Damers First School have become the Energy Sparks South West Regional and National Champions! They have won £1250 to go towards an energy saving improvement or sustainability project within the school. Over 1000 primary and secondary schools took part.
Energy Sparks is an online, school-specific energy analysis tool, energy education programme. Schools score points by recording their activities to investigate their energy use, learning about energy, and taking energy saving actions around their school.
Damers First School pupils worked on different activities and actions from September 2022 to June 2023 to reduce their energy consumption. By using this Educational Programme to analyse daily, weekly and monthly data they have reduced the schools energy consumption by 12% this academic year.
The key to Damers success was the children including as many people as possible in their sustainability activities, including:
Governors
Wessex MAT Trustees
Kitchen staff
Cleaners
Lunchtime supervisors
Caretaker
Parents
and a local residents’ group
The children have run a Powerdown Day, sustainable travel days and worked closely with the caretaker, Mr Tim’s to action energy efficiency measures like changing heating times, temperatures and identifying inefficient lights that needed replacing.
Thanks to the DfE Energy Efficiency funding that all schools received at the end of last year. Damers First School has added Endotherm to their Gas Boiler which helps the systems work more efficiently saving the school at least 15%. All their lighting is now LED. More solar panels are being fitted to the school by local company Wessex Eco Energy which will then generate 40% of the school’s energy. Then some super sockets by Measurable Energy will be installed combined with machine learning and software. This allows sockets to automatically identify devices plugged in, monitor their energy use, report real-time data and automatically turn devices on/off to avoid wasted energy. The sockets use a light to indicate if the energy is coming from the solar (green) or from the grid (red).
Edd Moore, Class teacher and Eco Coordinator said,” The Energy Sparks Education Programme has been fantastic in supporting the pupils’ knowledge and understanding about reducing the amount of energy used within our school. The children and teachers have been motivated by the Energy Sparks Scoreboard which has helped us all keep track of the school’s progress. The Scoreboard has inspired more actions and activities to be taken by the children to reduce the school’s energy consumption. It is great to see the children taking what they have learned in school and implementing this into their own homes”.
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