Switchee, a British tech business aiming to improve the lives of those in social housing, has pioneered a unique method for calculating home efficiency based on real data in a way that is, for the first time, highly scalable and logistically viable.
Smart Meter Insights is an efficient method for understanding the thermal performance of homes, including Heat Transfer Coefficient (HTC), Heat Loss Parameter (HLP), Space Heat Demand (SHD) and home running cost at scale.
Approved by the UK regulator Ofgem, Switchee’s advancement significantly streamlines the process of obtaining key data by gaining consent from residents via Switchee’s inbuilt smart thermostat.
This provides a scalable way for housing providers to gain smart meter data consent that was previously not logistically possible to calculate on a large scale.
Switchee’s service allows housing providers to understand the exact value and truth of the energy efficiency of a home, identify which social homes would benefit most from intervention, which homes require more or less energy to keep them warm, and verification of the impact of retrofits – ensuring investments deliver real benefits.
This is in contrast to the Energy Performance Certificate (EPC), which has produced some inaccuracies in survey-based assessments.
As such, Smart Meter Insights is a fundamental service to demonstrate the cost-benefit of retrofitting on energy bills, providing reassurance that retrofit work is genuinely benefitting the resident.
Switchee’s Smart Meter Insights is not only supporting housing providers to make strong applications to access the government’s Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund (SHDF), and SHDF Wave 3 in particular, but is also helping to build an accurate retrofitting picture for the government to implement a changed strategy.
This is essential to answering leading industry questions such as the value for money of double glazing, the effectiveness of cavity walls compared to loft insulation, and the success of heat pumps.
Solutions provided by Smart Meter Insights include:
- Prioritising homes for retrofit improvement: The service compares thermal performance between homes across a portfolio and uses HLP to understand which homes require significantly more or less energy per square metre to keep them warm
- Measuring the impact of retrofit improvements: Smart Meter Insights allows housing providers to understand which interventions are most impactful in terms of:
- Changes in HTC and HLP
- Changes in KWh energy required to keep the home at 18°C for one year (assuming typical weather)
- Change in energy cost required to keep the home at 18°C for one year (assuming standard UK energy costs)
- Confirming HTC performance of new-build properties and HTC contract work: The service compares the actual energy required to keep a home warm to the building specifications or to the promised increase of the HTC. It also identifies and addresses any discrepancies with contractors
- Resident consent: The service contains an industry-leading smart meter consent process that works via the Switchee device and has full approval from UK regulator Ofgem
Tom Robins, CEO of Switchee, said: “We are delighted to share our Smart Meter Insights, which is the result of a longer-term ambition of using our analytics to improve social housing.
“This cutting-edge service benefits both residents and housing providers, all whilst accelerating the journey to net zero.
“At Switchee, we want to provide the industry with options that move away from survey-based subjective measures such as EPC and toward quantitative, real facts about the amount of energy being retained in the home and what the expected cost to the resident is.
“With Smart Meter Insights, we make this a reality.”
Switchee is a Housing Digital Stakeholder that seeks to make maintaining properties simple and straight forward with remote tools that allow the user to check a property’s condition, analyse problems, and schedule fixes.
Main image: Fah Studio 27/Shutterstock
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