“You know that now, electricity is expensive!”, he says to the fifteen residents who came to listen to him at the request of their lessor, the subsidiary of the Caisse des dépôts CDC Habitat.
“What consumes the most?” he asks. “Heating?” a man tries. «Exactly! Two-thirds of the bill,» explains the workshop leader, representative of the environmental education association Inven’terre, based in Sarcelles, a neighboring town.
Residents, mostly elderly people relocated to this residence of 102 apartments during an urban renewal operation in the priority district Derrière-les-Murs, share their concerns about heating.
Benefiting from collective heating in their old towers now demolished, they must now learn to manage the individual electric radiators of the residence themselves.
Humidity, the use of the oven or hot water… tit for tat, Elmadani Abaskar responds to their concerns, defuses received ideas.
But it is above all his argument on the invoice that hits the mark.
Without paying attention, the energy supplier «will ask you for an adjustment of 2, 3,000 euros!» “Aaah!” reacts a lady in the audience.
– «Reduce this, reduce that…» –
Because in a context of soaring energy prices, which the government’s tariff shield has only partially absorbed, it is often a painful regularization bill that has pushed tenants to worry more about their energy consumption. ‘energy.
This is the case of Dede Mwamba, 46, who has lived in the residence with her two children since November 2020. Last winter, she says she had to pay 700 euros for regularization and then decided to install on her phone EDF’s application to monitor consumption.
To limit this, she has already started cooking wholesale for the week, rather than every day as before. And after the workshop, she’s convinced to unplug her standby devices when they’re not in use.
«It’s very important. Especially right now!», she says.
«We have to get it into our heads to reduce this, reduce that …», also says Claudette Buffet, 72, who arrived in November 2020 in the residence. «We don’t have big pensions, I don’t want to have a high bill!» She said.
The workshop ends with the distribution of a kit consisting, among other things, of a thermometer indicating the ideal temperature levels: 19 degrees in the living room, 16 to 18 in an adult’s room, 20 to 22 in a bedroom. childlike, and too hot beyond that.
The remaining kits will be distributed to tenants who have not come to pick them up, during home visits which will make it possible to suggest eco-gestures adapted to each household.
The objective for the lessor is also to limit the unpaid bills of its tenants, 35% of the occupants of the HLM stock living below the poverty line.
CDC Habitat, which manages some 350,000 social housing units throughout France, has already provided a solidarity fund of 1.15 million euros to support the tenants most in difficulty.
“We know that our tenants are economically fragile, and the idea is to limit the impact of price increases for them,” explains Lydia Bendifallah, urban social development project manager at CDC Habitat.
«If we are not on the ground, the response will not necessarily be appropriate,» she adds.
«There are still some who are reluctant,» says Elmadani Abaskar. Once the workshops are over, «the difficulty is that behind, the advice can be applied».