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Category: Blog

When you sell a house in the uk, it now requires an Energy Performance Certificate its some sort of weird government attempt to classify how energy efficient our houses are.

Have you actually read the detail of an EPC? It appears to be a gravy train for the untrained to take some basic observations in a house and use some standard software to produce a report. In the 2 houses I have lived in recently, the estimated heating costs are a substantial underestimate of actual costs. In my neighbour's house, a solid block wall is described as cavity brick construction with assumed cavity insulation.

The assumed costs of a 2.5kWP Solar PV are in my EPC as £7,000 - £14,000. None of the quotes I recently receives came even close to £6,000.

The lighting section says that I my lighting costs would go from £97 per year to £54 a year by fitting energy saving bulbs. Big deal. My estimate is that incandescent and halogen to LED has reduced my annual lighting bill from £136 to £9. This is borne out by the fact that my monthly electricity bill dropped by about 120 kWh per month since I installed LED throughout.

The problem appears to be that the standard assumptions and costs are some years out of date, in order to make comparison easier between EPCs. This seriously devalues them as information source for the end user, and more of a cheap data gathering exercise for the government.

Interesting coment on www.superhomes.org.uk "The Standard Assessment Procedure (SAP) for dwellings should not be used [for determining energy costs] as it is not designed to accurately determine the heating and domestic hot water energy requirements of real dwellings."