And the winner is... SmartHTC!

The prestigious annual CABE Built Environment Awards are “a marker of industry standards” which truly recognise excellence and ingenuity across the construction sector.

Build Test Solutions are proud to be announced as inaugural winners and honoured to receive the first ever CABE Digital Transformation Award for SmartHTC Building Performance Measurement at the gala dinner and ceremony which was held on 14th October 2021 in Milton Keynes, hosted by Jon Culshaw.

The awards panel itself was made up of a team of top industry experts and chaired by the Chartered Association of Building Engineers Patron, Lord John Lytton. Nominations were assessed by the panel across a variety of criteria but particularly taking into account sustainability, inclusivity and social impact.

Along with the long established categories of new build, facilities management / refurbishment, preservation / conservation and sustainability, 2021 saw the introduction of a new award category:- the CABE Digital Transformation Award. This category was intended to reflect the rapidly increasing pace of change in the way digital technologies can be used to benefit the entire construction industry.

Let’s face it, building information management, inspection, measurement and testing along with augmented and virtual reality are changing how the industry operates. They are opening doors to new ways of working and providing efficiencies across the entire sector. This new award category was therefore designed to recognise the “outstanding application or development of digital technologies which have a positive impact on building performance and construction sector productivity”.

Winning technology SmartHTC is a low cost, non-invasive technique for accurately measuring the thermal performance of buildings. This cloud-based algorithm uses measurements of internal temperature and energy consumption to inform an energy balance of a building and quantify its Heat Transfer Coefficient.

The software can be easily delivered via reusable sensors or through the millions of smart thermostats and meters that are already in homes throughout the UK. That means that measurements can be carried out as a new service offering for building assessors and surveyors, or seamlessly and remotely through existing smart tech.

These twin routes enable scalable measurement for the first time, providing quick and actionable insights to support asset managers, building and retrofit works and residents. Performance measurements allow targeting of remedial measures to the buildings most in need, quality assurance on newly built and retrofitted buildings and more informed retrofit design.

These efficient and practical delivery mechanisms support the Build Test Solutions mission to make building measurement affordable, cost effective and mainstream.

Managing Director Luke Smith said:

At Build Test Solutions we are passionate about building performance measurement and have a saying that you can’t manage what you don’t measure. As such SmartHTC was developed to take the guesswork out building performance measurement and to provide a quantified and actual Heat Transfer Coefficient. To be recognised by CABE in such a way is an absolute honour and justifies the years of development and hard work it’s taken to bring the product to market. It is with great pride that I was able to accept the CABE award for Digital Transformation on behalf of the whole team.

SmartHTC Product Manager Richard Jack said:

This is great recognition of a product that’s been developed over the last 10 years. It’s been a great journey and we’ve worked with great people throughout, including Loughborough University, the University of Salford, SOAP Retrofit, Elmhurst Energy, Hildebrand and the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy; this is an award for their great work as well. SmartHTC has the capability to dramatically improve the way we manage buildings and I’m really looking forward to doing that with our team.