First thing in the morning, I attended four meetings with owners of different community buildings in Wrexham and Flintshire. These meetings were to feedback on recent carbon reduction plans and energy feasibility studies that Litegreen had carried out before I got there. I also met Shaun and Heather and different people from Flintshire Local Voluntary Counil (FLVC). They are the umbrella and support organisation for over 1200 voluntary and community groups based in Flintshire. Everyone I met was very knowledgeable and friendly.

These meetings  were also to help me understand the fundamentals of the work and see the final outcome before I made a start.

Later that day, after I had eaten lunch, we returned to the office, where I was shown the ropes of what goes on behind the scenes in an office environment.

I met with Litegreens National Ops manager Alex Wilcox in a virtual meeting via Microsoft teams to ask him about his role and I met a few other new people too, including We mind the Gap who share our building. They were really friendly and explained that they help local young people aged 16+ develop themselves with activity days, experiences & mentors on long term programmes called we discover, we grow and we belong.

I was able to conduct some energy efficiency surveys on community buildings of my own. I visited the Bwlchgwyn Village Hall, which is still a relatively modern and really active community center in quite a rural village and I visited the former Pontfadog School site, which is unused, has some historical features and ready for some serious upgrades.

The good thing is that the school was bought buy the local community and turned into a CIC, they have plans to make it into a community hub with forest schools, advice drop-ins and more. I met Izzy and John who told us all about their plans. There's a news article you can read more about them here:

I had my own personal protective equipment (PPE) for the energy surveys and used tools like laser measures, drills and a borescope to look into walls to inspect if they had insulation or if they did, what type. I learnt how to recognise different wall types visually by the pattern of the bricks.

I also drew my first floorplans of the buildings and added a record of the different measurements and building features, like ceiling height, width, window measurements and historical features and current heating and lighting features. I used quite a lot of maths.

Then, in the afternoon, I took part in the young influencer's programme for AVOW (association of voluntary organisations Wrexham). I got to meet a lot of new people from AVOW, they were all very nice. They help all the local charities and communities in Wrexham with things like accessing funding, resources and growth.

I contributed to the creation of their teams promotional video with other people from local schools who were my age. This was to strengthen community connections and help their work in awarding youth led grants to young people wanting to improve their local community. I would recommend other people in Wrexham my age to get involved, I think they have a new Facebook page and there's more info here: They should do this everywhere.

Wednesday

In the morning, I did an energy performance certificate (EPC) on a home in Wexham, to help the homeowner understand their energy efficiency so they could reduce their bills during the energy crisis and to check to see if they could qualify for Government grants to help improve their home with things like insulation, solar panels, boiler upgrades and other technology. I used different software on an IPad whilst working on this. Afterwards we spent time talking to the home owner about what they could do to make running costs less for them.

We then came back to the office to finish off the feasibility reports for the energy efficiency surveys by doing calculations for the heat loss perimeter (HLP) and the areas of the buildings. I did all working out myself and we ended up using this to write a full energy efficiency report, which was very detailed and was 32 pages long.

Thursday

Thursday, we went to the office and finished off any work that needed finishing from this week or any past weeks. I met Litegreens Business Support Officer Karl Moore who was on annual leave but came in to say hello. I was shown behind the scenes of the website and how it is managed.

I was also set the task of writing this blog to summarise my week and created this whole web page from scratch, deciding the page layout, how to use corporate colours and fonts, inputting links and learning about things like search engine optimisation's (SEO) Hex codes and general marketing strategies.

I was then allowed to publish this page to the official website and social media pages to get a flavour of what is involved in design and marketing behind the scenes. You can follow Litegreen on social media by clicking on the icons below.  

Friday

Friday, we cleared storage space so that we can store all the different documents, evidence and certificates from all of Litegreens work over the last 5 years. This will be kept for several years in an archive.

This involved relocating large boxes from a different location and making sure they were all correctly labelled and accessible. We also had to consider things like health and the safety of ourselves and others and manual handling when doing this work.

In the end, we decided we had a long hard week so we finished work and explored North Wales and lakes in Snodonia to get our bank holiday weekend off to a good start.