It's been a little while since the last update so here's a roundup of changes since the summer:

Assessment & organisation management

We rewrote the assessments page and added a search feature to it. In future we'll add in pagination as we're aware that for some users the list of assessments is getting rather long!

We also out the organisations management aspect from the front page and added an organisation page. You can access this via the "Organisations" link on the top right of the tool. Organisation admins now have the ability to invite their own users rather than having to email us about it.

On the project page we added the ability to reassign ownership of an assessment.

Heating hours input

We've finally overhauled what was one of the most annoying parts of data entry - the heating times on the questionnaire page. It'll now let you know if you've made a mistake much much sooner. We're aware that it doens't catch all possible errors still - if you put the times not in order or you leave a row as a gap this is still a problem - but we'll add warnings about those too shortly.

Price updates

We have updated our price data to the OfGEM price gap Jan-Mar 2024.

Address search

We added a few extra fields:

• groundwater flooding status
• overheating status (England only)

And improved:

• the exposure map - now viewable as GIS data with higher reslution
• frost attack risk - now automated based on the tables in NHBC Standards 2019.

We have a larger piece of work on the address search page landing in the next few weeks.

Reports

We changed the external design temperature calculation for heat pumps so instead of assuming a constant temperature for the whole of the UK, it varies per CIBSE A. In built-up areas this will result in more reasonable external design temperatures. This will also appear on the address search page in the next few weeks.

Comparison page

It's slightly easier to use - the data for each scenario and the overall summary is hidden behind a click so that you can more easily find the thing you want without having to scroll the whole page first

House graphic & in-app reporting

And inside the tool, we improved the design of the page header: the house graphic now uses colour to help differentiate the different numbers, and the graphs to the right also use colour and are no longer pixellated. The same design is now used on the commentary page.

We also changed the numbers shown in the app to match up better with what appears in the report: so the headline numbers are now space heating (SHD), EUI and peak heat load.

SHD and EUI are both shown in their normal form plus in their standardised form (with a consistent internal heating target of 21 degrees and with 9 hours of heating on weekdays and 16 hours of heating on weekends to model comfort take-back). The two different measures aren't labelled right now - but the top one is the non-standised figure. We'll add this to the in-app display in the next weeks to make things clearer.

Thanks for reading

And of course, we continue to make improvements to our implementation of SAP and code quality behind the scenes.

We'll shortly be enabling some new sharing controls, plus some general design changes in HRP:

• The biggest design change is purely cosmetic - we're moving to a blue-and-grey pallette in the app from the red-and-beige
• The assessment title and description are now in the top left hand corner of the page, so even if you've scrolled down the sidebar you can see at a glance what assessment you're editing
• We've added a new Project page, where you can edit the name, description, and status of a project
• The Project page also contains access controls, so you can see who has access to a project and (if you're an organisation admin) share and unshare with other people in your organisation

We will be adding some more features to the new page (such as the ability to reassign ownership of a project) in the near future. More announcements about that to come.

As usual, if you have any queries, questions or complaints, please reach out to us on support@retrofitplanner.app.

We will shortly be rolling out some changes to HRP's navigation sidebar. You can see the old version on the left and the new version on the right of this image:

The changes we've made are as follows:

• The current page and scenario are highlighted clearly on the sidebar.
• The buttons to copy/delete/lock a scenario are just below the scenario name.
• When making a new scenario, you're prompted for its name straight away rather than having to go into the 'dwelling data' page to alter it. New scenarios are now created by clicking the 'new' button under the scenario that you want to base the new scenario off.
• You can have multiple scenario sections open in the sidebar at once.
• Opening or closing a scenario section on the sidebar doesn't automatically navigae to that scenario - now you have to click on the page you want to navigate to in order to go there.

As usual, if you have any queries, questions or complaints, please reach out to us on support@retrofitplanner.app!

A smaller batch of bugfixes and smaller improvements this month, since the last update was in March. We'll be posting these quarterly from now on, to sync up with our technical leads meetings.

• Use latest SAP fuel figures (Feb 2023)
• Wall elements that have zero for area are marked as 'deleted' for clarity.
• Clarified text on heating page about instantaneous water heating - this toggle is for heating at the point of use, e.g. for electric showers, but users were previously using it for boilers. Hopefully the new text is clearer.
• Solar hot water page cleaned up -most of the time the calculations on the SHW page are excessive, and users often miss filling out the inputs which were lower down the page. We've switch to a layout where only inputs are presented, but you can toggle the display of the full SAP worksheet-like calculations too if that's useful.
• Show more info in the title bar of the browser - previously just said "Home Retrofit Planner", now will include the scenario, project title, etc.
• The commentary page has changed behind-the-scenes in a way we hope will make data loss issues related to this page a thing of the past. Please tell us if you encounter issues with it!

