The starting point for the training of tenants was a very directly use of tenants’ own home as demo project, where actual own monitoring on water, heat and electricity consumption were used to rise awareness – amongst others by offering the tenants assistance with evaluating energy accounts and energy bills to help optimising user behaviours.

SIR had a permanent advisory consultancy service for the tenants over a period of two winters, and has also carried out an opinion poll to investigate effects on tenants’ behaviours.

For the heating period 2002/2003 focus was on step-by-step to initiate information/awareness and actual technical improvements of a bad functioning ventilation system in close cooperation with the involved housing project consultants.

A revised concept for further training activities were realized in the heating period 2003/04. Here the main focus was on a consolidation of the beginning of self-organisation of dwellers. Ongoing projects were shown on homepage www.schlumpfhausen.info and weekly information afternoon each Friday (not only but also in dealings with energy). A functioning structure for self-organisation facilitated information and discussion with dwellers. Monitoring results were presented on the homepage and also at tenant’s information evening. Finally a manual for dwellers was distributed in March 2004.

Conclusions of tenants training at Stieglgründe:

• All in all the model project “Stieglgründe” is more likely to show that the user's behaviour is more than ever one of the most essential size of influence on the consumption of energy. The user defines the requirements to space air, intervenes in the systems engineering and determinates the warm water need.
   
• Despite extensive efforts in the model project “Stieglgründe” and the comprehensive involvement of the residents we have noticed that there is still a big gap between consciousness and concrete behaviour.
   
• New heating and ventilation technologies particular in rent house buildings have to work perfectly and without luxurious service. The strategy of the social background that requires a behavioural change of residents only works secondary and is not able to compensate bad technical hardware.
   
• A user-friendly engineering design is able to reduce negative user’s influences on the consumption of energy.
   
• The reports and surveys show that the classical window ventilation has been carried out in spite of an installed supply and exhaust air system (“controlled living ventilation”) by most of the residents also during the winter season.
   
• Without acceptance of the users and their extensive renunciation of window ventilation during the winter, the application of mechanical ventilation systems with heat recovery do not offer an efficient energy saving potential.
   
• A housing estate with united structures and an organized general public offers basically better points of contact for interventions in the environmental field. Indeed, multipliers not only work in a desired direction. Their attendance and their contacts can overturn also in a negative mood by appearance of engineering problems.
   
• In the field of heating and airing we cannot speak of a typical consumer / user, contrariwise we are confronted by very different "target groups". This means we have to find out target group-specific strategies also in the environmental communication. These strategies should be able to come along with ecology-or energy saving potentials of the end user / households.
   
• The possibilities of the social network of the housing estate “Stieglgründe” could be used even better for measures of the deliberate contact with energy for the future. Starting points for more energy efficiency in the housing estate could be a continuously energy consumption information (also on Internet) that makes cost developments transparent.

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