Repowering Homes: Scaling Retrofit for Blocks

Blocks of flats pose unique legal, technical, and social challenges for retrofit, making it particularly difficult for low income and vulnerable households in these properties to access the benefits of warmer, healthier homes. Building on their core strengths in community engagement and co-design, this project will address key gaps in the market through a community retrofit service for these homes. 

This project builds on two previously funded projects, through which they have piloted and developed a property survey and retrofit co-design service for blocks of flats. In a previous project, they tested the minimum viable service in one estate of five blocks. The original scale of this project was revised to facilitate essential development of a digital platform for data collection and actionable advice by project partner Novoville; it has generated significant learnings and tools for delivering this offering at scale. 

This project will systematise and deliver the full service for a cohort of ten blocks of flats, including: 

• Block recruitment and marketing
• Co-developing collaborative visions for retrofit and mentoring community champions
• Whole-block survey methodology: collecting behavioural and technical data
• Energy modelling and reporting: optioneering retrofit measures, generating actionable energy efficiency plans for residents, and whole block retrofit plans

This will validate service development work undertaken to date across different typologies, standardise the approach to create efficiencies, and subsequently offer the full service at scale across varied tenure-types.