked her for things, uh, asked for advice on these, um

Daunting technically, like technologically and stuff, or daunting just because it's long and. Mainly finding the words, actually a little bit daunting because you seem to use software that doesn't, didn't. My computer didn't like it

I could not always get the things to fit in the boxes or you drive from the boxes, which I mean, and that drives me nuts because that's, uh, so it's interesting you say you can't find the words though, because when we read your application, we thought, wow, what a well written and well worded and professional application. We were wondering if you had uh oh well. We didn't have anyone outside

There were the 4 members of the project that you were thinking, what did you do for retirement because you clearly had a very good project management. Um, Neil, who was the, the blessed with some proficient, Neil, who was the um one from French, he's done as a job, project management, so he was good at producing um what you call them waterfall charts and um. Uh, constraints and, uh, possible pitfalls and the mitigations and, you know, he put all that together

Uh some of the more fancy words, one of the other members of the project team, Graham. He's also been in, he's worked for NGOs in foreign countries, so he's good at writing grants, um, so yeah, uh, so we've had that expertise. As I said we haven't brought in anybody from out, we haven't brought in anyone from outside, we haven't got

Somebody and said look we want it's not organised we we don't have a hierarchy with a a paid vicar at the top. We're kind of used to um. Appointing people for particular roles according to what their skills are, so everybody is used to um contributing what they can and where their own skills are

So I'm sure this happens in other churches as well, but I think quite a. Um, a kind of fairly used, so maybe that is a factor that comes in. And, and we are all volunteers

I, I, I mean, at least all the people at the top of the tree are volunteers. We've, we've got a few people at the bottom like cleaners and we have some wardens we have some wardens, yeah, yeah, and not in this book, we don't have a warden this book two of our meeting houses have residents and. The warden at Hawfield runs all this booking spreadsheet and uh so so we do have some paid staff to do that but um to do the sort of routine tasks if you like, you know, we got a premises assistant ready to make sure she checks the firing alarms each week and um does the legionel checks and um gets the gas round to do you know all that stuff but um

That that the top level organisations or. It has. I'd be interested, um, if I could turn this interview around a little bit, not having been in at the beginning of this

How many um projects were awarded grants and what other kinds of projects were there? We did this back in the day and I cannot remember we talk about 10 there was a he would be more. It was like maybe not. There was, there was a lot

There was a lot of applications. I'd say 35 and I think that sounds about right. remember it's across the whole so each ward had, like I remember we discussed

we have 10 ward 10, yeah, it was a lot per ward to discuss to to work out who gets which money. But ours was uh a low carbon one, but I guess a lot of them were well exactly so like generally I don't know if you notice there's been kind of themes to the question, so like uh like like uh ecology or sustainability, community. Accessibility, things like this are all the different themes and so people like you, like you said would apply under different themes of what their project would do

And so there was a quite, there was a relatively even split across all of them that would, would be that and then we, we'd have to try and make sure that uh. A community group in each community serving each of those kind of things was ideally met, not, not like 100% of the time, but generally. And I think one thing as well is thinking one of the reasons why we noticed that just how well this has been written is there are different community groups who are applying for CRF funding

Some were less literate, um, and less less literate, less, you know, the applications were needed a bit of helping hands. So actually some of the process that, um, Callum and I involved from the beginning was actually looking at the applications, working out thinking. Does anyone need any more help in actually writing the application? So actually the way normally if you apply for funding something, you would just have an application form and that's you don't have any opportunity to adjust it

And the way we did it very much was actually thinking we've got, we want people to come from apply from all areas, all levels of skill and interest and experience. And so one of the big things was actually the ability to help people. So for example, if someone's interested in doing something for disabled people, we work closely with an organisation called Wessel which is um Westland centre for Independent Living

And help them to advise the um organisation on what they want to do regarding disability accessibility. So we have, we did a lot more hand holding and let's say another grant provider might take. It was I think I did, you know, one of the big forms I filled in, I sent it in and I think it sort of came back, could you expand more and which is fine