Also, please don't navigate away from the image gallery while uploads are in progress; the uploads might not complete.

Our induction process for new retrofit surveyors up until now has been to add them to a 'training' group on the app. Then after the training phase is complete, we remove them from that group and add them to their organisation's group. As we've grown in size, this training group has become a bit unmanageable for us. We haven't had a good system for tracking who should and shouldn't be in it, and people have ended up in more than one group. Some users have found this confusing.

So, we've decided to remove the training group. This won't make any difference to most of our active users because most of them aren't in it. However you might have had a test or experimental assessment in this group. If so, it's not lost! You still have access to it, it's just a private assessment now.

As usual, if you have any queries or questions, please reach out us on support@retrofitplanner.app!

Hot on the heels of the overhauled floor section, we have a new "address search" page.

This page contains some aspects of what used to be on the household questionnaire page and dwelling data page, plus some new questions that provide important context when planning a retrofit. It's all data that can be found, automatically or manually, from public databases.

As part of this work we've automated the collection of some data:

• full address from the Royal Mail postcode address file (PAF)
• universal property reference number (UPRN)
• local authority
• LSOA
• altitude (from the EU Copernicus project)
• SAP region (from the tables in SAP)

All you have to do is do is enter the postcode or the first line of an address, select the address you want to use, and these data will be filled in. You still have manually to fill in the rest of the page – but in the future we hope to automate most of the data collection on this page.

This feature will be enabled in the week beginning 20 March. We welcome any feedback you have on this change at support@retrofitplanner.app.

We've been working on a revamped fabric page. At the moment this only affects walls; the next step will be expanding it to include 'openings' (windows and doors).

A splash of paint

We now have coloured indicators of whether a measure has been applied to an element:

• Gray means no measure applied
• Green means measure applied in this scenario
• Blue means measure applied in previous scenario

Applying measures

We've reworked the measures application to give an overview of available measures with cost information. A similar approach is used for entering new fabric elements in the first place.

Clicking on one of these entries will expand it to show more information about the measure; and then 'select' will choose it.

There's also now a 'filter' text field that is focussed when you open this dialogue box, which allows you to search for the measure you want quickly. This will search through the tag and description.

We'll be rolling out this style of element / measure selector to everywhere else in the app over the next years. Long-time users will be happy to know there's no way for the dialogue box to end up half off the screen.

Area input

We now allow you select "area" or "length x width/height" for the areas of elements. Previously it was unclear, especially to new users, how this worked, and now it's impossible to get wrong:

Loft and roof changes

We previously advised modelling loft conversions by applying roof measures to loft elements. Conversions between 'lofts' and 'roofs' in the tool will no longer be possible.

In the case of loft insulation being installed for the first time, the process now will be:

• in the baseline...
  • modelling the roof (as it's part of the thermal envelope)
• in the scenario where the loft insulation will be applied...
  • changing the dimensions of the old roof element to 0
  • adding a new loft element for the existing condition, and
  • applying a measure to it.

And vice versa, if there will be a loft conversion where the thermal envelope changes. Instructions about this are also included in the tool.

This change is largely because it keeps HRP's code simplier – but we think it makes sense conceptually too. Items added to the fabric page represent real fabric element of the building, and roofs and lofts do not change into each other.

Rollout

This feature will be enabled in the week beginning 20 March. We welcome any feedback you have on this change at support@retrofitplanner.app.

It's been a while since the last general update in September. A lot of work has gone into the new floor u-value calculator, which is now live, and we've fixed a laundry list of bugs and made various updates and tweaks to functionality too.

Behind the scenes we're still working on some bigger changes that aren't yet ready for public consumption as we're testing them internally: an new address search page and a rewrite of part of the fabric page. We'll write more on these when we release them generally.

