Homeowner Hub: A New Tool to Empower Greener Homes
Innovative app sets homeowners on the path to greener, more efficient homes with personalised guidance and resources.
In the UK we are facing two big problems, rising energy prices and the urgent need to reduce carbon emissions if we’re to reach net zero by 2050. With more than 30 million homes in the UK, homes are responsible for a fifth of all the emissions in the country, a large amount of which is generated by home heating. We’re on a mission to accelerate the transition to greener homes in the West of England.
Introduction to the Homeowner Hub
The Homeowner Hub is a digital resource for sustainable home improvement. The portal (platformed through SuSy House) will help users evaluate their home’s energy efficiency, suggest practical upgrade options, and connect them to local experts.
Improving your home’s energy efficiency is a significant step in the road towards net zero.
Our UK housing stock accounts for a fifth of emissions in the country, largely generated by our home heating technology. The Homeowner Hub, enables homeowners to clearly see what improvements they can make to their homes, how much money and carbon they could save, and connects them to our trusted directory of suppliers to carry out the work locally.
Reach your home’s potential with these in-app features:
- User-friendly interface designed for accessibility to all homeowners.
- Step-by-step guides for making sustainable choices, from home assessments and insulation upgrades to renewable energy systems.
- Personalised action plans tailored to a homeowner’s specific property and energy goals.
- Uses EPC data from multiple validated sources to show you specific actions you can take to upgrade your home.
- Provides users with estimated costs, energy bill savings and carbon reductions.
- Provides estimates from local suppliers all in-app, based on your home information.
- Access to resources from Retrofit West’s trusted network of suppliers and professionals.
How does the Homeowner Hub work?
The Homeowner Hub is an extension of the current Retrofit West website and acts as a portal for homeowners to access personalised information, estimates and guidance.
Features include your ‘home score’ based on the information pulled from SuSy House home data. This is a quick, clear overview of your home’s efficiency. The app can estimate your current energy efficiency, carbon emissions and how green the infrastructure of your home is. The ‘structure’ part of the score measures how insulated your home is and whether you have renewable energy sources (like solar) installed.
The Home Assessment ‘help me choose’ feature also talks you through step-by-step which assessment to go for, based on the information you most want to know about your home.
Homeowners will have unique access to estimates based on their personal home profile, pulling data from market rates which are periodically kept up-to-date and factor in labour and material costs. You can then confidently contact Retrofit West’s directory of trusted professionals and local installers and book quotations.
Once you’re logged in, Retrofit West can also use your data to build a picture of the homeowners in the West of England who are on their retrofit journey. This live data enables us to improve our services, give impartial advice and get the best resources for you.
More about the home data: The data comes from a variety of sources (e.g. the public EPC database, Ordnance Survey, Land Registry, NASA) then it is run through SuSy House’s own algorithms to clean and validate it. They have a database of all c. 30 million homes in the UK but some will have very detailed information available and others have predicted information, based on similar properties. Users are encouraged to review and edit the information about their homes – the estimates are only as good as the information being fed in.
The Bigger Picture
The Homeowner Hub will empower users with the information they need to start and continue decarbonising their homes. By providing practical solutions for homeowners, we can support the long-term goals of reducing energy costs, making homes healthier and reducing carbon emissions.
