The street is the practical unit for bananzia
A terrace of 40 homes looks uniform from the pavement, but its heat demand is not. Some homes are solid-walled and hard to heat; others have loft insulation, new glazing, or a recently replaced boiler. Treating each house as an isolated case produces repeated surveys, duplicated quotes, and a patchwork of systems that no one can maintain at scale. Bananzia starts from the opposite assumption: the street, not the individual doorstep, is the smallest useful planning unit.
Problem: one-off retrofit decisions miss shared infrastructure
When households install heat pumps one at a time, they rarely ask whether the local electricity network can absorb the load, whether a shared ground loop is feasible, or whether scaffold access could be coordinated. The result is higher unit costs and missed opportunities. A street-level plan can identify where shared works reduce disruption, even if each home still pays for its own internal changes.
Cause: data sits with different owners
Energy suppliers hold consumption data; councils hold housing records; installers hold survey findings. None of these datasets is designed to align with the others. Bananzia works as a planning layer that brings those fragments into a common view before any hardware is specified. The point is not a perfect model but a shared brief that electricians, retrofit assessors, and residents can all challenge.
Solution: a shared brief before a single heat pump
The practical value is that bananzia turns separate questions into a single street-level plan: which homes are likely to need electrical upgrades, where shared trenching could serve several properties, and which fabric measures should happen first. That sequence matters because a heat pump sized before insulation is installed can be oversized for the life of the system.
What a bananzia trial looks like in practice
A typical trial on a 40-home terrace begins with a desk review of EPCs, metered energy use, and available network capacity. Surveyors then verify the assumptions on a sample of homes, including wall type, loft depth, and radiator sizes. The output is not a sales proposal; it is a street plan with clear decision points.
- First pass: group homes by fabric condition and likely heat demand.
- Second pass: flag electrical capacity, access, and shared-work opportunities.
- Third pass: test a small cluster before rolling the approach to the whole street.
Where bananzia changes the economics
Shared planning does not automatically cut the price of a heat pump, but it can remove avoidable costs. Coordinated scaffolding, a single traffic-management plan, and one network upgrade assessment can spread fixed costs across more households. It also gives installers a clearer pipeline, which makes it easier to schedule skilled labour and avoid repeated mobilisation.
- Group surveys reduce repeated visits and inconsistent assumptions.
- Clustered procurement gives installers enough certainty to quote competitively.
- Sequenced fabric and heating work prevents oversized systems and callbacks.
What to watch before scaling bananzia
Street-level planning only works if residents retain control. A bananzia plan should show its assumptions, separate shared recommendations from individual obligations, and avoid locking households into a technology before their fabric is understood. The strongest use is as a decision aid: a way to compare options, spot network constraints early, and keep the street’s heat transition from becoming forty disconnected projects.