Our Services

Home energy retrofit options appraisal

Our core work is to provide independent advice to home owners in York to evaluate what options are available to move their home from fossil heating to a heat pump system. Energy efficiency and heating systems can come with a lot of jargon and assumed knowledge. We can tailor the detail we provide and the language we use to suit your needs. That is an important part of the initial consultation.

While our approach incorporates a fabric and ventilation first methodology, it is unlikely going to be affordable or acceptable to many home owners to undertake a level of retrofit that fully addresses these areas. As such our options appraisal is designed to provide a tailored assessment of your home to consider the estimated capital cost to operational saving benefit of different adjustments to your home.

Our core objective is to provide options that would move your property to being heat pump ready: achieving room comfort with a flow temperature of 45°C or less. Key areas we consider include:

• Internal and external wall insulation;
• Floor and loft insulation;
• Air tightness measures;
• Glazing;
• Mechanical ventilation with heat recovery (MVHR);
• Radiator sizing, including an assessment of the output of your existing radiators and underfloor heating;
• Heating flow and return temperatures and impact on system heat output and efficiency;
• Considerations for locating and interfacing a heat pump with your existing heating system;



Investment cost estimates are provided in the report against each option appraised. These are based on experience of undertaking a deep retrofit project in York and continued engagement with relevant suppliers in and around York. Heat loss calculations, in line with CIBSE and DBSP Domestic Heating Design Guide, undertaken by HeatSet under the different options appraised allow an appraisal of estimated annual heat saved relative to the current heating system. In turn this allows for an appraisal of financial payback of each option relative to your current heating system.

Further, in our work we estimate the carbon dioxide and equivalent emissions saving that each option is expected to provide relative to your current heating system. In line with Government methodology we put a pound value to these forecast emissions abated allowing for an additional "social" payback estimate on capital.