Energy efficiency shouldn't cost you thousands in retrofits, said Tom Ascough, Managing Director of heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) company, Symphony Energy.

In this week's Episode of the Net Hero Podcast, Tom told us: 'There is a significant performance gap in HVAC. Practically every building suffers from it, where you think you're going to get a lot better energy performance based on design and you don't.

'We need to match theoretical energy efficiency to actual efficiency.'

Tom told us that the challenge of decarbonising heating and cooling is massive.

He said: 'The challenge with cooling is that as you tackle heat, you actually worsen the cooling challenge because your buildings are better insulated and retain heat.

'In terms of global statistics, buildings account for 40 percent of total global emissions, 27 percent is just the operation of buildings and half of that is just HVAC.'

Symphony Energy helps buildings improve on their existing HVAC infrastructure without excessive costs.

He said: 'One of our technologies dubbed performance algorithms takes your existing HVAC infrastructure and forensically examines it and identifies the environmental signature of the building.

'Demand for heating and ventilation changes every day in every part of a building and we identify that pattern. And then we look to match that pattern with output, put those together and automate them.

'In terms of the retrofitting – two of our technologies, including the performance algorithms, doesn't change anything physically in the buildings, just the programming. And the last of our technologies is a small device that needs to be retrofitted but it is just tiny stuff.

‘So it costs very little and doesn’t cause much of a disturbance.’

Symphony Energy’s technologies can significantly increase energy efficiency.

'With the combination of our technologies, we can typically reduce energy consumption in a building by 60-80 percent.

'We had a client who wanted to test us and they gave us one of their best performing buildings, in the top 5 percent, to improve.

'Initially we thought, what can we really do? But when we deployed our three technologies, we ended up reducing the HVAC electricity by 75 percent and the HVAC gas by 76 percent. We brought that energy use intensity of that building from 121 down to 44.'

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