13 partners, 18 months, one mission: our new consortium-led Transform-ER project aims to enable one million home upgrades every year by 2030. This blog series tells the stories of our tactical team of partners and the retrofit barriers they are addressing – so let us introduce Ultrapanel Building Technologies!
Last year, we began our Meet the Transform-ERs series, showcasing our tactical team of partners working to revolutionise retrofit - including Ambue, the ‘data democratiser’ and Energiesprong UK, the ‘collaboration champion.’
For our next instalment, we’re catching up with Andrew Thomson, Technical Director at Ultrapanel to hear about its innovative HausWrap product. As one of the project’s manufacturers, Ultrapanel’s expertise in offsite construction is vital to our work on industrialising retrofit and creating high-quality solutions that can be deployed quickly.
Below he shares more about Ultrapanel’s journey into retrofit, its experience with certification and accreditation processes and why manufacturers need stronger guarantees of long-term demand to unlock investment.
Established in 1983, we were the first offsite manufacturer of precision engineered roofing systems, starting with conservatories, and moving into solid roof home extensions.
We now produce a panelised hybrid steel and timber system for roofs and walls. We’d always considered the potential for wider use, including in retrofit, but our initial focus was the new build sector.
Our entry into the retrofit market was brought forward when we got the opportunity to participate in the Mayor of London’s Retrofit Accelerator – Homes Innovation Partnership. Through this work, we’ve developed and tested our HausWrap solution, which has now been deployed in Becontree – the UK’s largest housing estate.
We’re involved in Transform-ER because we can bring our experience to influence the direction of travel and make it easier for a manufacturer to operate inside the regulated environment whilst being able to adapt and optimise our products to ensure it can be suitable for volume application. The overriding ambition of Transform-ER is to unlock retrofit at scale and to do this we need the right products at the right price.
Our focus is on the work around streamlining accreditation routes and prototyping products and kits-of-parts, defining interoperability standards to cost-effectively meet demand.
Certification of retrofit products poses unique challenges. Because our product is a ‘system’ of components rather than an individual component, the approval process is more complex. In addition, the process is delayed if any changes are made to the product - this is understandable since the certificate needs to represent the final product.
But it highlights the difficulties that we as manufacturers face when trying to achieve necessary approvals to take a new product to market but are still learning and developing the product based on early installation experiences.
As a mid-sized manufacturing company, we’ve been able to carry the commercial risk, but this would be extremely challenging for smaller companies.
You can see more about our certification journey and the challenges in Transform-ER's latest report, Retrofit product certification: state of the market report (scroll to the bottom of the page to download).
To unlock retrofit at scale that’s desirable to householders and can be financed, we need solutions that are straightforward and rapid to install, high-quality and high-performing.
For example, HausWrap is an offsite manufactured panelised system to thermally insulate the roof and walls, customised via a 3D scan and configured to precisely fit each building.
The home is prepared ready to receive the pre-manufactured elements, or kit of parts, ready for assembly. In fact, the installation team who were trained in one day on the new system said, “it’s like Lego for adults!”
We need significantly more products on the market like this. Alongside my fellow Transform-ER product manufacturers Bow Tie Construction, Tata Steel and VundaHaus, we’re looking at ways to make it easier for new products to join the market and defining interoperability standards for a more cost-effective, higher-performing, and productive sector.
As a manufacturer, we need investment to build capability and capacity to meet the market need. This needs a level of certainty. Often the demand goes in cycles with no longer term guarantees. Changing this will allow investment for the longer term so that we can create the capacity the sector needs.
Discover more insights into the state of the market for retrofit product certification with our latest report, written by BRE and Ultrapanel (scroll to the bottom of the page to download).
