Green Open Homes Bristol 2025
Find out how Bristol Energy Network used Retrofit West's Community Group Grant to coordinate a city-wide open homes weekend, giving Bristol residents a first-hand look at retrofit in action.
Project funded: Coordination and delivery of Bristol Green Open Homes weekend, September 2025.
Area covered: Bristol
For many people, improving a home’s energy efficiency feels abstract and diagrams and advice pages can only go so far. Seeing changes in a real home, on a real street nearby, is a different thing entirely.
The Bristol Green Open Homes event aims to give people that exact opportunity. Over one weekend in September 2025, Bristol Energy Network coordinated Bristol’s Green Open Homes event, bringing together ten homes across the city and opening their doors to over 100 visitors.
How Green Open Homes works
Green Open Homes is built on a simple idea: that seeing is more powerful than being told. Rather than attending a presentation or reading a leaflet, visitors step inside neighbours’ homes and see retrofit measures in place.
There is no set route or formal programme. Visitors choose which homes to visit and move between them at their own pace. Inside each home, the owner is on hand to talk through what they have done: insulation choices, solar panels, heating systems and ventilation. They also share what the process taught them, including what they might do differently if starting again.
This format turns abstract concepts into something concrete. Visitors can ask practical questions about cost, disruption, and what it is actually like to live with those changes day to day.
About Bristol Energy Network
Bristol Energy Network (BEN) is a membership organisation working with communities across the city to help them play an active part in the just energy transition.
The group meets people where they are, working to understand and address the barriers residents face when it comes to improving their homes and reducing their energy use, and supporting communities to lead that change in their own neighbourhoods.
In 2024 alone, BEN ran 111 events and had direct contact with 2,289 people across Bristol, from Bedminster and Easton to Knowle West, Avonmouth and Southmead.
Alongside Green Open Homes, their work spans an Energy Champion programme, community energy projects and an Energy Help Desk offering advice and support out in local communities. They have built strong relationships with a wide range of partner organisations across the city.
BEN’s roots in Bristol’s communities made them well placed to bring Green Open Homes to life as a genuinely local, neighbourhood-led event.
Check out Bristol Energy Network here
Bristol Green Open Homes 2025: what happened across the weekend
The event ran across Saturday 6th and Sunday 7th September. Despite poor weather, visitors travelled from across Bristol to see homes in different neighbourhoods, covering a range of property types and measures.
In Bedminster, George opened his mid-terrace after going fully fossil fuel free in 2023, showing visitors how a heat pump, solar panels and battery storage can work together without costly full insulation works first. In Bishopston, a home focused on damp management and energy monitoring demonstrated wood fibre internal solid wall insulation, DIY secondary glazing and a range of draught-proofing measures.
Visitors came at all different stages, from early curiosity to plans already underway. Homeowners shared practical recommendations from their own experience, including which local installers they had used and what to look out for along the way.
Bringing retrofit to life for Bristol homeowners
Many visitors arrive not knowing what is possible in a home like theirs. They leave with a clearer picture of what options exist, what the trade-offs are, and what a realistic first step might look like.
“People can only make choices they realise are available to them.”
– George, Homeowner & Green Open Homes Exhibitor
What Bristol residents took away from the weekend
A huge amount of work goes into an event like this. Bristol Energy Network spent months pulling the weekend together, finding homeowners willing to open their doors, supporting them to prepare, and making sure visitors from across the city knew it was happening. That effort showed in the response from people who came along.
Visitors left with practical knowledge they could actually use:
“Learnt so much about the different materials used in retrofit. Quite inspirational.”
– Green Open Homes Bristol visitor
What came through most strongly in the feedback was how much it meant to see real homes rather than slides or diagrams. When a neighbour shows you what they have done in a house just like yours, it makes the whole thing feel possible in a way that a workshop simply cannot. That sense of community is exactly what Bristol Energy Network set out to create.
“Great to have the opportunity to meet other people who have made energy improvements and see what they have done.”
– Green Open Homes Bristol visitor
What Bristol Energy Network learned
Running Green Open Homes across a whole city was rewarding, but it was also resource-intensive. Coordinating ten homes, supporting participating homeowners and reaching new audiences across different Bristol neighbourhoods took significant staff time and planning effort.
For other groups considering a similar event, the learning is clear: this kind of in-person, city-wide delivery needs proper resourcing behind it. A lighter-touch format, such as a single open home within a wider retrofit event, or online case studies in place of a full weekend, could reach people with less strain on a small team. The peer-to-peer value is real, but the format needs to fit the capacity available.
About the Community Group Grant
Retrofit West’s Community Group Grant supports local organisations to engage their communities in home energy efficiency. The funding is designed to be flexible, allowing groups to shape activity around the needs of their community.
Bristol is a large and varied city, with a wide range of housing types and residents at very different stages of their retrofit journey. By backing Bristol Energy Network to coordinate Green Open Homes, the grant helped bring a city-wide event to life, rooted in real homes and lived experience. It gave residents access to practical, neighbourhood-level insight that no leaflet or advice page can replicate, and supported the kind of peer-to-peer learning that actually helps people take action.
Read more about our Community Group Grants
