Landlord or a homeowner, monitoring your retrofit gives you the information you need to get the best from your retrofit budget. In fact, the SHRA describe monitoring as ‘essential’ to closing the performance gap, that is the gap between what a design expects and how a building actually performs.
Done well, monitoring and evaluation of your retrofit project will help you spot the strongest approach and highlight snags so they can be fixed. Post occupancy evaluation can be used to improve designs and give you confidence that money is well spent. Pre-works monitoring is also useful to find the areas that most need investment.
So it valuable, especially for projects covering many homes. Still, monitoring and evaluation can be low on the priority list for landlords, partly because it is complex issue. There are many techniques, from survey to data gathering. Adding to the complexity, some options are better for certain types of project than others. Different stakeholders in a project will want different things from monitoring and evaluation.
To help you deliver a successful evaluation, Purrmetrix have produced a one page cheat sheet on how to design retrofit monitoring projects. This covers tasks, timing, tools and techniques for monitoring and evaluation.
Three key tips for success:
- Know what the data is for. Who will take action and what will they do?
- Decide what will be tested and when. Most forms of monitoring – even survey – will be more effective in the heating season
- Bring residents on board. Don’t let monitoring come as a surprise: make sure it is included in all communications on retrofit projects.
For more tips, tools and monitoring tasks you can download the full cheat sheet below. For an in depth discussion of what could work for your project, please get in touch.