Introducing the ivie app Thermal Efficiency Score

Along with talk of electric vehicles and heat pumps, there’s a lot of chatter around home insulation and energy efficiency at the moment – or lack thereof.

The UK has some of the oldest housing stock in Europe, which has a huge impact on the efficiency of many homes. With such varying levels of building quality over the years, it’s hard to know how to plan for a more sustainable, electrified energy future in your home.

That’s why we’re excited to introduce the latest feature in the free ivie app – our new and improved Thermal Efficiency Score.

Discover the ivie Thermal Efficiency Score

We wanted to help homeowners understand how well their home is faring when it comes to thermal efficiency. A simple check, without having to shell out for an inspector to carry out a new EPC survey on the property.

EPC ratings are a useful rule of thumb, but they’re also limited in what they’re able to tell you about how well your home is actually able to keep heat in, in order to help keep your energy bills down. The new ivie Thermal Efficiency Score sits alongside your EPC score, and can quickly tell you how much heat you are losing on its efficiency scale.

Not only can it tell you how much heat you’re losing, but it can also recommend where best to invest when making home improvements. 

How the Thermal Efficiency Score works

In simple terms, ivie’s Thermal Efficiency Score calculates how effectively users’ homes are able to retain heat. 

It combines temperature data from the ivie Bud, our advanced in-home display that connects to your smart meter, with additional user data from the ivie app. It takes in information such as the size of your property, how many people live with you, and day-to-day energy use, along with local weather data. The clever algorithm is then able to calculate how much heat is being lost, or retained, in your home.

Your score also unlocks suggestions as to how you can improve your home’s thermal efficiency, as well as exclusive offers and partnerships available for those home improvements. We’ve teamed up with Furbnow to help homeowners use their home energy data to inform what retrofits will suit their needs best.

Finally, the score is a great indicator for how suitable a home is for new heating technologies such as heat pumps. Thermal efficiency is crucial for heat pumps to work successfully, so improving this aspect of your home really is the first step on the journey.

How to get the ivie Thermal Efficiency Score

If you have the combination of the ivie Bud and the free ivie app you can find the Thermal Efficiency Score under the ‘Challenges’ tab on the dashboard. 

This feature is currently available for homes with gas-powered central heating only – we hope to be able to roll this feature out to even more homes in the near future.

Click here for more information on how our clever Activity Insights can help you better understand where your home energy is being used.