Heat Loss Surveys – Commercial

A commercial heat loss survey combines thermography and air tightness testing to give a complete, measured picture of how and where a building is losing heat. Thermography uses infrared imaging to identify conductive heat loss through the building fabric – walls, roofs and cold bridges – while air tightness testing measures convective heat loss through gaps, joints and penetrations. Together they separate the two heat loss types clearly, rather than leaving either as an assumption.

Yes – a heat loss survey establishes whether your building’s fabric can support efficient low-carbon heating before you invest in it. At Horfield Health Centre, our modelling showed that installing an air source heat pump on the building as it stood would have increased running costs by around £6,000 a year, because the fabric was too poor for the heat pump to run efficiently. Fixing the insulation and airtightness issues the survey identified first, then upgrading the heating system, was the only sequence that made the investment pay off.

Yes – surveys can be timed around a live, occupied building rather than requiring it to close. For The Marlowes Shopping Centre, we split thermography across two sessions, one in the evening and one finishing early the following morning, to eliminate solar loading while the centre remained fully trading throughout the day.

Yes, and it’s often a safer option than more invasive diagnostic methods. For The Churches Conservation Trust’s St Paul’s Church, a Grade I listed Georgian building, the original brief called for invasive smoke testing to trace air movement – a method that risked staining the historic stone and timber. We used blower doors to exaggerate infiltration pathways for the thermal camera instead, achieving the same visibility without touching the fabric, and established a precise air permeability baseline of 6.72 m³/h·m²@50Pa.

A heat loss survey finds real, measured defects that a standard energy assessment’s default assumptions miss entirely. For one ageing commercial facility we assessed, diagnostic air testing recorded a permeability roughly ten times the accepted standard for a comparable modern building, tracing the leakage to specific paths including degraded floor-to-wall seals, unsealed penetrations and gaps at the eaves – giving the client a targeted repair roadmap rather than a blanket refurbishment based on guesswork.

Yes – thermography and air tightness testing feed directly into both. We combined a BREEAM-compliant thermographic survey with an air permeability test for Beard Construction on the University of Bristol Veterinary School’s new Blagdon Building, verifying fabric continuity in support of a BREEAM thermographic credit, and have used the same combined testing to underpin PAS 2038 energy modelling on other commercial projects.

Very little, and the building can generally continue operating as normal. For thermography, we check weather and temperature conditions in advance and schedule the survey for when they’ll give a reliable reading. For air tightness testing, external doors and windows need to stay closed during the test itself, though the rest of the building’s day-to-day use isn’t affected.

You’ll receive a full written report covering the thermal imagery, identified defects and measured air permeability results, alongside a prioritised list of recommended actions ranked by impact. As with all our services, we work to a standard two-week turnaround from completing on-site testing.

We work with commercial property owners, facilities managers, healthcare providers, retail operators, charities and heritage building custodians across the South West and nationwide – from single-site GP surgeries and community halls to live, multi-unit retail centres.