About
WDS Green Energy is a heat pump specialist based near Cardiff, covering South Wales and surrounding areas. The company has been installing heat pumps for 15 years, from well before the technology was grant-funded or widely known.
Chris, who manages design and sales at WDS, oversees the full journey from initial enquiry through to contracted design. The business handles between 40-60 enquiries a month, with a 250-job pipeline at the proposal stage at any one time. Year-on-year turnover has grown by 10-20% across 2023, 2024 and 2025. Since adopting Spruce, the volume of surveys WDS books has lifted by around 75%.
"The heat pump industry in the UK is riding a wave of growth. We needed to set ourselves up to scale well. We needed the tools to work well for us, rather than us having to work really hard at just making the day-to-day functions work."
The Challenge
Built in-house over 15 years
Before Spruce, WDS ran their entire heat pump design and quoting workflow on a bespoke Excel-based toolkit they had built and refined in-house over more than a decade. Customer data went into a manual database. Heat loss calculations were done in a separate Excel sheet. These were complex spreadsheets, coded up with pricing and different logic rules. Costing and design outputs fed into a mail-merge Word document, which combined with four or five separate PDFs to become the final customer quote.
The system was accurate, and entirely tailored to how WDS worked. It was also the product of years of expertise. But each new enquiry meant re-entering the same customer details across multiple sheets, navigating macros that needed careful handling, and stitching together quotes from several separate documents.
Onboarding took months
The scaling ceiling was new staff. The bespoke nature of the system meant every quirk, template and workaround had to be learned individually. New starters could take months to become productive, and the team spent time maintaining the system itself. They had to protect templates, manage coding issues, and keep shared drives organised. For a business riding a growing market, that was the constraint.
"It was OK. It worked. It was very much 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it'. It wasn't really broken. It was just time consuming and admin heavy. It was far from slick."
The Solution
Estimates in 10 minutes
The biggest single change has been on the front end. Web enquiries now arrive through a Spruce form integrated into the WDS website, which captures customer details, property information and location automatically. Chris uses the initial phone call to fill in the technical gaps rather than to gather basic data. From there, he can produce and send a full estimate in about 10 minutes.
Before Spruce, the same process took around an hour: opening the bespoke design tool, running a partial heat loss, working through the costing, and drafting an email with attachments. That process has now been reduced to a fifth of the time.
The downstream effect is bigger than the time saving itself. Because estimates are quick, more customers receive one. Because the estimate links directly into an option to have a survey, more of those customers convert through to this stage. All leading to survey volume increasing by around 75%.
Two weeks to onboard
The same logic applies to new staff. WDS had three new starters in summer 2025, all new to the heat pump industry. With Spruce's self-led training resources and a few days of supervised use, all three were sending estimates, building proposals and working on detailed designs within two weeks. The visual heat loss interface makes data-entry errors obvious at a glance, which means junior staff can be productive without needing constant senior oversight.
"Within two weeks we had a team that were able to send estimates, build proposals and work on designs in a fair bit of detail. The onboarding process with Spruce has been infinitely better than anything we've ever done."
The Results
Key outcomes
Increased survey volume: Increased 75%
Cut estimate time: Around 1 hour → 10 minutes per estimate
Faster onboarding: Months → two weeks for new starters
Steady annual growth: 10-20% year-on-year turnover growth from 2023 to 2025
Chris is now spending more time on detailed design work and less on admin. The post-survey workflow runs in one platform end-to-end, with the design and customer-facing proposal as a single deliverable rather than several documents stitched together. That has cut another hour per job, time that goes back into design quality rather than paperwork.
The in-house system WDS had built still worked. It still produced accurate results. But it couldn't onboard new staff at the pace WDS needed to grow, and it couldn't handle the front-end volume the market was generating. Moving to Spruce gave the business the room to scale.
"Using Spruce’s estimate tool means we’re spending a fifth of the time vs our old process. It's taken so much weight off our estimating workflow. It gives us loads of scope because the industry's growing and we are growing."
What if your team could send estimates in a fifth of the time?
Join 650+ installers like WDS who use Spruce to handle 75% more surveys and onboard new staff in weeks rather than months.