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.
