From Projects to Power Stations: A New Vision for Healthy UK Housing

Retrofitting the UK's housing stock isn't just an energy efficiency challenge; it's a public health imperative. For decades, a frustrating boom-bust cycle has undermined progress, leading not only to financial instability in the supply chain but to poor outcomes for residents, including homes with inadequate ventilation and unhealthy indoor air. As we make our buildings more airtight to save energy, the risk of trapping pollutants indoors only grows. The question is no longer if we should retrofit, but how we can do it at scale without compromising the quality of the air we breathe.

This was the central theme of a conversation I had on the Air Quality Matters podcast with Andrew Sutton , co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer at Sero . In our discussion, we explored how to break these cycles by focusing on quality, data, and a fundamental shift in perspective: seeing retrofit not as a one-off project, but as the key to creating healthy, affordable, and comfortable homes for the long term.

Beyond Piecemeal Fixes: Planning for Healthy, Breathing Buildings

One of the most persistent hurdles in retrofit is the perception of overwhelming cost. Andy offered a powerful reframing of this. A significant portion of the cost of a deep retrofit is money that social landlords are already spending on planned maintenance—replacing boilers, windows, and roofs. The failure is not a lack of funds, but a lack of a plan.

Andy stressed that ventilation is an integral, non-negotiable part of this process. It cannot be an afterthought. When a home’s improvement pathway is mapped out, decisions about ventilation are made from day one. This means that when windows are replaced, they are fitted with the correctly sized trickle vents as part of a wider ventilation strategy. It means that the journey to a comfortable, low-energy home must begin with ensuring it is, first and foremost, a healthy one. This subtle but profound shift—from piecemeal fixes to planned, holistic home improvement—is essential. Hearing Andy detail how this is embedded in SERO’s process highlights how practical and achievable this "business as usual" approach really is.

Measuring What Matters: From Proxies to Proven Healthy Outcomes

For too long, the construction sector has measured success with proxies. Was the fan fitted? Was the product installed? As Andy noted, this is a flawed approach. The real goal is a healthy, affordable, and comfortable home, and the only way to verify that is by measuring the actual outcomes.

He shared a powerful example of a heat pump installation where different parties had assumed different flow temperatures. Instead of getting lost in contractual disputes, the focus shifted to the real question: “Did the system still deliver affordable comfort for the resident?” This principle is even more critical for indoor air quality. We must move beyond simply replacing one fan with another and start asking, “What does this building and its occupants actually need?” Success isn't a fan on a wall; it's a verified air exchange rate that protects residents from damp, mould, and airborne pollutants. The full conversation delves into how this data-driven accountability can revolutionise the sector, creating the feedback loops necessary to ensure that the products and processes we use genuinely deliver healthier indoor environments.

The Future Vision: Powering the Delivery of Healthy Homes

Perhaps the most forward-thinking concept we explored was the idea of housing stock as a distributed power station. As we electrify homes with PV panels, batteries, and heat pumps, they are no longer just passive consumers of energy; they become active participants in the grid.

From this perspective, Andy argues that landlords are faced with a simple choice: build a managed power station or an unmanaged one. A managed system can generate a stable income stream that decouples retrofit funding from the boom-bust political cycle. This is the engine that can drive the entire process. It provides the long-term, patient capital required to ensure that every retrofit journey starts with the foundational elements of health and safety, chief among them being proper, effective ventilation. It creates the financial security to do the job right, every single time.

One Take: Making Low-Cost IAQ Sensors Fit for Compliance

In this week's "One Take" segment, we unpacked a paper that offers a dose of pragmatic optimism for one of indoor air quality’s biggest challenges: monitoring. The paper, led by the renowned Professor Lidia Morawska , addresses how we can use affordable, low-cost PM2.5 sensors for regulatory compliance.

We all know the problem. Gold-standard reference monitors are too expensive and complex for widespread deployment in every school, office, and home. Low-cost sensors, while accessible, have known limitations, with factors like humidity and particle type affecting their accuracy.

Instead of seeing this as a deal-breaker, the paper treats it as an engineering challenge to be solved. It proposes a clever, scalable framework that harnesses the power of these sensors while building in the necessary scientific rigour. The approach involves creating a small network within a building, nominating an internal and external sensor as “reference points,” and performing a targeted, traceable calibration on only these key nodes once a year. The correction factors derived from this process can then be applied across the network and even shared in a central database to build a community of practice.

This moves low-cost sensors from being interesting gadgets to serious tools for public health. It provides a viable pathway for dynamic ventilation control, for verifying building performance against health-based standards, and for creating true accountability.

The Air Quality Matters Podcast in Partnership with

Farmwood - Eurovent- Aico - Aereco - Ultra Protect -

The One Take Podcast in Partnership with

SafeTraces and Inbiot

Do check them out in the links and on the Air Quality Matters Website.

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