Heat networks: Building Assessment Report (BAR) guidance

3 Building Assessment Report for Centralised Supply Template - accompanying guidance

A recognised challenge when completing a BAR is sites which have multiple properties served by one common heat source. This could be a heat network, a smaller shared boiler system or a single gas offtake for multiple buildings. In these instances, it may be hard to establish demand and other fields at a property level. To overcome these issues, a separate "Building Assessment Report Template" should still be completed for the known fields for each property, and alongside this, the shorter "Building Assessment Report for Centralised Supply Template" should also be completed. The latter lists all the UPRNs or coordinates for properties covered by the centralised heat source and reports the heat demand at this centralised point.

This Centralised Supply Template is much shorter than the main BAR template and consists of similar fields. Please see the supporting text above for descriptions of how to complete the relevant questions. For technical questions, these all relate to heat demand and guidance for completion is provided in questions 17, 18 and 23 detailed above – for clarity the equivalent questions in the Centralised Supply Template are respectively questions 8, 9 and 10. The main difference for the Centralised Supply Template is that this aggregates information for multiple properties – as listed in question 6 of the Centralised Supply Template - so for heat demand (i.e. question 17 main BAR or 8 in Centralised Supply Template) this is the total heat demand for all properties with a centralised supply, or in the case of fuel use (question 18 or 9 in Centralised Supply Template) this could be the total gas demand for one centralised meter. For cooling, this follows the same qualitative approach outlined in question 23 above for question 10 in Centralised Supply Template.

For the non-technical cataloguing questions, the main deviation is that all properties that share a centralised supply need to be listed. In question 6 of the Centralised Supply Template this list links relevant main BAR templates to a Centralised Supply Template. Question 6 here lists either the UPRN or coordinates for each property that share a common heat source. The shortened format of the Centralised Supply Template avoids having to reproduce all the information in the main BAR template, and also helps mitigate dangers of duplication of demands, which is a known source of error in assessing the viability of heat networks at strategic level.