EPC dubious results

[Martin Brown]

Through selling my mothers house I have had the amusement of seeing one of the new EPC certificates that every house must have when sold.

The results are "interesting". The inspector completely missed the fact that the house has a rather sophisticated zoned CH system controlled by more than one room thermostat (it does NONE/HW/UP/DOWN/BOTH).

It was described as partially double glazed and given 2 stars for that. In fact the only two windows that are not double glazed are in the kitchen and larder (where it serves to let heat escape intentionally).

The list of suggested improvements was in a very strange order (although a couple of them are correct this seems to be more by chance than anything else). Are EPCs sponsored by the companies selling home improvements? Or is it a case of poor training of inspectors?

Ranking them by the more sane measure of saving benefit to cost: annual saving cost Hot water tank insulation 24 24 Low energy lighting 30 25 Thermostatic radiator valves 35 350 Floor insulation 60 1000 Flat roof insulation 40 1000 New condensing boiler 65 3000 Solar water heating 40 4000 Double glazing throughout 50 6000 Solar PV on present FIT 260 8000

Of these I think the floor and flat roof insulation are good suggestions and replacing the double glazing which is near end of life would also be sensible. But the boiler is still quite new. I doubt that TRVs would give the benefit predicted since the zoning already shuts down the unoccupied parts of the house for most of the daytime.

The hot water tank is already very well insulated and the lights in the main parts of the house in regular use are already low energy lamps. Seldom used rooms still have original filament bulbs. The saving claimed is illusory (it is a classic 80/20 problem).

Solar water heating is a joke since the government subsidises you to dump the entire output of your solar PV system into the hot water immersion heater whilst still paying for "half" of the electricity.

A more practical problem is that the house has little or no suitable roof area for enough solar panels. The main roof area is north facing!

It also suggests why not get an exempted biomass boiler and contribute more smoke to air pollution in the city as a final parting shot. They also completely failed to notice that it still has an open fireplace (which could still be used if the chimney was swept first).

[Chris Hogg]

Dubious results? The whole thing in a complete farce! I had a similar experience a few weeks ago, selling our previous property and moving into my late mother's. The 'surveyor' wanders around, takes some measurements of the room sizes, asks a few simple questions about insulation, goes home, feeds his numbers into the appropriate bit of software which churns out some totally irrelevant nonsense as to how many squillions of £'s could be saved if this or that were done. The house agent was equally dismissive of the whole process, having had a survey done recently on his own property that he was selling.

[NY]

My respect for EPCs went down when we had our house surveyed prior to selling it. The report made various statements which were factually wrong - like saying that there was no loft insulation. The surveyor's grounds for saying this were that the majority of the loft is boarded. The amount of insulation in the unboarded parts nearer the eaves is plain to see, and I argued that the report should say "assumed x cm of insulation throughout based on what is visible at eaves" rather than saying "no loft insulation". Fortunately our buyer wasn't deterred by this because they had already seen the amount of visible insulation.

The statement about double glazing was misleading too: every single window of our house was double glazed with the exception of one small window that leads onto an alley, but the statement was "part double glazed" which makes it sound as if a significant number of windows were single.

It stated that it had "partial energy-saving bulbs" which was ludicrous because light bulbs are not fixtures: we removed all our expensive daylight CFL and LED (Philips Hue) bulbs and replaced them with cheap tungsten and cheap CFL when we moved out. Good thing we kept the original bulbs when we first replaced them with CFL/LED, since 100 W tungsten are now very hard to find.

Almost all EPC reports that I have seen mention cavity wall insulation, even when this is not possible: I told the surveyor when she asked about cavity wall insulation that we'd been told that it was not possible due to the large number of cross-bricks used to tie the inner and outer skin together, a type of construction that was common in 1930s (ex)council houses like ours.

[Martin Brown]

I did consider "utter bollocks" as an alternative subject title.

The whole thing appears to be a monkey see, monkey do tick box exercise that has almost no connection with reality. It is ludicrous that it is an offence not to purchase one of these useless pieces of paper!

It certainly has that look of utter cluelessness. The ABC categories are each divided into 100 sub divisions too which I found highly amusing.

Values might be good to 1 sig fig on a good day with a trailing wind.

[Bill Wright]

I knew someone who was by any reasonable standards unemployable due to being a total d*****ad, but she had the gift of the gab and a degree so she walked into a succession of jobs during her working life, most or all of which she proved incompetent or inefficient and was sacked. Each time she got the sack she moved to a different job. Incidentally her private life was equally chaotic. She had many partners over the years. She was one of those people that seem absolutely fine if a bit scatty to start with, the major snags in her personality only emerging later. Unsurprisingly she was eventually employed to do these surveys. She was trained, and let loose. At a social gathering I asked her about her job and it soon became obvious that she had no knowledge of building techniques, insulation, or anything else of a practical nature. She was not dismissed from the job; she reached retirement age.

Bill

[Dave Liquorice]

What do you expect when you can get the City & Guilds "Domestic Energy Assessor" qualification by parting with about £1000 for a 3 day classroom based course and maybe doing and submitting a few EPCs as examples.

"Assessor" intresting word to use, not "Inspector" or anything else that implies a reasonable knowledge of the subject in question...