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Tell a resident, in one breath, that they're getting solar, an air source heat pump, some door undercuts and some ventilation, and you have technically communicated everything about to happen to their home. You have also told them almost nothing useful at all.
Our research into communication in domestic retrofit found this exact pattern repeating across the sector: the same technical scripts, delivered accurately, that leave residents with no idea what any of it means or why it's been chosen for their specific house. Left unaddressed, that confusion doesn't sit quietly. It turns into pushback, scepticism, and sometimes outright refusal, for measures that were never actually the problem.
Installing a heat pump correctly is a technical skill. Explaining why someone needs one, in language that survives contact with a sceptical resident on their own doorstep, is a different skill entirely, and it's the one the sector trains for least.
Retrofit measures rarely announce their own value. A resident can see a new kitchen and understand instantly why it's an improvement. They can't see airflow, and they don't experience carbon savings or EPC ratings as anything real in their day-to-day life. What they experience is comfort, cost, and sometimes health, and if a measure isn't explained in those terms, it doesn't register as a benefit at all. It registers as disruption with no clear point.
That gap between technical accuracy and actual understanding has consequences well beyond a single awkward phone call. A resident who doesn't understand why a measure was chosen for their home has no way to distinguish a legitimate technical decision from an arbitrary one, and will often assume the worst. Confusion at the point of explanation shows up later as resistance during installation, and later still as misuse once the work is done, residents running new systems the wrong way because nobody's explanation ever actually landed.
The skill is translation rather than simplification for its own sake: taking something a retrofit professional understands fluently and finding the version of it that means something to someone who doesn't do this for a living.
Door undercuts are a useful test case, because they fail this test constantly. Tony Doyle, Head of Customer Care for People & Communities South at Equans, has seen residents focus on the one thing they can picture: a gap cut into the bottom of the door that will let in a draught they don't want. It isn't that they think the contractor means them any harm. It's that nobody has explained what the gap is actually for, so the draught is all there is to understand. Once someone explains that the gap is required for airflow in a new ventilation system, the objection tends to disappear. The measure hasn't changed. The explanation has.
Heat pumps carry a heavier version of the same problem, because residents arrive with pre-loaded scepticism from somewhere else entirely, a neighbour's comment, a headline, a half-remembered story. Jordan Shelley, Head of Business Partnerships at CCS, has heard it repeatedly:
"If you speak to the average person and say air source heat pump, straight away there are so many negative connotations attached to that, they're no good, they cost more, they don't heat your house as well."
Listing the measure does nothing to address that. What addresses it is explaining how the technology actually behaves differently from a gas boiler, and what running it correctly looks like, before asking the resident to accept it.
Gemma Voaden, Senior Manager Net Zero at Together Housing, tackles this scepticism at source rather than waiting for it to surface on a doorstep. She counters media-driven myths about heat pumps directly, using real performance data and successful local case studies rather than reassurance alone, on the basis that a genuine example from a neighbour's home persuades far more effectively than a general claim that the technology works. She also points out this resistance isn't new: residents pushed back just as hard when gas boilers first replaced coal fires, "I'm not going away from coal, what are you talking about?" was a genuine objection once. Normalising a new technology has always taken time and familiarity, not just a good explanation on the day.
Crucially, this isn't a conversation that ends at handover. Explanation that stops the moment installation finishes tends to unravel within weeks, residents quietly reverting to old habits, like switching a new system off to save money, because the initial explanation never really took. Good practice treats the explanation as something to check and repeat, not something to deliver once and assume has landed.
Part of the problem is who's doing the explaining. Coordination and technical teams are, understandably, fluent in the language of compliance and specification. That fluency is exactly what makes plain-language explanation hard: it's difficult to notice which of your own words are jargon once you've used them every day for years. "MVHR" is a completely ordinary phrase to a retrofit coordinator and a meaningless one to almost everyone else.
There's also a structural pressure towards brevity. A coordination call listing four or five measures in thirty seconds looks efficient on a call log. The same call, done properly, with time built in to explain the reasoning behind each measure and check the resident has actually understood, takes considerably longer, and that time rarely gets budgeted for.
Build a short, plain-language explanation for every measure before it's ever delivered to a resident, not a technical spec sheet, but the version you'd use to explain it to a relative with no background in construction. If your team can't produce that version easily, that's worth noticing in itself.
Replace "does that make sense?" with a genuine check for understanding. Asking someone to explain back what they think is happening, in their own words, surfaces confusion that a yes-or-no question never will.
Treat post-installation explanation as a second, equally important conversation, not an afterthought. The habits residents form in the first few weeks of living with a new system are the habits that stick, and getting the explanation right at that point is often what decides whether the measure actually delivers the benefit it was installed for.
And give teams the chance to practise explaining a measure to someone who is actively sceptical, not just someone nodding along. The confidence to hold a plain-language explanation together while a resident pushes back is built through repetition, not through reading the explanation once in a training manual.
It's also worth testing explanations on people outside the sector before they ever reach a resident. Anyone who has worked in retrofit for more than a few months loses the ability to judge which words still need translating. A colleague, a friend, or a family member with no construction background is a far better test audience than another retrofit professional, precisely because they'll notice the jargon a specialist has stopped seeing.
Retrofit rarely fails because residents reject the technology. More often, it fails because nobody translated the technology into something that made sense to the person whose home it's going into. That's a fixable gap, but only if organisations treat explanation as a skill in its own right, worth building deliberately, rather than an assumed by-product of technical competence.
This is one of six communication skills we set out in full in our research report, The Retrofit Conversation Gap, alongside the evidence for where plain-language explanation succeeds and fails across a typical retrofit journey. Download the report for the complete findings.
If you want your team to practise explaining measures like heat pumps and door undercuts in plain language, to residents who push back, before they're doing it live on a doorstep, we've developed interactive role-play scenarios built for exactly this. Get in touch to find out more.
