Polymorphic Case study
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04 / HOUSING / ILLUSTRATIVE

Every home’s energy, estimated before the first panel.

A household energy model built from scratch on Australia’s NatHERS research—turning a home’s construction, orientation, and climate into an estimate of its heating, cooling, and solar potential, so installations are sized on evidence rather than a guess.

The plateLeft: a steady-state heat-conduction solve over a home’s plan, an isotherm every degree. A leaky envelope throws a wide warm halo that pulls in once the walls are known to be insulated. Right: 1,600 candidate homes from the street’s prior, by annual heating and cooling; each input the adviser learns pulls the cloud onto the estimate.

ClientRESIDENTIAL ENERGY PROVIDER
CapabilityENERGY MODELLING
Duration20 WEEKS
StatusILLUSTRATIVE CASE

01 / the gap
What does this home actually need?

Most installations are sized on a guess.

Households weighing solar, a battery, or a heat pump were quoted systems sized from a postcode and a recent bill. Two homes on the same street can need very different systems, and the difference only showed once the system was on the roof.

The goal was an estimate good enough to act on: the energy a specific home uses for heating and cooling, and what it could generate, before anyone climbs a ladder.

Fig. 01

Two homes on one street

Same postcode, same bill band: one home needs more than twice the heating and cooling of the other.

Annual heating + cooling

02 / the build
Research → model → calibrate → explain

Start from the physics the research already measured.

Australia’s Nationwide House Energy Rating Scheme rests on decades of thermal research across climate zones and construction types. We built the model from that foundation: walls, glazing, insulation, orientation, and climate set heating and cooling loads; roof geometry and shading set solar yield.

Few homes come with plans, so the model works from what can be observed or asked—floor area, era of construction, roof aspect—and states its uncertainty whenever an input is missing.

  1. Stage 0101

    Research

    Thermal performance by climate zone and construction type, drawn from NatHERS research.

  2. Stage 0202

    Model

    Heating and cooling loads from envelope, glazing, orientation, and climate.

  3. Stage 0303

    Calibrate

    Estimates checked against metered consumption, with the uncertainty stated home by home.

  4. Stage 0404

    Explain

    A recommendation a household can read: what to install, what it will do, and why.

03 / the result
Installations sized on evidence

A better first recommendation.

Advisers could size systems home by home rather than postcode by postcode, and show each household the estimate behind the recommendation. Fewer systems were oversized, and homes that needed insulation before panels were told so first.

±12%

annual load estimate vs metered

−18%

oversized systems

69

NatHERS climate zones covered