Heat networks are complex to deliver, but for residents they are simply home. So who is making sure the client’s interests are properly represented when the technical decisions are being made?
I spent some time on site recently at a project in London, shadowing one of our engineers through acceptance testing in the plantroom, across the distribution network and in the dwellings themselves. The visit prompted me to think about the technical and practical reality of heat networks, the importance of getting them right for the resident, and why Uniti Heat exists to sit on the client’s side of exactly this kind of room.
From a desk, working at masterplan and business-case level, it’s easy to lose sight of the connection between a project and the customer. The resident becomes another stakeholder category. Disruption and customer outcomes are discussed in business cases and board papers, but that can feel a long way from anyone’s front door. Standing on site, that distance disappears.
Every decision made in the boardroom eventually lands in someone’s home. If the design is wrong, commissioning is rushed or the controls were never set up properly, the person living with the consequences is a resident who had no say in any of it. I felt this particularly during acceptance testing in the dwellings themselves. For the resident, this isn’t a project. It’s their home. Every return visit to fix something that should have been right the first time means another afternoon waiting for someone to arrive at the door. And unlike most other utilities, a heat-network customer generally can’t simply switch supplier if the service underperforms. They are living with what the project team delivered, potentially for decades.
The other thing that struck me was what it takes to be useful in that room. Anyone can attend a witness test. Knowing which readings matter, what a marginal result is really telling you, and when a plausible explanation deserves a second look takes years of experience. Contractors are experienced, confident and often right. When they’re not, you need the technical grounding to recognise it, challenge it and stand behind that challenge with authority.
So who in the client’s team is supposed to be that person?
A contractor delivering heat networks may do this every week. A housing association or developer might commission one only every few years. The expertise sits in an awkward gap between development, M&E and asset management without necessarily belonging fully to any of them. Nobody should expect a client to keep someone on the payroll who knows exactly what a commissioning witness test ought to show, or what a creeping return temperature is telling you. But without that expertise in the room, the challenging questions simply don’t get asked. Not because anyone is hiding anything. Because you can’t challenge what you don’t know to look for.
And even when a client does ask the question and gets an answer, how do they know whether it’s a good one? If a contractor says a result is within tolerance, or that a workaround is standard practice, most clients have little to benchmark that against. They aren’t necessarily short of questions, but short of a reference point for what good looks like. A question that goes unasked, or an answer that goes untested, can turn up years later as a defect nobody can trace, or as a bill that’s higher than it should be.
Acceptance testing is one of the last points in a scheme’s life when catching a problem is still relatively cheap. Once the network is live and homes are occupied, the cost and disruption of putting things right can multiply. Buried pipework doesn’t come back up easily, and a plantroom serving hundreds of homes can’t simply be switched off for rework. Some problems are never fully traced. They become part of the scheme’s status quo: heat the client pays to generate, and losses that ultimately have to be carried by residents.
The heat network sector is entering a period of significant delivery and greater regulatory scrutiny. Many of the clients commissioning these schemes will be doing so for the first or second time, while their delivery partners may have done it hundreds of times. Bridging that gap matters. For us, that means being prepared to stand in the room, understand what is being tested, ask the awkward technical question when it needs asking, and keep sight of the person ultimately affected by the answer.
It’s easy to talk about assurance in the abstract. It feels different once you’ve stood in the building and thought about who lives above the plantroom.
