ENERGY EFFICIENCY CERTIFICATES – USEFUL OR USELESS?

One profession that will never fail is the Advertising Agency, their role being to present, to the public, the “facts”.

As you can probably tell, this website hasn’t been anywhere near an Advertising Agency or a Copywriter, despite the fact that an extremely good friend of my wife is a Director of an Advertising Agency in another part of the county and I would love to see how she would have written this!

 Perhaps there wouldn’t be so much truth on this website or, to put it another way, the truth would be expressed in an entirely different way!

EPC’s are promoted by our beloved Government and included in the HIPS as a means of making us aware of the energy that we use and waste in our homes. They are trying to educate us into being less energy wasteful, which is a very sensible and a laudable aim.

Despite months of advertising, the majority of home owners don’t really know what a HIP is and are equally unaware of the form, intent and purpose of an EPC.

British Gas offers free Domestic Energy Audits, although I take the cynical approach that they are free on the basis that it gets them into people’s houses and provides them with names and addresses to whom they can sell replacement central heating boilers, cavity wall insulation, roof void insulation, etc.

 I am particularly fond of the recent advert which runs along the lines of “Mr B of Norwich said…….”British Gas showed me how I can save £384 a year on my fuel bills””. 

A fact, undoubtedly, but there is a distinct failure for “Mr B of Norwich” to follow by saying “unfortunately, it could cost me £6,000 to do the changes to save that much”!

An Advertising Agency’s clever distortion of reality!

A number of years ago I qualified as a Domestic Energy Auditor with a very respectable National Company as Energy Audits were included with the Mortgage Valuation Reports of a major lender. I very much liked the format of the Energy Audit that was presented to the Client as it provided a certificate giving an energy rating, advice on what energy cost savings could be made and how those savings would be achieved and what the cost would be.

On the old system, you had a list which told you what change was suggested, how much it would cost, how much it would save you per year and how many “payback years” would be involved.

Before I qualified as an Energy Assessor for that firm I had to submit a number of reports, one of which was for a house that I was living in at the time, that being August 2001.

The Energy Report advised that the existing rating was good (62 points) but that with a few changes I could move the efficiency level up to very good (74 points).

The suggestions were:

▪Increase roof insulation thickness to 200mm. Annual fuel cost saving- £8. 

Installation cost - £154.  Payback period - 19.3 years.

▪Install cavity wall insulation. Annual fuel cost saving - £69.

Installation cost - £308.   Payback period - 4.5 years.

Further advice was given to fit low energy light bulbs at an estimated cost of between £5 and £15 each as “they last 8 times longer than ordinary bulbs and this benefit added to the reduction in electricity means each one will save you about £10 per year”.

Solar heating was another suggestion, this described to the modern EPC’s as  photovoltaic heating system!

To my own report, I was told that I could DIY install a photovoltaic heating system for about £800 but that a commercial system would cost between £3,000 and £4,000.

The estimated saving was advised to be around £300 per annum from a commercial system and the payback period would be between 15 and 20 years.

I imagine that you are now seeing the point of this.

Let’s compare this with the new and “improved” EPC and the way it is presented.

A friendly Estate Agent let me have a look at the EPC for an end terrace three Bedroomed ex Local Authority house in the Newcastle area. The house was fully double glazed, had 200mm of insulation in the roof space, cavity wall insulation and low energy bulbs in most of the light fittings.

Under the heading “About the Cost Effective Measures to improve this homes performance ratings”, the suggestions made were as follows:

 ▪          Lower cost measures (typically up to £500 each).

            Increase hot water cylinder insulation to 160mm. (Over 6 inches thick!) 

            Estimated saving per year - £19.

 ▪          Higher cost measures (typically over £500 each.

            Fit hot water cylinder thermostat – estimated annual saving - £17.

Upgrade heating controls (i.e. fit thermostatic valves to radiators) - estimated savings per year - £29.    Replace boiler with Band A condensing boiler - estimated annual saving of £138.

The fifth recommendation comes in under the heating “About the Further Measures to achieve even higher standards”.

Solar photo voltaic panels (25% of roof area)! (My exclamation mark!).

This is suggested to make a further saving of £29 per year on the home owners heating bills.

Apart from the fact that 25% of the roof area would be covered with black panels and the installation cost would be thousands, the £29 estimated annual saving seems to be an awful lot of money when considering the cost of fitting such a horrendously expensive system.

