Home Energy Doctor
Baselining Buildings
course for organisations and individuals
The HEDBB© course blends desk-based and practical, hands-on testing
Home Energy Doctor Baselining Buildings ©
The Home Energy Doctor Baselining Buildings© course* equips building professionals with the skills to measure and understand the airtightness and performance of existing single-household dwellings. Participants learn to assess current building performance, clearly communicate findings, and engage homeowners in ways that inspire participation in energy-saving actions. The course also empowers trainees to provide tailored, practical roadmaps—ranging from quick DIY fixes to the process for deep retrofit — helping households take confident steps toward reducing their energy use.
The Home Energy Doctor Baselining Buildings© is an intensive 4-day course for up to six participants, blending desk-based learning with practical, hands-on testing. Designed for professionals with a solid understanding of buildings, the training covers airtightness testing using a blower door, interpreting thermal images, and using these tools to identify building performance issues. Participants learn how to gather and present data to support retrofit plans, while understanding the vital links between occupant comfort, airtightness, ventilation, and thermal performance. The course is tailored to focus on local building types, using archetypes identified by the host organisation to provide an engaging, practical learning experience.
Take your skills further with our optional fifth day of Airtightness Testing Level 1 training. Building on the 4-day Home Energy Doctor Baselining Buildings© course, this provides the training required to enable an individual to formally become a certified assessor — valuable for crystalising the benefits of retrofitting and for improving EPC ratings under RdSAP10. You’ll learn the procedures, compliance requirements, and practical steps to produce tests that meet accreditation standards. Successful candidates receive a separate certificate and begin their journey toward full accreditation. This additional one day course is only open to participants of the 4-day Baselining Buildings© course.
The training is led by Diane Hubbard, a mechanical engineer, trained as a Passivhaus Consultant, and Level 2 specialist in both airtightness testing and thermography. With over 15 years’ experience assessing everything from cottages to castles, Diane has developed this course from her deep practical knowledge of how UK homes perform.
* The Baselining Buildings© course is delivered as an NOCN Assured Short course which is an industry-relevant, high-quality training programme validated by NOCN Group. NOCN Group’s “Assured” quality mark signifies that the training meets best practice and industry standards and that Home Energy Doctor has been sanctioned by NOCN as an Approved Training Provider.
Home Energy Doctor Baselining Building Overview
- 4-day course delivered to a maximum of 6 people
- Combination of desk based and hands-on testing
- Providing an understanding of airtightness in existing buildings
- Training in use of a blower door and the calculation of airtightness test results
- Basic training in the use of thermal imaging cameras, sufficient to understand basics, interpret images and allow participants to recognise the limitations of their knowledge
- Enable participants to quantify the airtightness of the existing building
- Using the airtightness testing and thermography combined, to identify and record the current issues with a building
- To collect information to provide to a specifier to enable to support the preparation of a retrofit plan (RdSAP based, AECB, LETI, EnerPHit or informal methodology)
- Emphasis is placed on considering the importance of the building as a whole and understanding the relationship between occupant thermal comfort, airtightness, ventilation and thermal performance and potential unintended consequences.
- No previous experience with either blower doors or infrared thermography is needed, but participants are expected to have a good general understanding of buildingsUnderstand and quantify the airtightness of existing single household dwellings
Currently, the course is being offered to organisations for training their own staff. The host organisation will need to provide a suitable training venue, together with at least 3 dwellings to be tested (can be occupied properties). For individuals seeking training, please see below “For Individuals“.
In addition to the core training manual, some aspects of the course can be tailored to the objectives of the host organisation and focus on local or target building archetypes.
How Baselining Buildings Training can help you
As an organisation involved in retrofitting buildings, achieving the required KPIs is critical.
Avoiding a gap between the design and achieved building performance can be assisted by ensuring the project building is baselined prior to the design stage. Importantly, the risk of unintended consequences is reduced by using actual project specific data. The HEDBB Training enables you to carry out that baseline assessment out in-house.
The Baselining Buildings Training is relevant, whatever the circumstances
- Achieving retrofit KPIs at minimum cost and effort
- Failure to achieve KPIs on previous retrofit project
- Issues with mould, ventilation or airtightness on previous projects
- The risk of unintended consequences
- Compliance to latest PAS 2035
- Need to achieve statutory requirements
- Specifier’s first retrofit project
- Third sector organisation facilitating retrofits
- Building owner
- Construction specifier or consultant
Become a course host
At Home Energy Doctor, we enjoy working with like-minded partners and course hosts who share our vision and values.
Your organisation may be directly involved in retrofit or it may be of most relevance to your members or associates. The HEDBB training can help you in a number of ways:
- Addresses a gap in the retrofit process you may already have recognised
- Enabling retrofit projects to suceed
- Achieving retrofit KPIs at min cost and effort
- Compliance to PAS 2035- new version from April 2025
- Supporting your involvement with owner occupier retrofit or heat pump installation – and you already see assumed airtightness is a weak point
- Lack of in-house knowledge on existing building performance
- Supports your role in disseminating information
As a Baselining Buildings host, you can nominate the local building archetypes to be tested as part of the course, maximising the relevance for your staff and current projects. It is also possible to tailor some aspects of the course content to your specific needs.
Information for individuals who wish to take part
Although the course is primarily delivered to a particular host organisation’s staff and limited to a maximum of six participants, if a host organisation does not use all six places, the remaining places may be purchased by appropriately qualified individuals not associated with the host organisation.
Home Energy Doctor Baselining Buildings© is for professionals and suitably qualified individuals already working in construction and assumes a good level of underlying knowledge. Our participants usually hold professional qualifications in a related field e.g. RICS, RIBA
- Home Energy Doctor Baselining Buildings© includes testing three local or dominant housing types.
- The choice of these archetypes will depend on the host organisation and the stock in a particular area so you will need to accept that you have no influence over the choice of test properties. If you are considering purchasing a place on a course, bear in mind that the course which is most relevant to you may not be the course that is most local to you.
- Depending on the archetypes, the course contents may also be tailored to suit the needs of the host organisation.
- Whilst the blower door will be supplied by the host organisation, an individual purchasing a place on a course will need to bring a thermal imaging camera with them for their own use during the practical elements of the course.
To ensure all participants benefit fully, we require additional information from interested individuals before offering a place. Please complete an Expression of Interest Form and we will come back to you to confirm if you are on the waiting list for places.
If suitable, we expect to let you know by the end of September which courses have places available, the location of those courses and the archetypes being tested to illustrate the local housing stock, together with the cost per place available. If this info is available sooner we will be back in touch. To confirm a place, payment in full is required at the time of booking.
We also plan to deliver further courses after Christmas, with details available by the end of October.
Funding – COMING SOON
We are actively exploring diverse funding opportunities and welcome support.
Course Accreditation – COMING SOON
This course will be fully accredited by 1 September 2025.