Miscellaneous fixes and tweaks

• Fix bug where new heating systems would always have the category of 'Warm air systems'
• Format output numbers better - in new code, we now use commas as a thousands separator (visible on e.g. the current energy page)
• Improve performance of library item selection - previously the frontend was fetching all libraries every time an library item needed to be selected, which was slow. Now we fetch once on page load
• Fix image rotation on report output
• Fix 'add floor' button on dwelling data page which sometimes malfunctioned
• Fix 'delete appliance' button on appliance page which sometimes malfunctioned
• Try to make sure the bulk measure application dialogue box pop-up fits on the screen, and make it scrollable
• Fix various typos and remove mentions of MHEP
• Update fuel costs
• When loading an assessment, show the first page on the sidebar (household questionaire)
• Show an error on the export screen if you click the button to import an assessment file but you haven't selected a file
• Add 'for review' status for assessments - this is intended to make it easier to see what assessments are in progress and which are waiting for QA
• Assessments shared with multiple users no longer cause a server error
• Remove faulty handling of space cooling demand, which sometimes caused the fuel requirements pages of assessments to break. It was only triggered in about 1 in every 300 assessments, and the implementation was incompete and not compliant with SAP
• Fix bug where current energy page was showing carbon emissions per area figure for total carbon emissions
• Current energy page now shows total energy use and has end-use energy intensity on the comparison charts
• Be smarter about saving data to the server - avoid trying to send multiple updates to the server at once because this caused a race condition which meant data could sometimes be lost

Report changes

• Fix the bills data bar of the fuel costs graph, which was calculated wrongly if there was generation
• Display heating system on/off duration as hours and minutes - so e.g. write "6 hours 20 minutes" rather than "6.3333333 hours"
• Fix the output of user-provided text in the report, which output "it's" as "it'" due to HTML encoding issues

Refactoring work

And we have continued rewriting parts of HRP to make it more robust. In particular, the generation & current energy sections of the model have been rewritten and so has page navigation & management, which is more robust than before.

This month we have some changes to the image gallery and current energy pages, plus several bug fixes.

New image gallery

We've implemented a new and less annoying image upload feature:

• You can now drag and drop files to upload onto the page
• There's a list of images to upload, which have individual uploading statuses, so you can see how far along the upload process is - and you know which files failed to upload if there's a problem
• We'll only upload two images concurrently - previously if you had, say, 25 images, the app would try to upload them all at once and this could cause upload failures.

New current energy page

Again, this looks pretty similar to the old page - but under the hood it's totally different code. We've provided side-by-side comparisons on the bar charts between baseline and current use, and improved the alignment and visual appearance of the table, with the numbers lining up nicely in columns.

We do have plans to align the reporting in the app with the reporting in the report – but this is something we'll be looking at closer in 2023.

"Carbon Co-op"-style appliances bug fix

We discovered a set of related bugs in the Carbon Co-op appliances calculations that together led to space heating demand (SHD) being higher than it should be. In the majority of affected assessments, the overestimate was between 1% and 5%, though in some it was more significant. (In many assessments this behaviour was not triggered at all.)

In keeping with our backwards compatibility policy for building model changes, projects started before this bug was fixed will retain their old calculations, but new projects will use the fixed version.

Smaller bug fixes

• Per person energy use and CO₂ emissions were swapped on the 'compare scenarios' page
• The household questionnaire page's layout had been messed up - it's now readable again.
• Applying bulk measures to window elements that don't have the 'subtract from' field set is now possible.

Coming soon

We'll have the new floor u value calculator ready hopefully in October - we'll post about that when it goes live.

We've added a couple of bigger features over the last months, alongside a larger set of smaller fixes and improvements.

New report

HRP has now has a new report. This is a big update and addresses various issues with the old report: * the report template has been reworked to put the most important sections first, as well as reduced in size * the graphs in the report are of a higher quality and show more useful information * PDF generation is built in instead of relying on the web browser to produce a report, which often produced bad results

A sample report is available, showing the new report format.

Solar hot water estimator

Solar hot water data entry in the tool previously required information that is not typically available. We've added an estimator feature, following SAP, that does not require a test certificate.

Other changes

Performance

• We improved the load time of the list of assessments page. For some users it taking a noticeable amount of time to show the assessment list - now it's near-instant on a good connection.
• Only load libraries once when the assessment is loaded, rather than refetching them every time a library item is required, removing a delay when using the library selector

Usability

• New library selector for wall elements. This is the first stage of a usability refresh of the fabric page, and other library selectors (for floors, windows, etc.) will start to follow the same design as the new wall selector.
• New heating page layout. It's now less ugly and helps avoid the need to scroll far to the right.
• Assessment list entries are sorted by date last modified within the status categories (in progress, complete etc)
• If an assessment is marked as 'complete' no further changes can be made - but the only indication of this in the interface were confusing error messages. Now there is an alert when opening an assessment if it can't be saved to clarify the situation.
• The side menu no longer disappears if you reduce the size of the browser window

Bugs fixed

• Intermittent failure of "Add floor" button on 'dwelling data'
• Images in the image gallery are not rotated correctly