Our proposed whole-house solution addresses a number of significant challenges and barriers that currently exist for the large-scale retrofit of social housing stock. COST: A low-maintenance ‘fit and forget’ fabric-based approach is advocated, which leads to minimum call-outs for the social housing provider, resulting in some financial return. There are not only enormous savings in energy costs for the tenant, the income received from the expected Feed-in-tariffs for PV-generated electricity supplement the rental return for social housing. PLANNING: As the property will be insulated from outside, planning permission will be sought. However the planning department has been informed and involved in the development of this project very early on, before the scheme was detailed. PROCESS: Our approach has been simple, practical and cost-effective, designed to simplify where we achieve 69% of the savings in energy through fabric-related energy efficiency measures, increasing to 80% savings by adding efficient heating systems, controls, lighting and appliances, with some nominal amount of solar technologies to reach 85% of emissions reductions over baseline. BUILD: Our proposal uses well-proven technologies and has been designed to simplify the construction stage. Improvement measures selected will be fitted using the ‘accredited construction details’ documents during the build phase to minimise thermal bridging. SCALE UP: The likelihood of our technical proposal to be replicated in other properties is very high because of its fabric-based approach. The ‘fit and forget’ principle will be preferred by RSLs. The installation will be carried out by an existing social housing contractor whose workforce will gain considerable experience in delivering whole-house retrofits for the social housing stock. Additionally Home Group (who owns the house) will gain direct experience to encourage future renovations using the most successful technologies. Since this is a vacant property, it provides a valuable opportunity to examine the actual fabric heat losses by conducting a co-heating test.