We design heat systems that make life on an estate feel easier, not harder.
If you are here, you are probably sitting with big, practical questions. How do we decarbonise this place without people feeling colder or more stressed. How do we spend public money well. How do we make decisions now that still look wise to the team that inherits this estate in twenty years.
Generation 7 is here to make heat work for life on public estates. We help you move from scattered projects and one off bids to a joined up system that cuts carbon, calms bills and keeps people warm in the places that matter.
Heat is invisible until it is not.
You notice it when the children’s centre is freezing, when a ward overheats,
when a plant failure cancels clinics, when the bill lands on a stretched budget.
Most estates are running on kit and pipework that grew in layers over decades.
Budgets, policies and procurement have grown in layers as well.
Our roadmap is simple. Turn heat from a constant worry in the background
into a quiet asset in the foreground. Use every project and every pound
to move you from fire fighting to future ready, one decision at a time.
A roadmap from first questions to real change on the ground.
This is not a theory of change that lives in a slide deck.
It is a practical path we keep walking with hospitals, housing providers,
councils and campus teams.
Each phase builds on the last. Better questions lead to better briefs.
Better briefs lead to better designs. Better designs lead to systems that
feel good to live with, not just good on paper.
Make the invisible system visible.
We begin by mapping how heat really moves through your estate. Not just pipes and plant, but people, policies, funding, data and pain points. The aim is simple. A shared picture everyone can understand.
- Whole estate heat and energy mapping that joins engineering and behaviours.
- Workshops that surface what is working, what is fragile and what is wasting money.
- Clear principles for what good looks like on this estate, not in a generic guide.
Shape decisions that actually change outcomes.
Here we turn that shared picture into sharp, workable briefs. Funding cases, scopes and options that line up engineering, finance and day to day operations. The question becomes less “what can we install” and more “what future are we choosing”.
- Heat decarbonisation pathways that link real sites, real kits and real costs.
- Briefs that explain the why as clearly as the what, so decisions land smoothly.
- Phasing plans that respect disruption, resilience and people’s experience of the place.
Design heat as a service, not just a scheme.
We move into detailed design and assurance of networks, plants and controls. The focus is comfort, reliability and long term performance, not just year one metrics. Every line on a drawing is an assumption about someone’s day. We treat that seriously.
- Design and review of low temperature networks and fifth generation concepts.
- Checks that comfort, maintenance and resilience are baked in, not added later.
- Support through procurement so the intent of the design survives contact with reality.
Turn every project into a better next project.
Once systems are live, the work is not over. We help you learn from performance data and lived experience, so the estate gets smarter over time. Heat becomes something you shape, not something that just happens to you.
- Performance reviews that focus on what it feels like on the ground as well as numbers.
- Simple tools and templates so your team can keep improving without us in the room.
- Stories, not just reports, that help others across your organisation see what is possible.
Why our story keeps pointing back to heat, place and people.
Generation 7’s founder, Oliver Riley, first felt the power of systems in a highland
community in the Philippines, helping set up a small hydro scheme to mill rice.
What stayed with him was not the equipment. It was the way water, labour, land
and community life were treated as one living system.
That experience became a quiet reference point. It showed what it looks like when
energy work serves daily life and the landscape instead of the other way round.
Generation 7 exists to bring that way of thinking into the very practical world of
public estates, heat networks and decarbonisation.
Our long term work is simple to describe and demanding to do.
We want every estate we touch to be easier to live and work in, less expensive
to run and far easier on the climate.
In practice that means three things. Better briefs for a better world.
Heat networks that feel like civic infrastructure rather than mysterious boxes.
And tools that help local teams keep shaping good decisions long after the consultants have gone home.