About
Alter Eco Renewables is a Cheshire-based renewables installer covering a wide area from North Wales down towards Birmingham. The company works on air source heat pumps, ground source systems and MVHR (mechanical ventilation with heat recovery) across both domestic and commercial projects.
Director Aaron went full-time on renewables around three years ago, dropping gas and oil work entirely. At the time, Alter Eco was doing between 15-20 heat pump installations a year. Within a year of starting with Spruce, the team had doubled to four engineers and the install volume had reached 50-60 a year.
The business runs entirely on referrals from architects, builders and previous customers, and Aaron also runs a small MCS umbrella supporting other installers getting into heat pumps.
"Previously, when an enquiry came in I'd think 'when have I got the time to schedule this in?'. Now I can drag-drop the drawings, get the heat loss done, and we're onto a proposal."
The Challenge
Half a day per heat loss
Before Spruce, doing a heat loss on an average property meant blocking out the best part of a day. On site, Aaron would take a sketch pad and a laser measure, draw out a floor plan room by room, and note down every door, window, radiator and dimension by hand. That alone took around two hours at a typical property. Back at the desk, all of it had to be entered into the heat loss software a second time, which took another one to two hours. Three to four hours of work before any design or proposal had even started.
Proposals that undersold the work
The customer-facing side was the bigger problem. Aaron was working from dated Word templates that needed manual adjustment for every job, and the resulting proposals didn't reflect the standard of work Alter Eco was actually doing. For a business built entirely on referrals and reputation, that gap between the craft and the paperwork mattered. Customers would receive a stack of confusing technical documents instead of something they could read.
"With Easy MCS, it was a very over-complicated system. You'd have to go in and manually adjust every document to suit the new customer. It was tedious, long-winded, quite boring."
The Solution
Heat loss in 30 minutes
The biggest change for Aaron has been the speed of running a heat loss. On an average house, a full heat loss now takes 30 to 45 minutes, down from half a day. Aaron prefers to go straight to a full heat loss rather than rely on a quicker estimate, particularly for renovation and extension projects where the building fabric is changing and an estimate could mislead. With Spruce, that thoroughness no longer costs him time.
On site, he can scan the property and produce the floor plan in around 15 minutes, with the key property information captured directly into the system. The proposal then comes together quickly because all of the underlying data is already there.
That speed has won jobs outright. On one new-build enquiry where the drawings arrived by email, Aaron returned a full proposal the same morning. He has since delivered the project.
"Within an hour and 20 minutes, I'd sent the full heat loss, design, proposal and emitter schedule. Within half an hour after that, he'd accepted the proposal."
Proposals customers can actually follow
The proposal itself comes out of Spruce as one branded document with the specification laid out clearly. For Aaron, that's changed the customer conversation. Where before he was handing over a stack of separate technical files, the homeowner now receives something they can read and understand. The proposal also includes an options section where customers can untick line items and watch the price adjust, which gives them a sense of control over the specification rather than being presented with a fixed number to accept or reject.
The Results
Key outcomes
Scaled installations: 15-20 heat pumps a year → 50-60 a year, within 12 months
Doubled the team: 2 engineers → 4 engineers
Faster heat loss: Half a day → 30-45 minutes per property
Faster on-site capture: 3-4 hours of sketching and re-entering → around 15 minutes for a LiDAR scan
Aaron is now mostly office-based, with three other engineers handling the on-site work. The growth has continued past the 50-60 a year figure, with the current year on track to be busier still.
The umbrella side of the business is also picking up. A manufacturer has just appointed Alter Eco as a recommended MCS umbrella partner, with enquiries already coming through. That side runs on the same Spruce setup as the installation business, which means a single workflow supports both arms of the company.
"Within 12 months we've gone from 15-20 heat pumps a year to 50-60 units a year, and this year is looking even busier."
What if your proposals matched the quality of your installs?
Join 650+ installers like Alter Eco who use Spruce to turn referrals into customers with proposals that close the deal.