News

Updates since December 2024:

• Each scenario can now have its own set of heating hours. This is most relevant where someone is currently under-heating but plans to switch to a heat pump.
• Rewritten SAP worksheet page which is more comprehensive and clearer about how HRP deviates from SAP
• 'Fuel requirements' page was rewritten and renamed to 'energy use'
• Partial rewrite of heating page (no functionality changes but it appears a little different and more consistent with other parts of the application)
• Fuel cost data update to latest Ofgem price cap + SAP 2024
• There is now always at least one fuel for fans and pumps
• floor elements can have default floor types for the calc so they don't default to a 'custom u-value' of 1 (ot yet taken advantage of in the libraries)
• implement embodied carbon graphs (not yet in report, except fig 7 which has had a change of methodology)
• Assume medium global TMP value in absence of a user decision
• Show embodied carbon data on comparison page measure summary tables
• Add reference field in report generation
• Add select all/deselect all to bulk measures on fabric page
• Various additions and minor reorganisation of the address search page
• Include party walls in 'wall' total on the house graphic
• Make sidebar text a little smaller so more can be shown at once
• Fix report generation scenario selection bug
• 'Standardised heating mode' (used in the report) now assumes a constant mean internal temperature of 20, rather than a particular heating schedule (aligning better with AECB CLR Step 1)

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

We have overhauled the SAP Worksheet page so that it should now be much more useful. It includes the units for all figures and a brief explanation of each section.

We will be enabling it progressively over the next few weeks in order to gather feedback, first within PPR, then for Tech Leads in partner organisations, then across the board.

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

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've made some updates to the standard report format that is used by several organisations. These updates were mainly focused on the text in the report and we felt they were needed to better explaining some of our approach and a couple of key issues in retrofit, in response to client queries and an emerging consensus on best practice in the industry:

• Balancing decarbonising heat and ‘fabric first’ approaches: We now better explain what we mean by ‘fabric first’ and how this relates to ensuring homes are ‘retrofit ready’ through repairs and maintenance, and how recommended retrofit strategies respond to client aims.We encourage the decarbonisation of heat while paying attention to client priorities, budgets, building condition, and comfort and health needs. We’ve also better explained changing heating patterns and radiator sizing practices to support efficiency of both condensing boilers and heat pumps. (Text has been updated in ‘Our Approach’ and section 2.21 to support this).
• The importance of well-performing ventilation systems: We are keen to support good indoor air quality in homes, so we have also updated the text on ventilation within the standard report to support this. We’ve explained our preference for continuously running mechanical ventilation systems (section 4.5). We’ve also added some further explanatory text on woodburners, highlighting their negative pollution and carbon impacts (section 4.5.2).

Alongside these bigger thematic updates, we’ve taken the opportunity to improve and tweak other aspects of the standard text and labelling of graphics, clarifying in response to feedback. In doing this we’ve also taken the opportunity to pick up on typos. We’ve also added the following:

• A note on the second page about the provenance and development of the Home Retrofit Planner software.
• Section 3.3, ‘Quick Wins’: added information on lighting and laundry, updated text on renewable energy use and monitoring.
• Section 5.2, ‘Next Steps’: Updated text on help available from People Powered Retrofit. (There is an opportunity for other organisations to do the same).
• Glossary: Added text on air to air heat pumps, boiler upgrade scheme (BUS), MEV, dMEV, MVHR, VAT. Updated text on ASHP, GSHP, LETI, RHI.

We hope that all of this makes the report a more useful document to both clients and the householders supporting them. As ever, feedback is always welcome - and if you spot any typos, let us know!

Further updates will be coming soon - especially in Section 4 on context and in measures libraries. We’ll share with partner organisations for comment before these are implemented.

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.