Co Tyrone student Harry Blakiston Houston’s ingenious windows make war-damaged houses habitable again in Ukraine

While studying for his PhD in Biotechnology at the University of Cambridge, he and some friends came up with a simple design: four sheets of recycled polythene plastic stretched around a PVC piping frame, secured with duct tape and insulating noodles.

The windows would offer more insulation than double glazed windows, while still providing natural light. Most importantly, each window can be constructed in under 15 minutes and costs no more than £12 to make and install.

In January 2021, Harry paused his studies and he and his friends travelled to Ukraine to see if his glassless window solution would work.

He said: “There was an old woman in Mykolaiv, in southern Ukraine, who had been sleeping in her bathtub for two months because it was the warmest place in her house.”

But after he installed his innovative windows, he said “the house was immediately warmer and lighter”, allowing the elderly woman to return to “some kind of normality”.

In the city of Izyum, less than 50 miles from the eastern front line, the surviving inhabitants were using carpet, sandbags and plastic to keep out the cold. But, as Harry discovered, these did almost nothing.

"On a minus 15 degree day we went to visit a lady called Svetlana who lived on the top floor of a block of flats. When we walked into her room it was painfully cold; your fingers were aching, your toes were aching, it really wasn’t a nice place to be and you just can’t imagine how anyone could possibly live there. She had plastic sheeting on the windows, but the wind was coming straight into her apartment. She looked like a circular ball, because she had layers and layers and layers of clothes on. Essentially she was living in a freezer.”

Harry installed the new windows and came back later to see if it had made any difference to the inside temperature of the home. He recorded +12 degrees celcius in the space of eight hours.

After teaching a few locals how to build the windows for themselves, Harry then began to source donations from the UK and America, and in April established NGO, Insulate Ukraine, which now provides work for 32 Ukrainian civilians in five different war-torn zones.

Harry said that with the funding provided by individuals and companies from the west, all windows remain free for Ukrainian civilians, and funds go towards supplies (all within Ukraine).

"Russia is using the weather as one of the tools of this war, to make people struggle and we are an antidote to that.”

He said Insulate Ukraine aims to install 50,000 windows by March in liberated areas.

To donate to Insulate Ukraine visit: https://www.insulate-ukraine.org/