The Home Retrofit Planner Survey: What is it and what is it good for?

Retrofitting your home to improve energy efficiency, improve air quality, reduce bills, and lower your carbon footprint can drastically increase your quality of life, but how do you know where to begin?

The first step is usually a home retrofit survey, providing you with a detailed assessment of your home’s energy usage, performance and outlining areas for improvement. For this blog, I spoke to Mark Crunden-White, one of People Powered Retrofit’s expert surveyors to talk you through what happens on one of our Home Retrofit Planner Surveys and how it can benefit your home retrofit plans.

In short, the Home Retrofit Planner (HRP) is a detailed survey of the home, helping you understand your home’s context, retrofit readiness and potential for improvement. We consider your aims, circumstances and budget to provide tailored recommendations and model several retrofit scenarios so you can understand the impact of these measures in your home. A sample of the report can be found here, and it’s worth a look - it’s both a tool to help you make the right decisions about your home for you and your family, and helps explain concepts around energy efficiency.

‘You begin with a phone call with our Householder Service Manager, Harriet,’ Mark tells me, ‘Harriet will create a retrofit project brief, asking you for a bit more information about your home, your budget, your expectations for your project. This helps us understand your personal circumstances better, and allows us to identify if a survey actually makes sense for you to undertake.’ The phone interview takes about 30 minutes, and Harriet provides you with a quote for the survey.

Mark then chats to the client just before he is due to visit the home, on a pre-survey call. I want to know what he discusses. ‘I am interested in hearing more about their experience of living in the home - how they feel about the house, their favourite rooms, or things they aren’t happy with. I want to know who else is in the house living with them and what hopes they have for how they’d like to live’. I ask why that’s important - surely in retrofit you just need to know about the fabric of the house? ‘How people feel about their home is incredibly important, and structures how we approach the survey and what recommendations we make. It’s people who live in homes’.

And what sort of questions do people come with at this stage in the process? ‘Very few,’ Mark acknowledges. He explains that at this point it's more about getting to know one another. ‘Some clients already have detailed ideas about what they want to do,’ he adds, ‘but most of the time they don’t. I’m there to tease out more about their lives’.

What if clients don’t know much about their home? Is it important that they know whether they have cavity walls or not? ‘No,’ Mark laughs, ‘all of that can be worked out at the survey’.

‘When I arrive at the client’s house, I’ll usually ask them to give me a tour,’ Mark explains. This allows him to again contextualise the home. ‘Little nuggets of information usually pop up here that hasn’t come up before - this part of the house is draughty or mouldy, or I'll be able to tell whether a room isn’t used as much and am able to ask more questions.’

Mark then gets into measuring up the home. ‘It’s a lot of measuring up and defining the fabric of the home at this point. I need to know whether the floor is solid or suspended, whether there are cavity walls or if there are a mix, the volume of the rooms. I’m essentially getting data to build a 3D model’. I ask whether there is anything invasive in the survey. ‘No, I avoid that,’ Mark assures me, ‘if invasive surveys are needed in the future we can talk about that separately’.

Overall, the survey tends to last between 2 - 4 hours depending on the complexity of the home - 'and how much chatting we're doing', Mark adds.

Mark returns to the office following the survey, modelling a baseline of the house into our software and then modelling some recommended retrofit scenarios to illustrate possible improvements. He then writes the narrative, fleshing out advice and guidance. This normally takes between 3-4 weeks to complete and deliver.

‘We then give clients about 2 weeks to read through it and then ask for another meeting to go through any questions they might have’. What kind of questions do people normally have at this stage? ‘Most of the time they’ve looked through the report and so they have a pretty good idea of what they might want to do. They’ll ask about certain technologies, such as heat pumps, but they also might ask to go into detail about some of the scenarios. They might have done some research and might want to know what happens if they pick and choose different elements of the scenario’. What does happen? I ask. ‘I’ll talk to them about what they want to achieve in their retrofit and try to advise on how those changes might impact their budget or their timeline - I’ve got to know them pretty well over the time we’ve spent together and so understand how best to present information to make it easy for them to make sense of’.

I’m interested to know more about the role Mark is playing here for clients in their retrofit journey. ‘We’re helping people make decisions. We outline the risks, we talk through the scenarios I’ve built and I’ll consider the impact of what they might implement in terms of scheduling work or interacting with other measures. I might also advise if they need to get remedial work done or more invasive surveys if I think they need more information.’

From here, clients make decisions about what’s next for them - and we’re happy to help. For some, simple and straightforward measures such as loft insulation or new windows are all that are needed, and we can provide both standard specifications and conversations with your builder or installer to ensure the installation is meeting your needs. For others, you’ll want to work with an architect for a new extension or layout design and we can ensure we're helping you make the most energy efficient choices in your design.

The first step though is always a retrofit survey, and we'd be delighted to hear from you! Get in touch through the button below.