YBS Insulation Supports Charity in keeping the Homeless Warm in ‘Sleep Pod’ Initiative

A scheme aimed at supplying outreach teams with compact and lightweight emergency shelters which are currently manufactured within the UK at very low cost has begun to be rolled out with YBS Insulation having been chosen as one of the key supply partners by the charity involved.

Sleep Pod is attempting to tackle the toll of avoidable deaths linked to people sleeping out in the open, both on our streets and as the result of the wider humanitarian crisis across Europe. Its founders have already distributed 180 Sleep Pods across the EU and are now seeking to engage with small groups of volunteers to manufacture many more, in places where they are desperately needed.

Following a detailed design it was decided to use YBS Insulations product “Airtec Double” for the inner skin to the portable shelters, the benefits of the product material are, its slim and robust, while offering excellent insulation properties. Significantly, the bubble insulation’s foil coating not only enhances the thermal performance, but makes it easier to shape into a tent-like form.

The Airtec products are being supplied by YBS Insulation through one of its South-East stockists, Parker Building Supplies of Maidstone. Impressively, individual Sleep Pods are produced for £25 each and can be assembled simply.

One of the founders, Ian Ashby, who has been involved with setting up Sleep Pod from the start, commented: “The three founders met when we were volunteering at refugee camps in Europe in 2016 and saw there was a real need for an affordable one-person shelter that is both easy to make and put up.  “The Sleep Pod uses two lengths of the Airtec Insulation joined together, with three 70mm lengths of bamboo secured with tape along each side of the ridge.  The Airtec insulation products also forms the base.

The whole pod is then wrapped in a heavy duty polythene membrane supplied by another partner within the scheme.