Blog: From Warm Homes to Adaptive Homes

What is an Adaptive Home?

The Warm Homes Plan is a Good Thing

It sets a clear and welcome level of ambition and brings fuel poverty, affordability and decarbonisation into a single, aligned conversation. Importantly it recognises that these challenges are interconnected. When renewable energy, efficient heating systems and fabric improvements are thoughtfully combined, they can improve comfort, lower bills while lowering carbon emissions at scale.

Of course, it’s not the complete picture. As others have pointed out, warm homes are great but creating healthy homes at the same time is essential. If we only fix insulation and air tightness or add solar and heat pumps without sorting ventilation we are not helping people live well in their homes and potentially storing up a crisis for later down the line.

As someone interested in systems thinking and complexity, it worries me a little that these different parts of retrofit are treated as self-contained physics, engineering or design problems. In reality, we are trying to solve a dynamic mutli-parameter optimisation across heat transfer, air flow, solar irradiation, grid dynamics (and more) and in this midst of all that we have people doing people things in their homes. Which is, after all, the point.

It also worries me that the tools we currently use to address this dynamic challenge are largely static ones. Building Regulations, Future Homes and Retrofit standards are vital, but they are design and build tools assessing and addressing a home at a fixed point in time. And inevitably that means, while the designs try to allow for a range of conditions, that they are wrong most of the time on at least one of the dimensions. A ventilation design for a healthy home will in many situations have too much air flow for comfort and energy efficiency. Not least when you add people into the mix, who didn’t read the Regs, thought they were just living in a home and don’t like the draughts.

So if homes are complex what can we do

The first thing is to realise that the only successful approach to complexity is systems that adapt or even evolve in response to their environment. Sensing the surroundings and responding to stimuli, testing whether a response improved the situation and learning is the only way to go. Experience from complex systems the world over says that fixed designs that can’t adapt will fail.

Of course we are increasingly adding “smart” tools to help. The Warm Homes plan and the associated improvements to EPCs make much of the introduction of “smart” technologies - primarily solar PV and storage. We already have many smart thermostats to help improve heating efficiency and there is much activity in the sensors and performance data world.

These tools are still largely independent; their own little mini systems optimising or reporting on their own world. Expecting and requiring external action to adapt - a user interaction, a site visit, some maintenance.

But they do point to the way forward. Monitoring provides sensing of the environment, to identify the issues in a home. The next step is smart systems that can respond to the sensor input, smart heating controls and smart ventilation. The data stream can tell us whether it’s working. And the final part is integration, for example combining heating with ventilation so energy efficiency is not competing with air flow and the smart systems optimise for both.

This is the foundation of what we describe as the Adaptive Home

An adaptive home is not simply insulated or heated efficiently. It is a home in which energy efficiency, ventilation and monitoring operate as a connected system, based on sensor information. It responds to changing environmental conditions and activities in the home rather than relying solely on fixed design assumptions. It balances warmth with moisture control and supports long term building health.

If the first phase of large scale retrofit was about installing measures, the next phase must be about designing and delivering these systems in an integrated way. The Warm Homes Plan provides momentum and scale. The opportunity now is to ensure that our delivery models reflect the complexity of the homes we are improving.

There are many challenges to overcome to create this system

One of the challenges is that in many organisations the different disciplines of retrofit, asset management, damp and mould remediation or data analysis can still sit within separate programmes, managed by different teams and delivered through distinct funding streams. Each is important in its own right, but we need to see integration here too if we are to address homes holistically. 

In partnership with Inside Housing, we are running a short survey to understand how housing providers are integrating retrofit, ventilation and monitoring in practice. With regulatory expectations evolving and funding increasing, this is an important moment to reflect on whether we are moving towards truly adaptive homes.

Warm homes? Yes! But adaptive homes, where energy efficiency, ventilation and monitoring work together for the health and wellbeing of the people in them, should be the next chapter of retrofit.

Richard Kemp-Harper, Chief Strategy Officer, AirEx Technologies.