Local retrofit guides. Real numbers. Sources you can check.

Why this site exists

The economics of insulating a Victorian terrace, fitting solar panels to a sloped roof, or applying for ECO4 grants change every year. Most of the easy-to-find guidance is written by installers selling something. Public information is good, but it's spread across gov.uk, Bristol City Council, the West of England Combined Authority, Ofgem, MCS, the Energy Saving Trust, dozens of consultations and grant schemes, and several different price caps. You shouldn't have to assemble that yourself to make a sensible decision about your own house.

Bristol Retrofit does that assembly job. We translate the original sources into plain English, attach the actual numbers, add local context (Bristol housing stock, regional solar yields, council schemes), and keep the pages updated as the schemes and prices change.

How articles get written

Research is done with the help of AI tools (currently Claude), which speeds up cross-referencing primary sources. Every article is then reviewed and edited by a human before it's published. We don't auto-publish AI output.

In practice: AI helps gather data from gov.uk consultation papers, Met Office solar irradiance data, Bristol City Council scheme pages, Energy Saving Trust calculators, MCS-installer rate cards and the like. A human checks each cited figure against its source, removes anything we can't verify, and writes the framing.

Sources

Every factual claim (costs, grants, eligibility rules, solar yields) is paired with an inline citation linking to its primary source. If you click through and the source has been updated since we last checked, please email us and we'll update the page.

Sources we use most often:

• gov.uk: ECO4, Great British Insulation Scheme, EPC and SAP guidance.
• Bristol City Council: local energy efficiency schemes and grants.
• West of England Combined Authority: regional retrofit funding.
• Met Office: Bristol solar irradiance and climate data.
• Ofgem: energy price cap, supplier obligations.
• Energy Saving Trust: solar and insulation cost / payback estimates.
• MCS (Microgeneration Certification Scheme): installer standards and certification rules.
• Historic England: period property and listed building guidance.
• Office for National Statistics: housing-stock statistics, Census 2021 data.

What we don't do

• We don't take paid placements in articles.
• We don't run affiliate links to specific installers, manufacturers or finance products.
• We don't use stock photos that imply a person we don't have.
• We don't publish anything without a human reviewer reading the final draft.

Get in touch

Spotted an out-of-date figure, a calculation that doesn't add up, or a topic we should be covering? Email hello@bristolretrofit.co.uk.