You see what I mean about the EPC, it gives you advice, but doesn’t tell you how much it’s going to cost, nor does it tell you how many ‘payback years’ are involved.

You are getting part of the truth only!

So, here are my thoughts:

 ▪          The old type Domestic Energy Audit was effective and useful in the sense that it actually told you how much it would cost to make various changes and you could decide how best to spend money to improve thermal efficiency.

 ▪          The important and worthwhile part of the old type Energy Audit was that it told you how many years it would take you to start making an actual saving on your energy costs, because it told you how much it was going to cost to make a change and how many years the payback period be.

e.g.  Insulate the loft: Cost £200. Annual saving on heating costs: £50 per year. Payback period: £200 divided by £50 equals 4 years.

 ▪          So, Mr B of Norwich, you can save £384 per year on your heating costs, but how much would it cost you to make the changes?

Could it possibly be the case that the format of the new EPC doesn’t tell you exactly what the costs of making energy savings will be because it hides the fact that there could be a period of 15 years before you get to that position of actually saving £384 per annum?

 ▪          How many of us are going to pay any attention to the EPC and actually do the work to make our homes more efficient?

We all know that we need to save energy, if only for the reason that the bills keep going up (15% increase on gas and 10% on electricity charges from early 2008).

How many people will read, acknowledge and act on the EPC? That is something that we will have to judge as time goes on, but my suspicion is that most people won’t doanything.

So, I agree with the idea of an Energy Audit and we all need to be encouraged to make savings. What I cannot agree on is the format of the existing report, the manner in which information is presented and the distorted impression that it gives.

As with most things, in this life, the old way of going about it seems to have been better, more effective and more informative than what the Government decided we should have.Finally, on Wednesday 13 February 2008, my wife and I were looking at a set of Agents Sales Particulars and she asked me what the coloured bars were at the end of the Particulars.

I explained that this was the EPC report on the house that was being sold. She is not an unintelligent woman, but I had a bit of a problem explaining what it was all about.

 I had to show her that the green, orange and red bars showed that the house had an energy efficiency of Band D (middle of the range) and that with the EPC recommended improvements they could move a couple of points up within Band D, but couldn’t possibly get to Bands A, B or C (very efficient).

Her comment was that she didn’t understand what it was all about, she didn’t see that there was much point in spending the money to make changes for such a marginal increase in energy efficiency but, of course, agreed that energy saving light bulbs were a good idea.

We have a lot of them at home – I flick a switch and it’s like walking into a room with a candle until they brighten up!

As an aside, I take the cynical view (an expression often used) that the Government might have been better off giving us all free energy efficient light bulbs instead of spending a vast amount of money sorting out the Home Condition Report fiasco and advertising to promote the value of EPC’s, which most people out there don’t seem to know much about.

My wife and I then moved on to the carbon efficiency part of the Sales Particulars and again the house was in the middle of Band D, with the changes proposed likely to marginally decrease CO² output, but the house remaining in Band D.

In conclusion, I state that the EPC will only be useful if it tells you the actual cost of making the changes so that people can make a well informed decision on the cost effective changes that they can make.

As ever, these are my views and not necessarily representative of the views of other people that you may talk to!

Finally, my most recent experience of the EPC, the inspection carried out on my own home with a newly trained Energy Inspector in February 2008!

After 4 hours and a number of discussions with the company supplying the Energy Certificate I saw an EPC produced that gave my home one of the highest ratings (Band C) – a very pleasing result you would think.

Unfortunately, I don’t consider that the EPC is worth the paper it is printed on as the energy audit is wholly incapable of dealing with the specifics of my home and ignores:

 -The Aga cooker, which not only produces a lot of heat but also uses a lot of gas.

-The two central heating boilers, the audit only capable of recording the existence of one.

-The audit has no way of taking into account the insulation that I had packed under not only the floating timber on concrete floors but also the floor void upstairs.

-The extra insulation in the walls and roof structure.

So, all in all, what was the worth of the EPC?

Not a lot, as far as I am concerned and I believe that it is highly unlikely that the eventual buyer will bother looking at it.

Success, however, for the Advertising Agency that will have advised on the format of the final format of the EPC. They have designed a document that means virtually nothing, in that the information is so vague and non specific.