That's what we did quite a lot of yeah yeah yeah. quite a good application process like that so that you haven't got all your eggs in one basket that you are going to be able to interrupt. How did you feel that the grant was being decided by normal everyday people rather than like, as in, and it was a, you know, it was a big decision process with like 20-30 people rather than like 3 people in an office deciding who gets the money, how do you feel about that? Well, we're fine with that, I think, yes, uh, yeah, it, it seems OK

I mean, it all dragged on a bit, but, but then yeah, but that, that, that, that, that's fine and um. Yeah, I, I, no, I, I don't think it's because I guess similarly to what you were saying, Gillian, about this possibly being a kind of use study, a case study for other buildings to use heat pumps, kind of the idea of the CRF is, can this be a new way of doing local government and stuff, um, so it's it's good to hear that it's, it was a generally positive, um, experience for you, if not, uh, long, um. But yeah, I guess the final question would be

Is there anything else you want to tell us about? I, I'll tell you one thing that I'm very grateful for the money. So I, I start by saying. When, when Because we're putting this stuff on the flat roof, yeah, is the roof strong enough? So we had to have a structural engineer come along to check that the roof was strong enough and we had to cut a hole in the ceiling to look at the beam, the beams underneath just because the construction details were slightly lost in the list of times and so years ago

So that cost us 1500 quid. Uh, and we did that before the grant was approved and we were in process, and then I said to Robin or something, can we claim for that and I said no, sorry, yeah, only claim, you can only claim for things. After the grant was approved and I thought, well, you know, this is all preliminary work

I mean that took you know by the time we've done that a few weeks to organise, we're trying to get a head start on it was specific for this project. Part of me says we should have that, but anyway, that I think that's fun it's an interesting point, um, you know, because if it wasn't for this project, I wouldn't have had any major cutting holes in the roof to look at. You know, that's feedback

That's great, yeah, I mean, yes, it was done before the day before the grant, but it was fundamentally I was well underway, but I'm sure there is, I'm sure obviously um there would be rules and stuff around the, just the reasoning, but yeah, it's a, it's, it's definitely a good point for for doing that in the future. We, we have also spent some of our own money on, um, things that were sort of outside the scope of the ground while while we were up there, I think that the painting for eaves and the repair work we do yes we have. Roof repairs that needed doing, but you know that that was all coordinated in and uh

I mean the big frustration actually was you couldn't put the solar panels up, so the roof insulation had been done and the roofing company were. The weather was wrong when the men were off sick or they've got too many other, I mean. We chose a well-known company, um, one of the biggest roofing companies in Bristol and um every time I, I, you know, I got fed up emailing and phoning them, I had to go personally to their offices, um

The coordination can also be a bit a bit tricky, you you've got roofers who tend to want to just, just come when there's a gap in their work. But you've got to hire us in the building and they're wanting to do a meditative yoga and they don't really want a roof and you've got the autistic people doing their music class and they don't look brilliant. Yeah, yeah so I mean if you think what it's like to be a householder and there's just you there and they ring you up, yeah, OK, I can work from home today, if you can come today

Um, we don't actually have a quaker on the premises. We have some nearby. Jonathan's nowhere nearby, but so just, just generally, it makes life more difficult for contractors in, in, so we, we tried to give our hires as much notice as we could when we had the solar panels added and the uh the electrics done in in April then

We the April I think yeah, we managed to have a fairly firm week and we just said, look, uh, you may not wish to hire the room this week. And I think the one was done in a half term, I think. I think the was done in a half term and the solar panels

Again in a holiday or a half term or something. I mean we worked right, but I mean any, any contractors work in a building like this where there's in he booked it up. In advance, you know, months, well, actually I booked a date and then cos the roof it said we couldn't have it done, uh, the solar panels, I mean, the people who did the solar panels

I booked a date because the roofing should have been done and it wasn't so I postponed them and it still wasn't done so I posted and they got a little bit fed up and then but and in the end we fixed the date, they said we're coming on this day, it'll take us 3 days. They came on that day and it was done in 3 days and um so I would heartily recommend and when they were saying company who did the heat pump actually, and they said it'll take a week, we'll turn up on Monday and it'll be done by Friday and so it was so um. That's good

Uh, but the roof is, you know. really feel I've learned a lot about that if you want to see this, we'd love to show you around. Great

Well, let's do that. I think what your time scale. Let's, let's end this

Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you

You can bring..