Wednesday 20-06-2018 - 15:48

Article by Joanna Romanowicz, SAVES 2 Programme Manager

The SAVES 2 team had the pleasure to be hosted by University of Bucharest in Romania, one of the universities taking part in the SAVES 2 project, 14th-15th of June 2018. The meeting was attended by project members who deliver and/or over see the Student Switch Off (SSO) and Student Switch Off+ (SSO+) campaigns in their respective countries (the UK, Ireland, Greece, Lithuania, Cyprus, Romania and Bulgaria), in addition to members who oversee the development of the online dashboard that feeds back energy savings in halls to students, and those that help with our communications.

The meeting was very productive, and the discussions focused around the student experience of the project (students involved in Student Switch Off at University Bucharest came along and spoke of their involvement), how both the SSO and SSO+ campaigns can be enhanced for the academic year 2018-19, and the impact that the first year of the project has had.

To date, during the academic year 2017-18, we've had some great engagement from students:

• 11,942 students signed up to the SSO campaign (that's nearly 1 in 3 students living in every dormitory!)​
• 435 photos submitted​ as part of SSO competitions
• 9,193 quiz entries (1 in 5 students took part in our SSO climate quiz)
• 194 students became ambassadors for the SSO campaign
• Over 25,000 students received information when living/moving into private accommodation on energy performance certificates, energy efficieny, smart metering and energy saving and a further 36,000 living in dormitories received information on what to look out for when choosing private accommodation (in particular in relation to energy efficiency), help reduce energy wastage and at the same time enable them to adequately heat their homes.

It has been a great year for the project so far, and we are currently in the processes of calculating how much energy was saved by our students across the 7 different countries. Watch this space!