When Tom Lipinksi first visited a Housing Association tenant living on the ground floor of an Edwardian building, in the winter of 2013, he was taken aback by what he found.
"The lady that opened the door was in the middle of stuffing newspaper between the floorboards," he tells BusinessGreen. She was elderly - in her mid-70s, he estimates - and in distress, almost in tears, at her inability to keep the heat leaking out through the cracks in her floors.
Lipinksi, the founder of underfloor insulation robot Q-Bot, was midway through a six month research project investigating how much of a problem poor underfloor insulation is for Britain's homes. And as this anecdote demonstrates, it's a pretty big problem.
There are around six million Edwardian and Victorian properties in the UK, and all have suspended timber floors - which by their very design are meant to leak heat.
They were originally built as a source of ventilation for homes needing fresh air while burning wood or coal in the fireplace, Lipinksi explains. Nowadays, they are responsible for up to 40 per cent of the heat loss from a property.
Yet as it is, there is no easy, quick or affordable solution to insulating below suspended timber flooring. The most common remedy is manually installing insulation - a task that means removing furniture, carpets, floorboards and skirting boards to cut and lay insulation. This leaves the home uninhabitable for up to a week, and costs up to £10,000 to perform. It's not a very popular option.
So for decades people have suffered through the winter months while heat leaks out from beneath their feet. Lipinksi, an architect and energy efficiency expert, stumbled across the problem when exploring "extreme retrofitting" options for the Technology Strategy Board (now Innovate UK), back in 2013.
After looking into the issue, he says "it became obvious that there's nothing that can deal with suspended timber floor. Everything we looked at was either ridiculously expensive, totally wrong for the building, or impossible to do with tenants in situ, or all of the above," he says.
So Lipinski and his team began to think about what an ideal solution would need to offer, were it to exist. "How would we do this in an ideal world? We would insulate the floors from the bottom, we would make sure that the insulation is impermeable so it acts as a damp course membrane, we would make sure that the insulation is airtight, and we would make sure that it's done non-disruptively," he says.
The team came to the conclusion that the solution lay in robotics - or more specifically, a particular kind of robot small enough to crawl beneath the floorboards of period properties and deliver insulation without having to move the residents or tenants from their homes.
"It's a technology that was developed through not just technical challenge but a very specific need [...] as opposed to a technology that was developed at university and has now gone out looking for a purpose," Lipinski says.
Compared to the £10,000, week-long project of traditional underfloor insulation, Q-Bot - which is folded up and inserted beneath floorboards through external ventilation grates - can complete a job within two days, with a price tag of just £3,000. This means that insulation installed by Q-Bot pays for itself in 14 years, compared to 50 years using traditional insulation techniques.
The team completed its first trial projects in mid-2014, on a handful of period properties in London owned by Camden Council, Peabody Housing Association and City West Housing Trust. After feedback from tenants, all three housing trusts placed additional orders the following year - Camden for 20 more homes, City West for 10 more.
Peabody, Lipinksi says, is on the brink of agreeing a "much bigger order" within the next few weeks that could see Q-Bot retrofit more than a hundred of their properties.
Although three-quarters of the country's Edwardian and Victorian properties are in private hands, for now housing associations - which own about 7,000 such properties - present the best option for Q-Bot to scale its business, Lipinski says.
"At the moment you talk to a single set of stakeholders about the 20,000 properties that they have, and you can work out a programme of delivery. With private markets, with every job you start a new relationship," he explains. "It's a much more onerous and time-consuming process."
Nevertheless, expansion into the private sector is teh "next logical step", he says. The team has just moved into a new office - a 4,500 square foot space fitted with offices and workshops, in preparation for Lipinksi's ambitious plans for 2016.
In this vast space Lipinski plans to begin training external contractors to be able to deliver the Q-Bot insulation service. "We cannot grow fast enough to actually deliver what our customers are telling us they need done," he says. "In the first month of 2016 we have already sold more than we have in the whole of last year. We are going through a bit of an explosive phase right now," he admits.
This contractor model will eventually be how Q-Bot enters the private home ownership market. However, this won't be for at least a year yet, although the enquiries are already flooding in, he says. "I tell them ‘sorry, we can't do it. Come back in two years' time,'" he says, jokingly adding: "in the meantime, wear some knee-high socks."
One of the problems with energy efficiency is that for the average person, it's not a very exciting topic. Trying to convince people to spend their time, and money, considering insulation projects that are often expensive and disruptive to install, is a tall order. Added to that, much of the low-hanging fruit in the sector - such as loft insulation - has already been rolled out, yet millions of "hard to reach homes" up and down the country needing more expensive or complicated retrofits are still leaking energy throughout the year.
In this context Lipinksi's roving robot is something of a master stroke, tapping into our love of gadgets while tackling the sobering topics of energy efficiency and fuel poverty. Any invention that can hit those two hot political topics in one neatly packaged piece of British robotics is destined for big things.
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