If you’re delivering retrofit, how do you understand which homes are going to benefit the most and what should be done? Measuring the true heat loss of a home is an important benchmark for defining potential savings and designing the upgrades needed. At the same time, project managers, designers and contractors have questions about which homes show the worst internal conditions, which have high levels of condensation and where ventilation may be an issue.
Flexible monitoring and heat loss testing
Based on our years of experience in delivering measurement of building performance, Purrmetrix have built a monitoring solution that can be deployed quickly and flexibly in housing to deliver measurements after a few weeks of testing. Warmscore is a toolset of sensors and web based software that can be installed in any house in 30 minutes to give measurements of:
– heatloss
– condensation risk profile
– ventilation rate (air changes)
– comfort level
Testing combines energy and environmental data from each home, taken either from a smart meter or meter reads. Results are available after less than a month of monitoring, or the toolset can be left in the home for longer term tests to understand how performance varies across the season and with different resident behaviour.
Measuring building performance in retrofit projects
For many retrofit projects testing is helpful at multiple stages – including stock selection, site survey and after delivery. Portable testing kits reduce cost per test and give you more flexibility in your monitoring plans; if one home has to be excluded from the test sample it is straightforward to retrieve the kit and deploy it elsewhere.
Our project with London Borough of Havering in the first wave of SHDF is a great example of how this works
Delivering measurements for London Borough of Havering
London Borough of Havering have been testing with Purrmetrix during the first wave of SHDF, to augment their EPC data and survey work with additional data on the archetypes. Funding was confirmed late in the heating season, being able to quickly deploy test systems was useful.
Working with LBH’s contractors, Purrmetrix provided heat loss for 10% of the homes to be upgraded, with measurements of ventilation rate and condensation risk for 20% of stock. The data identified homes with high heat loss and ventilation rates and gave confidence for models being used to design upgrades. Post works it will be used to verify improvements and confirm that tenants have more affordable comfort.
“The data provided by Warmscore is really helpful in developing our understanding of what is happening in our homes. We’re looking forward to getting additional measurements post works to confirm all is working correctly’” Robert Ditsell, Project Manager
Support for your monitoring
Warmscore’s measurement toolkit is valuable in any situation where you need better understanding of your building stock; building the business case for retrofit, identifying stock for grant applications, even finding causes of disrepair.
We can help you figure out what monitoring is needed for each project and how you can go about collecting the data you need. Contact us if you would like to learn how we might support your projects – there’s always a human on the end of this form, we promise!