Retrofit Coordination · Norfolk
Norfolk has one of the highest proportions of off-gas-grid housing in England, a great deal of pre-1919 traditional construction, and an exposed coast. That combination produces genuinely expensive homes to heat — and retrofit that goes badly wrong when it's specified from a spreadsheet.
Three characteristics dominate, and they compound one another rather than sitting independently.
Large parts of rural Norfolk have no mains gas at all. Homes run on oil, LPG, solid fuel or electric storage heating, and the running costs are among the worst in the country. That places a lot of properties in the lowest EPC bands and makes them strong funding candidates — but it also means the answer is rarely a heating swap on its own. A heat pump installed into a leaky, uninsulated building produces high bills and a complaint; the fabric has to come first, and the system has to be sized against the post-retrofit heat loss.
Flint, clay lump, timber frame and lime render are common in older Norfolk housing, particularly in the villages. These walls manage moisture by absorbing and releasing it, and they depend on being able to dry out.
Wrap a breathable wall in an impermeable insulation system and the moisture has nowhere to go. It accumulates in the fabric, rots embedded timbers, and appears as damp and mould in rooms that were dry for a century and a half.
Where a building is traditionally built, the insulation must be vapour-open — wood fibre, lime-based systems, sheep's wool — and the ventilation strategy has to be designed alongside it rather than added afterwards. This is the most common serious failure in rural retrofit, and it is expensive and sometimes irreversible.
Driving rain on an exposed north or east elevation changes both the heat loss and the moisture risk, and it affects which external systems are appropriate. Exposure zone is not a box to tick on a form — on the Norfolk coast it genuinely changes the specification.
We have not yet delivered a programme for a Norfolk authority, and we will not pretend otherwise. What we do have is directly comparable work: Suffolk County Council, in stock with the same traditional construction and the same off-grid rural pattern, and extensive fen delivery for South Holland and South Kesteven District Councils. King's Lynn is about forty minutes from our office.
PAS 2035 coordination at £549 per property, portfolio EPCs at £75, and air permeability testing at £175 per test — county-wide, with assessment rounds planned in geographic blocks so travel does not inflate the programme cost.
Before You Ask
One Last Thing
Send us a property list and the funding stream you're targeting. We'll come back with what qualifies, what it costs to coordinate, and the order the measures should go in.