I am now in possession of two Energy Performance Certificates for the same house. I don't suppose this has happened that often as there cannot be that many houses that have been bought and sold since the introduction of HIPs. I have never really bothered to look at these things in too much detail before but when you have two of them it affords you the opportunity to compare them.
It is difficult to know why the Government (or more particularly the EU) have decided to make these things compulsory. I am not sure they tell you much that you wouldn't already know and they do not impose any type of obligation on the home owner to actually improve things. If they were designed to persuade people to improve efficiency I think they may have failed in their mission.
The certificate measures two things and gives a rating. Energy Efficiency and Environmental Impact. As far as I can work out it gives two measurements for each rating, what you are now and what you could get to or Current and Potential as they describe it. I assume that the Potential rating is what you could do at a reasonable cost. Otherwise you could get a maximum rating by knocking the house down and rebuilding it in an environmentally friendly way. This is clearly not practical.
Anyway to get to the point when the house was first assessed (before we did anything). We achieved the following results.
And after all the work has been done we got this.
I am pleased we have improved (we certainly should have done with the amount spent) but why is there such a discrepancy in the potential figures. Surely a properties potential is it's potential and that should remain the same. The only recommendation we had was "to install low energy efficient light bulbs" which we didn't do as we had some old ones to use up. It rather makes a mockery of the system if the potential figures aren't the same.
8 comments:
As you've paid for one of them, perhaps you should ask? It would be interesting to know.
I guess I should but apart from the interest in knowing, what difference will it make?
If these things had an impact on property values it may be worth challenging the reults but as it is I cannot see the point.
As I understand it, the second statement is the energy efficiency that a purchaser can achieve without structural work.
Since you have done structural work, your current and potential values have got better.
Very few people thermal line walls and floors.
The whole system is flawed anyway as it doesn't take into account "embedded carbon" (i.e. that which it takes to create the materials used). And surely the lightbulbs are removable fixtures and fittings which you'll take when selling anyway (!).
and I forgot to say that also these certificates don't take into account "fugitive" emissions - those emissions generated from doing things (e.g. generated by the truck that delivers the material to the property). I wonder how much carbon is generated by a large truck delivering RSJs for structural changes, perhaps with some cement as well. If you add the embedded and fugitive emissions from both these, it's likely to weigh heavily in the equation.
I should get out more.
Isn't that one of the arguements for not buying a new car as well.
However much less it will impact on the environment in fuel etc it is a fraction of the impact in making the new car in the first place.
Turning back to Tim’s point about structural work, doesn’t that just re-enforce why this report is a waste of time and money.
Most of the recommendations are impractical on an average house and in any event the associated costs (as Janx has pointed out) outweigh the benefits anyway.
Sorry - I wasn't clear. The report tells you two things:
1) The current emissions/likely heating costs, exactly as it is on the day when it is inspected
2) The easy to achieve emissions/likely heating costs, taking into account things that any old fool can do, like install energy efficient lightbulbs (next time you might as well install them, as it will look good and costs such a trivial amount).
Thus people buying your house know that without doing anything they can achieve the first thing, and the second one they can achieve easily. That makes them pretty useful if you can be bothered to think about them.
It would not be useful if they told you what you could achieve via structural work, since few people do that. That is why they do not tell you that, and why you have been able to exceed the previous inspections definition of "possible".
The embodied CO2 from using insulated plasterboard over regular plasterboard will be trivial. You can see that by looking at the price difference between the two items - it is not huge, so they can't have generated much CO2 to make it, because CO2 is costly to generate (ie fuel use).
From memory the average new car is equivalent to 30-50k worth of miles.
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