I appreciate I may not be in the majority but I am genuinely interested in a houses eco credentials and suggestions on how to improve. I’ve looked at loads of epc’s now and almost all are complete garbage. I know it’s fairly superficial but loads of obvious stuff is just “(assumed)”. Then when they do say something useful like no cavity wall insulation or no lift insulation instead makeing that recommendation they instead suggest you install a wind turbine!! Utter nonsense in an urban area. Or floor insulation that would take a hundred years to pay off.
Is it just money making and box ticking?

Our EPC was automatically generated for our recent sale. Like you I was quite interested to see what was included. The only change from before we moved is we changed some lights to LED. They got that info from the estate agent. no one even came to look at the house. We could have done a fair bit to improve the efficiency in the 6 years we’ve been there.

Our EPC says we have cavity wall filled.
20 years ago – so there is barely anything left in there. I have looked. In three different places.
This means that a) EPC says ‘good’ when it isn’t and b) I cannot get replacement cavity wall insulation installed, so the house remains poorly insulated.

Is it just money making and box ticking?

Yes it’s a real missed opportunity.

The wall cavity is there for a reason, don’t breach it!

Whole thing is a farce.
I fitted Solar thermal and wood boiler a few years ago. I sacked off any involvement of any grants etc are the red tape was pathetic so I just payed for it all myself and saved even more money.
The whole thing was a tick box exercise , as are the reports.

Often useless as the surveyor doesn’t properly investigate what’s there. Solid brick outer(no cavity), wallpaper inside with a painted plaster ceiling. The surveyor will assume no insulation and only amended ours when shown photos of the work in progress during refurb. Without someone on hand with evidence of the property’s history, it’s just guesswork.

@matt_outandabout just get a new EPC done and make sure it gets that detail right.

We have an issue with EPC’s that we have learned from – we changed a boiler and did more insulation a few years ago in a rented house and wanted to get the EPC upgraded to reflect the improvement.
Disspointed to discover that the grade (D) didn’t move.
It turned out that the tenant hade removed all the fluro bulbs we had fitted in the bayonet light fittings and replaced with with older incandecents, you can still buy them!! Who could blame him first gen energy saving light bulbs were shit, slow to warm up and wierd light.
I argued with the assesor that these were consumable but it counted agaisnt the grade bigly.
Next time we did a boiler upgrade, made sure all bulbs were present and correct, different house, and it was newer LED’s which have been excellent.

@savoyad just get a new EPC done and make sure it gets that detail right.

Why would I want to do that? My house will look worse on paper EPC when I come to sell it (not that we are).

Yes, farce. Any fule noeth that the construction type and e.g. damp/cold issues are probably worth rather a little more than some estimated report with a magic colour scale.

However some buyers will put store in them.

So it pays to optimise it, if you can, especially if it is as difficult as changing the pigging light bulbs.

Utter waste of time. Most of the assessors seem to be ex double glazing salesman who know nothing about building construction.

We had one done recently as we were looking into the RHI payments and fitting a heat pump. We gave up in the end and fitted a new oil fired boiler, as the cost of the improvements (to qualify for the RHI payments) were a joke, especially when the house is well insulated already. We had the ‘install a wind turbine’ suggestion as well.

I asked him if he’d ever done an ‘A’ grade EPC?. No! He pointed out that he’d recently done a new build passive house that was only a ‘B’.

Why would I want to do that?

I thought you were complaining about (b) – it would solve that. I’m suspicious of cavity insulation, but if you want it and your EPC is an obstacle to getting a grant for that or whatever, the charge for another EPC in future (which would reflect the insulation you just installed…) when you do come to sell is trivial.

Or floor insulation that would take a hundred years to pay off.

I insulated under the floor. In terms of the energy saved compared with the embeded energy in the insulating materials it’ll pay of pretty quickly. In money terms less quickly but that’s only because eenergy is sold too cheaply and doesn’t take into account the environmental cost of the correspeonding emissions.

If you watch the videos I post you’ll see I never wear shoes or socks in the house because the floor isn’t cold. Insulating the floor was just one of the measures that meant we don’t need central heating so it avoided the replacemnt expense and running costs associated. The house is curently at 19°C and we haven’t need to heat for over a week (SW France if you want to check what the day and night time temperatures are currently)

Global warming is a problem, if your house is a thermal sieve and energy pit you are part of that problem. Do something about it for the sake of your kids and their kids.

