A community of less than 800 homes is being challenged to become Oxfordshire's first energy-efficient village.

About 80 families in North Leigh, near Witney, are already involved in monitoring their fuel consumption with the help of Oxford University - and now Southern Electric is jumping on board with a pilot scheme.

The company will be dishing out prototype electric meters to show householders at a glance how much electricity is being used - and how much it is costing them.

A meter will be fitted to the local substation, feeding data into a community website, so residents can assess their combined effort to reduce the village's carbon footprint.

The scheme is a combined link-up between the village's Energy Efficiency Group, set up a year ago, Thames Valley Energy Centre (TVEC) and Southern Electric, who called it a pioneering project.

Southern Electric energy efficiency manager Stephen Millward said they wanted to study how demand could be reduced across an entire community.

He said: "It's sometimes hard to encourage people to take up energy efficiency measures because, individually, the savings look small, but in North Leigh this will be aggregated to show the impact they are all making."

One idea being floated is the possibility of placing solar tiles on the roof of the village church, with the energy produced used to heat the building or fed into the National Grid.

The village's own 'Mr Efficiency' is retired Geoff Feasey, chairman of the village energy group.

He said: "Everyone making a small difference adds up. We've already had academic input with Oxford University's environment students, so we have basic data.

"Now we want to build on that and become the county's leading energy efficient village.

"North Leigh will never win a beauty contest as a village, but we could do this."

West Oxfordshire District Council leader and village resident Barry Norton, of Perrott Close, is one of the 80 householders signed up.

He said his family had already contributed to the community effort by no longer using one of their fridge freezers.