Innovate UK – the government agency set up to help UK businesses develop and commercialise new products, processes and services – has backed heata and its partner Sero with a SMART Grant to run a 12-month pilot trial of the heata unit, to gain the necessary accreditation for heata to be included in EPCs.
The pilot
The new trial builds on the results from the recently completed SMART grant that developed a proof-of-concept prototype and ran a small-scale trial, proving our ability to run a distributed compute network while delivering free hot water.
The new 12-month trial, starting later this year, will deploy our minimum viable product (MVP) in 100 homes as a pre-commercial pilot, providing the necessary data for SAP/RdSAP accreditation, which is the approved assessment method for EPCs.
A cost effective energy efficiency measure
The accreditation will allow the heata unit to be positioned as a low-carbon, energy efficiency measure which can be included in the calculation to improve a home’s EPC rating.
New tenancies must have an EPC rating of C or better (up from E) by 2026 and all tenancies must have the same rating by 2028, incentivising installs of heata by landlords to meet these targets (tenants will receive free hot water from the unit) and building our distributed cloud-computing network at the same time.
Housing and monitoring expertise from Sero
Sero is a joint winner of the SMART Grant and will be working alongside heata on the trial. Sero builds net zero homes and works with property owners and developers to help them achieve a carbon zero portfolio. Alongside locations for installation of trial units, Sero are bringing to the project their experience in retrofitting homes (they run the Welsh Optimise Retrofit Programme) and will be supplying monitoring, sub-metering and connectivity to the homes taking part, as well as trial-related project management.
We're looking forward to working with Sero to build a valuable data set that will enable us to measure the impact of the heata unit in the real world.
Interested?
We're always looking for more households who would be interested in being part of future trials. If that sounds like you or your housing group, do get in touch.
Contact: hello@heata.co