EPCs are often useless. They were originally a key feature of the Homebuyer Information Pack (HIPs) scheme which was not badly designed but it was rendered toothless before implementation and then roundly ignored by all (except poor buggers like me trying to sell houses at that time and paid for one).

i wonder if fitting a cheap 50 quid wind turbine would improve things?

They come under ‘pay peanuts, get …’.

The SAP / EPC software is a very blunt tool and when you have an assessor trying to make a living at £25 a time, any advice will be very basic.

I trained for new build SAP but thankfully no longer do them.

EPCs are a comparison tool, not a simulation (with the expection of non-dom DSM perhaps). They’re a cheap quick way for energy efficiency to be compared across dwellings to make it obivous to homeowners/buyers/renters etc. how the energy costs compare. They work reasonably well in that regard, obivously not all variables (e.g. condition) can be accounted for, nor is there intrusive or complex testing, but that is the trade-off for a survey that costs £<100.

Epc s for rental property in the UK are a waste of money, I have never had a tenant ask to see one in the 11 years they have been in force. Shame, looks like a missed opportunity to educate tenants in energy efficiency. I did pay the whole 45 GBP for a rental epc so can’t really expect much, valid for 10 years too.

Global warming is a problem, if your house is a thermal sieve and energy pit you are part of that problem.

Although Global warming makes thermal sieves less of a problem in the short term….

😉

They’re a cheap quick way for energy efficiency to be compared across dwellings to make it obivous to homeowners/buyers/renters etc. how the energy costs compare.

The thing is, homeowners/buyers/renters don’t generally give a flying wotsit about the relative energy costs of a house. I’m not saying they shouldn’t but they don’t. When coming to choose somewhere to live, there are many other factors that are far more important too them, and many of those are subjective. I consider myself a reasonably eco-conscious person, I want to do my bit, but I’m house-hunting at the moment and have not looked at a single EPC, and I probably won’t.

EPCs are basically greenwash.

The best way to think of an EPC is similar to the energy rating of a domestic appliance: ie as a purely comparative tool, not as predictor as to the actual energy a property will consume over a specific period. As already advised (but this applies equally to the non-domestic sector. Dynamic simulation tools can be used to predict in use consumption but that is over and above the actual EPC requirements, a CIBSE TM54 calculation Iirc…)

I’m more familiar with non-domestic EPC’s and the attendant Section 6 (Part L for you southerners) compliance. There is a significant performance gap between predicted and actual and subsequent a focus on designing for in use rather than compliance. For new build there is a Nominal Building which has all sort of assumptions made about it to simplify the calculation process, it is in essence a ‘black box’ and the specific building is then compared against this nominal one to see how it compares under the specific parameters inherent to its black box.

Unsurprisingly, it is more onerous for non-domestic than domestic.

Think about the number of dwellings that require an EPC.

Think about the number of experienced qualified people there are to do this properly.

Think about how much it would cost to get a ‘properly’ qualified and experienced person to do the survey and calculation.

Ultimately it’s garbage in garbage out. It’s a decent enough idea that’s hit the real world during implementation (and all that entails). In the main, It isn’t paid well enough for properly qualified and experienced people. They’re doing the building physics stuff instead.

And when you get to the improvements box, well that needs some actual knowledge on the part of an assessor. Years ago I did about 50 EPCs for vacant retail properties for letting purposes (it was the financial crisis and normal (ie speculative) work disappeared and people took on whatever to lay the bills). Most of the suggestions offered were bobbins, i personally only advised the ones that made any kind of sense…

I am looking forward to having this done on our flats. In theory as its an attic flat almost all external walls are lath and plaster to air gap to roof sarking boards. In practice I have spent a lot of time and money stuffing insulation everywhere and draft proofing so its actual insulation value and what it appears to have are two very different things

should be fun

General idea is ok as a comparative tool but the implementation is off IMO. Fitting energy saving bulbs changed the rating of our old house. Disposable items like what bulb you use shouldn’t be part of the assessment, they will get changed as they blow and can be changed to poor quality after the assessment. Other gaming of the system is you can have a relatively poorly insulated house but add a solar panel and you win.