Goodbye 2025... Hello 2026

It’s of course disappointing to be signing off on the year without the Warm Homes Plan or the Future Homes Standard. It has also been painful to observe the very slow mobilisation of the £1.3bn Warm Homes Social Housing Fund Wave 3 and the mishandling of communication around the budget and transition away from ECO.

One big positive in this field is the acceptance of airtightness measurements in EPCs, allowing the actual performance of houses to be properly reflected in their energy rating.

A year of media awareness

This year has also seen high profile media coverage on issues around poor quality retrofit, damp and mould as well as questionable approaches to demonstrating compliance, including but not limited to, the fallout from Trustmark suspending 39 contractors in January, the reporting of ‘30,000 botched insulation installs’ by ministers in September swiftly followed by the publication of the National Audit Office investigation in October which critiqued the level of compliance and quality of works delivered under ECO.

It is right that the industry is challenged and held to account. We must all constantly seek to challenge the status quo and do better. Data is now everywhere and there’s nowhere to hide.

What do we think 2026 will hold?

I’m pretty certain that as early as January we’ll see an extension to ECO out to December ‘26, along with the Warm Homes Plan giving us clarity to 2030. New build pipelines also seem to be growing and so hopefully we also see that translate into a picking up of starts and completions.

So for me, the market will come back and then all the noise around the need for quality, consumer trust and assured outcomes, simply points to the need for measurement and testing to become ever more central. All the guidance and research is there and the technologies exist that mean there is absolutely no reason not to measure heat loss, airtightness, ventilation and U-values on projects.

Those procuring and on the receiving end of projects must become ever more evidence and data led, calling on the supply chain to prove, demonstrate and verify that what is being installed does what is says on the tin.

Build Test Solutions and it's team

For BTS this year, we’ve seen growth despite all of the uncertainty. 2025 has seen our equipment used to deliver >58,000 building performance measurements in total, up 20% on last year. For just a few hundred customers, this is mighty impressive and just shows that for those wishing to engage and innovate, the opportunities are there.

We’ve also made a move into the field of training and education with a great series of webinars delivered and now up on our Youtube channel. We also have our Level 1 airtightness training, Pulse upskill course and U-value training courses with more planned for 2026.

Our first conference was held in October, and it was fantastic to be part of a full room talking passionately about building performance measurement and testing. The conference was a real highlight of the year, and something we’ll do again to provide a much-needed forum for the topic.

It’s been another busy year of development behind the scenes for BTS. We’ve been working away on a totally new version of Pulse, with an overhaul of the hardware and software. This will be a big step forward in user experience, and it’s the most thorough development and testing project Pulse has had since its inception. It’s been a lot of hard work, but we’re proud of the result and looking forward to getting them into use in 2026.

We also integrated with the Elmhurst Airtightness Scheme this year, so that Pulse users can lodge tests directly from the Pulse website, a great efficiency gain. This is all about us making measurement as accessible as possible for our users.

We’ve had a big year pushing forward the agenda for heat loss measurements with SmartHTC. We’ve had some great new customers this year, delivering measurements through integration with Switchee, Purrmetrix, and Hildebrand, and through our assessors across the country.

SmartHTC Go is now fully available through our SmartHTC website and the API, the first proven, reliable and accurate heat loss measurement using energy data alone. Heat loss measurement is now more accessible than ever, and 2026 should be a big year. To prepare the way, we’ve been putting in place the building blocks for HTC measurement to become a mainstream activity. We’re coauthoring an HTC measurement equivalent of the TM23 standard for airtightness measurement with CIBSE and Loughborough University. Writing standards is no one's idea of fun, but they are essential to deliver the confidence that Government, regulators, and the market need.

Even more on the horizon for 2026

We’ve got some really exciting plans for 2026.

You can look forward to a real push on getting U-value measurements recognised as an input for EPCs, just as airtightness measurements have been this year. U-value measurements are long-established, with existing ISO standards and proven methods like Heat3D and heat flux plates, and it’s high time that their results can be used to calibrate EPCs and make them a more accurate representation of houses’ real performance.

Already in 2025, we’ve worked with Elmhurst to put a U-value measurement scheme in place, and we’re following up with a new U-value measurement training course in 2026.

We’re also setting out on a major overhaul of our digital infrastructure, so that measurements from Pulse, SmartHTC, Heat3D, Ventiflow, and Mould Risk Indicator can be viewed in one place. We think this unlocks some really great new services for our users, with better holistic ventilation assessments, and building diagnostics to determine the ‘why?’ behind some of the surprising results we find.

We’ll be informing this with the collaborative international research we’ve been doing with the International Energy Agency Annex 94, so that it’s right up with the state of the art.

Cheers to 2026!

Despite some unfortunate wider market gloom, we keep our heads down and continue to drive forward with what we know is right. Thank you to all our customers, suppliers and partners for your continued support and we look forward to what’s set to be a lively start to 2026.