High running costs, tight budgets, and nobody obvious to pay for the fix.
Halls, resource centres, clubhouses and community facilities.
Community buildings carry a particular problem: high running costs, tight budgets, and no obvious owner for capital investment. A parish hall or a resource centre heated twice a week for two hours can cost a fortune to run and have nobody with the funds to fix it.
ENCON works with community organisations across Ireland on energy upgrades to halls, resource centres, clubhouses, meeting rooms and community facilities — and on the aggregated community energy projects that make funding these buildings possible.
The technical work is rarely the hard part. Assembling the funding and the project is.
Heated hard, for short periods, from cold, in a building with nothing to hold it.
Community buildings share a recognisable set of problems:
The fix is usually the same shape: insulate the envelope, control the heating properly so it’s only heating when the building is in use, and generate on site where the roof allows. Zoning and time control alone frequently deliver a large saving in a building used a few hours a week.
From insulation to heat pumps, ventilation and more. Improve comfort, lower bills and increase your BER rating.
New builds, extensions and deep retrofits, fully managed from design and planning through to construction and completion.
High-quality solar panel systems for homes, farms and businesses. Lower energy costs and gain energy independence.
Energy upgrades and construction solutions for commercial, agricultural and public sector projects.
The Community Energy Grant supports projects that bring multiple buildings together under a single application — homes, community facilities, clubs, schools and local businesses in one area. Aggregating like that typically unlocks stronger support than any of those buildings would get alone.
It requires a project coordinator to assemble the buildings, build the technical case and manage the application. ENCON works on these projects as delivery contractor and technical partner, handling surveys, specification, costing and the works themselves.
The useful first step costs nothing: a conversation about which buildings in your area could realistically form a project, and whether the numbers are likely to work. We’d rather tell you early that a project isn’t viable than watch a committee spend a year finding out.
Community projects run on volunteer time against grant-call deadlines. We’re used to that and we plan around it rather than expecting a committee to behave like a procurement department.
The Community Energy Grant needs aggregated projects, but there may be other routes. Talk to us and we’ll point you at what fits.
In an intermittently used building, heating controls and zoning are usually the fastest win. Insulation follows.
Energy agencies, local authorities, community groups and experienced contractors all take the role. It carries real responsibility.
Development and application usually run for months before works start. Starting early matters.
Usually not entirely. Works are phased around the activities the building hosts.
Call 051 850722. The first conversation costs nothing and will tell you whether the numbers work.
