Heat pumps, panels, batteries, chargers and MVHR are going into every plot from 2027 whether anyone plans for it or not. What decides whether a development runs well, commissions quickly and stays supportable is the layer above them: how they interface, how one configuration reaches every plot at once, and where the whole estate reports back to.
Scope of Handy
Shares of the reduction a new home has to find, so they total 100%. In the underlying figures those are 45, 20 and 10 percentage points of a 75% saving: fabric does the most work, but the last 10 points are the ones delivered as software.
Hundreds of thousands of homes and workplaces a year, every one carrying a heat pump, generation, storage and ventilation, and every one needing them to act as a single building. The 2026 guidance already points this way: where a heat pump sits alongside another heat source, all heat sources should be controlled by one control system, and automation in larger buildings should be interoperable across different manufacturers. Whoever buys or delivers a new building from 2027 is choosing this layer whether they realise it or not. Tap a system to see how it connects.
A house type is programmed once and cloned to every plot of that type: the default configuration loads in minutes, new devices slot into spaces already allocated in the file, and pairing is the only per-plot work left. The savings are not necessarily all in the hardware, but the system scales without limit, and the hours are where a development feels it: commissioning, callbacks, updates and handovers, multiplied by every plot on the site.
Worked example for a development. Illustrative, not a guideline or a quotation.
Plots on the scheme
Systems per plot
Fleet portal
delivery cost avoided
A worked example, not a guideline. Assumes 45 minutes to commission each standalone system plus 90 minutes for device intercommunication, about two hours pairing devices into pre-allocated slots and a short test. Hardware faults still require visits, but a central overview system lays out the technician's day in advance, so visits are planned and batched rather than discovered. Small scale projects can be programmed in under a day if properly specified.
SAP is being replaced by the Home Energy Model: a simulation engine with a wrapper on top, one wrapper for Part L compliance and another for EPCs. It runs at half-hourly resolution with a varying price signal and a varying carbon factor, so for the first time the assessment can model when a home uses energy, not just how much. SAP could not do that, which is why control has never scored before and is about to.
What nobody can claim
There is no such thing as a HEM certified product, and no control system can be approved against the model. HEM assesses a dwelling, not a manufacturer, and it does so on a standardised pattern of occupancy: the government's own wording is that it rates the inherent capability of a home's hardware and will not accurately forecast the savings a particular household sees. What a controls package can honestly claim is that the things it does, keeping generation on site, moving load to the right half hour, telling a cylinder when to heat, are the things the smart readiness metric is built to measure. Anyone selling you HEM compliance for a product is selling something that does not exist.
Loxone Exosphere sits above the Miniserver fleet. One login shows every building, compares sites against each other, and flags the outliers before anyone rings to complain.
60 plots reporting · 3 flagged alerts for potential faults before the resident noticed
Data sharing into Exosphere is opt-in per project, so the resident keeps control of what leaves their building. The Miniserver keeps running whether the portal is reachable or not.
Specified separately, every system arrives with its own app, its own login and its own support number. The resident is left to be the integrator, and the developer inherits the phone calls.
Separate systems
Six apps, six accounts, six things to update. None of them can see what the others are doing, so none of them can act on it.
One system
One app, unlimited users, no licence fees, one handover. It keeps working when the broadband does not, because the logic lives in the building rather than in someone's cloud.
Sketch a house type, pick the systems it has to talk to, and get a figure that scales across every plot on the scheme.
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