Insurance-backed warranty for whole life housing energy performance (I-LIFE)

The I-LIFE project is seeking to develop a new insurance product for the construction industry. The product will give insurance backing to a warranty for whole life energy performance. The focus of our work is on new build housing in the social or private sector. The primary challenge for the project is to develop energy prediction algorithms which accurately predict performance in use and can be translated into an insurance product.

Developing a deep understanding of the energy performance gap will be critical to success.

The project team is led by Encraft, an SME with expertise in building physics and the main project partners include; BLP, an insurance provider with expertise in whole life costing analysis; Oxford Brookes University who specialise in building performance evaluation and socio-technical approaches to enhancing energy performance; and Willmott Dixon, a volume housebuilder providing a potential route to market. The project will run for 30 months from September 2015 and will include a 12 month pilot testing phase. Findings will be widely disseminated through industry networks, events and published papers.

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