Withington Village Hall, Herefordshire

Withington Village Hall is fairly new: like many village halls it was built in 1999 as a millennium project and so is fairly energy efficient. It serves a community with lots of regular activity groups who rely on its facilities and has a proactive committee who think ahead to ensure the building has a sustainable future.

With this aim in mind, Solarkinetics was the chosen provider when the committee opted to install a solar array on the hall roof. The curved shape of the roof made this an interesting project for us and we were able to come up with a design which we felt suited this modern look. We were able to help with identifying sources of loan funding and after a successful application had been made, we were ready to start work

Given its public location, the challenges for us in this situation were ensuring that the necessary safety measures for our installers, scaffolding and so on, were made inaccessible to members of the public out of hours and working during the day in an unobtrusive way to allow the various activities taking place to carry on undisturbed by our presence.

The 10kW array was installed without any problem in April 2015 and the hall users are now benefitting from their increased energy efficiency.