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Same street, same house type, same wall construction. Different people inside. We asked Dan Rooke, our Retrofit Coordinator, and Chelsea Richards, our Retrofit Assessor, to explain the standard that governs how a retrofit is assessed, designed, coordinated and checked. Strip away the jargon and most of it comes down to one idea: plan the whole home, name who is accountable, and check that it worked.

What PAS 2035 actually is

PAS 2035 is the specification that sets out how domestic retrofit should be carried out, from the first assessment of a home through to checking the results afterwards. It works alongside PAS 2030, which covers the installers who do the work. Put simply: PAS 2035 is about the decisions, and PAS 2030 is about the doing.

It exists for a reason. Earlier funding schemes weren’t short of money or expertise, but the steps often weren’t joined up, and the result was homes that were wrapped but not well. As Max Rengifo puts it, you can’t move to stage two without stage one being signed off. We covered that backstory in our conversation with him earlier this month https://www.wrap-retrofit.com/in-conversation-with-max-rengifo-why-wr-ap-built-a-retrofit-practice-from-scratch/

The core idea: treat the home as a whole

The biggest shift PAS 2035 asks for is to stop thinking measure by measure. Insulation changes how a home handles moisture. Moisture changes what ventilation it needs. Ventilation affects heating. A loft hatch, a boiler and a wall are not three separate decisions.

Dan Rooke, our Retrofit Coordinator, works from a table inside the standard that sets out which measures sit safely alongside each other, which need to happen first, and which shouldn’t be combined at all. The output is a plan for the whole property, not a shopping list.

“I’ll create the medium-term improvement plan. What we’re going to do now, what we’re going to do in five years, 10, 15, 20 years.”

— Dan Rooke, Retrofit Coordinator

For a landlord, that matters more than it sounds. It means you don’t have to do everything in one go, and you don’t have to commit to a boiler replacement this year if the right time is seven years away. It also means every measure you do install has a reason for being in that order.

The roles, and why they are separate

PAS 2035 names the people accountable at each stage, and keeping them distinct is deliberate. The Assessor looks at the property as it actually is. The Designer turns that into a proposed set of measures. The Coordinator owns the programme as a whole: the risk, the sequencing and the compliance. And an Evaluator checks, afterwards, whether it worked.

Chelsea Richards, our Retrofit Assessor, describes her job simply: go to a house and understand what is going on inside it. That sounds obvious until you ask who, on your own programme, actually does it, and whether they are independent of the people who designed the fix.

Same building, different people

A whole-dwelling assessment isn’t only about walls and U-values. When we asked Dan and Chelsea what’s hardest to get right, neither of them mentioned the building.

“You could have ten of the same building, but we’re all different people. We like different heating scenarios, different shower temperatures. We don’t all open our windows.”

— Dan Rooke, Retrofit Coordinator

Chelsea sees the same thing from the survey side.

“Dan can figure out the U-value of a wall. But how people use their homes is completely different, house to house.”

— Chelsea Richards, Retrofit Assessor

That is why good retrofit programmes plan resident engagement before the day work starts, not on it, and why a good handover matters as much as a good specification. Residents need to know how their new heating and ventilation are meant to work, in plain English, before the installers leave.

Checking the result

The last part of the process is the one most often skipped. PAS 2035 builds in quality assurance and monitoring across and after installation, so that what was designed is checked against what was built, and what was modelled is checked against what the home actually does.

In practice, it also means the paperwork exists before anyone asks for it. If a funder, a regulator or a resident asks what was done and why, the answer is already written down.

Five questions to ask before you start

1. Who holds each PAS 2035 role on this programme, and could you name them today?

2. Has every property had a proper whole-dwelling survey, rather than a desktop assumption?

3. Do you have a plan for the whole property over time, or only the first measure?

4. Who checks the result, and are they independent of the team that designed it?

5. What have residents been told, and when?

If any of those give you pause, that is exactly what our Retrofit Readiness Check is for: ten questions to run through before you commit to, or continue, a retrofit programme. Download it free.

See how each PAS 2035 stage fits together on our retrofit journey, or read more about retrofit assessment and retrofit coordination.