Case Study No.1 – How Veritherm successfully uses BlockMark Registry
Read on to find out how it worked for Veritherm..
About us – BlockMark Technologies is a high tech supplier of innovative products, focused on using technology to improve certification and transparency whilst reducing fraud and unnecessary costs.
BlockMark works with organisations to help them manage the business challenges presented by a changing technology landscape making them future ready.
Since 2020 BlockMark has supported disruptive startup Veritherm in the development and validation of its Building Thermal footprint solution – creating a digital gold thread of accountability and an audit trail between Veritherm, their qualified testers, their validated members, licensed equipment and verifiable building energy performance certification; all of which can be verified and easily audited by customers.
Meet Usain Bolt’s NHS Twin: Tom Alcott
There are quite a few differences between the sprinter Usain Bolt and BlockMark CEO Tom Alcott – but Body Mass Index (BMI) is not one of them.
Usain’s body mass index can be calculated by the NHS as a ratio between his height (1.95m) and weight (95kg). Tom’s vital statistics by comparison are 1.85m and 84.8kg. You can see they both have a BMI of 24.7 – the good news is they are both healthy.
Usain Bolt BMI
Tom Alcott BMI
But performance wise in a 100m race, you guessed it – Usain would finish in 9.58s and Tom would pull a muscle at about 10m and limp home in 19.16s. Usain’s performance would be 2.6 x better than Tom’s. Which is frankly not surprising. What is surprising is that we still use the BMI to measure healthiness.
In 2018 Veritherm CEO, Tom Fenton realised that the same BMI problem occurred in the built environment.
The common Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) of houses is based on maths and paperwork and not real performance. If you want to know it’s the Heat Transfer Coefficient (HTC) and Standard Assessment Procedure (SAP).
The problem is that the real performance difference is up to 200-300% worse than the HTC-SAP paper calculation – on average about 2.6 x worse.
Planet Saving Certificates
Cars in the UK account for 25% of CO2 emissions. But close behind are buildings that account for at least 18% of CO2 emissions.
It’s clear that if we are going to save the planet, going forwards we are going to have to do things differently. For a start we will need to generally drive less, drive more electric cars and make better buildings.
The mantra that ‘what gets measured gets managed’ means that a key step in making better buildings is to make more accurate measurements of both new and existing buildings.
The solution of course is to not use BMI to measure running performance or EPC to measure building thermal footprint.
Build Back Better (& Faster)
Here’s the thing – more accurate building measurements have existed for a while but they are expensive and take up to 3 weeks to get a result; too long for most new builds and building control.
Enter Veritherm, who have invented and patented a new way to accurately measure the performance of buildings in just 12 hours, greatly increasing the accuracy using real world data and making everything more efficient and faster.
But in 2020 Veritherm still had a problem. There is a saying that if you want the milk – you have to put up with the cow. No one wants the barn, cow or manure.
Veritherm CEO Tom Fentons says,
“We were fortunate to meet BlockMark when we did. Their certificate management technology has really helped Veritherm; in creating a transparent and verifiable infrastructure to support our fast and cost-effective Thermal Measurement Solution”.
To support the creation of the new improved EPC certificate, Veritherm themselves would need to be an accredited body, with certified testers using certified equipment, issuing certificates to building partners and to the buildings themselves (like a car is issued an MOT).
In addition, Veritherm created a membership scheme for testers, to build a community and offer support, updates and special offers. And of course in the age of greenwash and fake news, everything would need to be both fool proof and easily verifiable by customers and partners.
Building Business as Usual?
Several solutions for building certificate infrastructure initially presented themselves to Veritherm, from simple word docs and excel spreadsheets to cloud schemes like dropbox or google drive. But by far the most commonly used scheme in the industry was Word docs and PDFs emailed to partners. Should Veritherm just do what everyone always did?
Being consummate disruptors, Veritherm didn’t want to replace a paper or PDF EPC with a paper-based Veritherm certification scheme. Veritherm wanted something future ready, something that would work on mobile, in the field, easily verified and something they would have absolute control over; suspending testers, revoking certificates with one click if need be.
The BlockMark Registry solution
Working with BlockMark Technologies, Veritherm now offers digital, mobile enabled, QR code based shareable certificates to all their testers. In addition testers can simply display membership badges on their websites and emails and give customers the chance to verify building certificates in just one click.
Not only is Veritherm a better measurement, it’s a better certification scheme too.
It may not seem like an important thing, or a big thing – but in a small way better measurement and sharing of that measurement could help reduce building CO2 emissions by 200% or more.
The planet needs us. Time to get a sprint on.
To find out more about Veritherm contact Tom.Fenton@veritherm.co.uk or visit at www.veritherm.co.uk
To find out more about how to better control your digital certificates and memberships contact Tom Alcott at tom.alcott@blockmarktech.com or visit www.blockmarktech.com.
