🏗️ Innovation or Inertia? Why Retrofit Talks Like This Must Be Shared

“Innovation isn’t the problem. Trust is.”
Dr Laura Morgan Forster, Innovation Lead – Net Zero Heat, Innovate UK

This Retrofit 2025 seminar at the Build Centre London broke the norms. It was a rare and vital moment of clarity - where the usual platitudes about “scaling up” were replaced with something sharper: honesty.

This was a panel where serious practitioners stopped pretending. Where data met delivery, and policy met pipework. Where innovators called out the idea of 'pilot projects' to describe proven solutions that we need to make street-by-street reality.

💡 Meet the Panel

Each speaker brought a clear lens on a complex issue:

• Dr Laura Morgan Forster, Innovation Lead – Net Zero Heat, Innovate UK, laid bare the innovation bottlenecks - not in tech, but in trust, process, and spec pathways.
• Andy MacCullum, Regional Business Development Manager, Sunamp, showed how compact thermal stores can make retrofit viable where conventional cylinders simply don’t fit.
• Ethan Wadsworth, Director, DiscreteHeat, exposed the elephant in the room: most UK homes can’t install heat pumps without serious disruption. His solution? Smart, skirting-mounted emitters that make heat pumps look good - and work.
• Jon Ackroyd, Managing Director, Ackroyd Lowrie, challenged the room to stop thinking like technocrats and start thinking like citizens - seeing retrofit as a cultural opportunity, not just a carbon-cutting exercise.

🧱 The Real Barrier: Not Cost, but Complexity

One message rang loud and clear: the tech already exists.
We have the capability - but the challenges... Complexity. Trust. Legitimacy. Systemic friction.

Some brutal stats were dropped:

82% of homeowners who enquire about heat pumps drop out - not because of cost, but because of disruption.

This is a government boosted market that is growing to slowly - we were told. Why? It’s a communications failure. A specification failure. A trust failure.

Many of the best innovations - like Sunamp’s phase-change thermal stores or DiscreteHeat’s ThermaSkirt - are proven and installed in thousands of homes, but still don’t appear in mainstream specs. Why?

Because they don’t look like the status quo. Because they’re not in SAP. Because we treat anything unfamiliar as risk - no matter how much evidence it has behind it.

🔄 Why This Event Must Be Shared

Let’s be blunt. These events shouldn’t be confined to the people in the room. They should be filmed, clipped, subtitled, and shared on loop.

Why?

Retrofit need to escape from PDFs or funding rounds. It lives in visible, practical proof that these technologies work - and that the people behind them know what they’re doing. So real in person talks like this matter.

And that’s why we’re sharing this now.

🛠️ Five Takeaways the Sector Must Grasp

1. If it’s not in SAP, it doesn’t exist
   Proven products stall at the gate if they can’t be specified. This is a systemic barrier we must address.

2. Disruption is the real retrofit killer
   Eight out of ten dropouts cite complexity, not cost. That’s a marketing, design, and delivery problem.

3. Heat storage is being reinvented
   Sunamp’s salt-based batteries store four times more energy than water and fit where cylinders don’t - unlocking dense, awkward homes for low-carbon upgrades.

4. Distribution is overdue a rethink
   ThermaSkirt replaces clunky radiators with sleek, skirting-level emitters - making heat pumps feasible without deep retrofits.

5. We need to design for people, not spreadsheets
   Jon Ackroyd urged us to stop focusing solely on U-values and start asking how retrofit transforms lives, cities, and communities.

📣 Final Word: It’s Time to Share the Work

The sector needs fewer closed-door discussions and as much visible leadership as we can possibly muster.

We need:

• 🎥 Recordings of events like this
• 📲 Short-form content for the front line - installers, landlords, planners
• 🏘️ Case studies that show, not just tell

Because the real innovation gap isn’t technical. It’s cultural.
And the only way to close it is to tell better stories - again and again - until trust catches up with technology.

We have established a new commercial service for readers that want to penetrate one of the biggest problems in retrofit.

Customer Trust = Customer Conversions. ⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️

The Retrofit Trust Builder™

A 3-minute video case study that builds trust and wins work.

Retrofit is hard to sell with brochures and PDFs. But when people see the result — hear from real clients, understand the pain that was solved — they buy in.

We make one thing: a short, powerful, real-world case study video that does exactly that.-

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