Bulb rental?

tbs624

chriserenity wrote: »

Er, its a load of rubbish......

that's my view on EPCs in their entirety.:D

chriserenity

Richard_Webster wrote: »

It really does come down to how many buyers actually take any notice of or understand the EPC.

I routinely write to buyer clients telling them not to take literally the generalised supposed estimated savings resulting from loft insulation, more efficient central heating etc.

Trouble is I bet someone will put up a thread in a year or two saying that they installed the loft insulation and they didn't save £x per year.....

Hi Richard,

As far as I can tell most corporately employed energy assessors don't leave their contact details with the Vendor. I do and receive calls from buyers and potential buyers who want help in understanding the report I produced on a given property.

I'd agree it is sound advice to say the EPC figures should not be taken to apply to the individual. As you know the EPC assumes standard occupancy and is intended as a tool for the would be buyer to directly compare the efficiency of any given property with any other. If each EPC took into account individual usage habits it would be useless as a comparison tool!
This doesn't mean it is useless though - if one EPC says you would save £400 a year by insulating the walls and another says you'd save £200 but you would actually have the heating on for less than the EPC assumes you'd still save more in the former property than in the latter.

It does actually say this on the last paragraph of the first page of the EPC.

chriserenity

tbs624 wrote: »

If you have a property where the mains gas supply has been disconnected, the DEAs have to mark that down as "mains gas not available" which has a marked effect on any rating - unless there has been a change to EPC software within the last 6-8 weeks there is no box to mark that the gas merely needs to be reconnected.

And don't you just love that VAT is charged at the full 17.5% but other energy efficient measures attract a levy of only 5%?

Apparently the data/photos etc will be retained for 15 years, not only by the DEA but by the Govt's central register too ( there's another database for them to lose a copy of..)

There have even been suggestions that to raise the profile and public acceptance of EPCs there should be some kind of link to stamp duty and/or council tax...............

Hi,

There will be a major update to the software we use on 7th September to resolve some of the issues you identified. Its still not perfect but with each successive update it becomes more accurate as a comparison tool, as it is its the best the buyer/tenant has access to for free.

Hey, you only need to pay VAT if you use a VAT registered company. We're not!

True, some licensing bodies do stipulate that energy assessors need to submit all their site notes, photos etc but equally some don't and only take a sample. There are about 6/7 major licensing schemes at the moment with consolidation planned for the future.

Put it this way, i'd put one of my EPCs up for a pepsi challenge with British Gas's 'home energy check' any day of the week.

chriserenity

I can see you're all quite keen to know the answer on this so to take a real example, I'm just lodging an EPC on a property I inspected today. As it happened the property had no low energy bulbs and (in conjunction with many other factors!) received a score of 37 out of 100 with a projected saving of £72 a year if the buyer/tenant switched to LELs. The report then states that if all the bulbs were changed to low energy the score would rise to 39 out of 100.

Its easy to trivialise the EPC by talking about lightbulbs but they do make a small difference. Specifically a home with all low energy bulbs receives a slightly higher rating as in the example above but a 100% LEL fitted home also has higher heating bills to compensate for the heat that would be given off by the bulbs. So whats the point? Point is its alot cheaper to heat a house on mains gas than it is on peak electric room heaters or lightbulbs for that matter so don't go saying 'well whats the point then? :think:

Would I put it past a landlord to be half an hour ahead of me with his two sets of LELs between 10 properties? Er, maybe but really whats the point with the price of them now?! I've inspected quite a few rental places now and I find the ones that have the LELs are the ones with the poorest tenants that've been living there ages, the super eco-friendly tenants that proudly show you they've got them in every socket or sometimes the little old lady who was sent a couple by grittish bas and says they're the best thing since the gramaphone was invented! :rotfl:

On a personal note, you stand with your head 2 inches under a 100w incandescent bulb for 5 minutes compared to a modern LEL and tell me the hole the waste heat burns in your head is just the same with either! :rotfl:I don't think so!

silvercar

chriserenity, do you check that every low energy bulb is working and how would you rate a place where a lot of the low energy bulbs were dead?

chriserenity

silvercar wrote: »

chriserenity, do you check that every low energy bulb is working and how would you rate a place where a lot of the low energy bulbs were dead?

Nope, Home Inspectors and Domestic Energy Assessors aren't there to check the condition of a property or an aspect of it, they're simply there to record whats there so whether its a dead bulb or a dead boiler we'll record it and assume that if its non-functional that it can be repaired. 50% dead, 50% working LELs are recorded as 100%

For reports on the condition of boilers etc landlords should refer to gas safety engineer reports and electrical inspection reports as normal. If you want a report on which LELs are still alive turn the switch on and find out :rotfl:

If any landlords just read that and thought "Right, I'll put the word out that I'll be collecting dead LELs on a recycling effort I can raise my green image and pull an extra 2 points on the EPCs at the same time" my advice is don't bother, its not worth it! Take the time you would take doing something daft like this and call your local energy saving trust number printed on your EPC, find out what free money is available to improve your property stock based on the recommendations in the EPC and get the grant applications rolling now!

GDB2222

Very helpful, Chris. It's a shame that you're in Yorkshire, and I need EPCs in London. You're not passing through soon, are you?

chartreuse_2

GDB2222 wrote: »

Very helpful, Chris. It's a shame that you're in Yorkshire, and I need EPCs in London. You're not passing through soon, are you?

I'll second that and add, fancy stopping off in Bedfordshire on your way to GBD2222's?

Davesnave

Fashion has a lot to answer for. When renovating a small property in 2006, I removed the fluorescent unit in the kitchen (36w) and replaced it with a bar of four 50w halogens.Ten seconds after switching on, I was back out the door to B&Q to get some downlighters.

Eventually, this tiny kitchen has sufficient light, but it was now burning 700w to achieve similar light levels to the 36w fluorescent. Yeah, OK it looked good, but if it had been a property I was going to live in I'd not have been happy. Multiply this scenario by millions up & down the country and that is a lot of extra Co2 and wasted money.

chriserenity

MyGreenLighting wrote: »

I don't know much about EPC ratings, but I've been reading this thread with some interest.

I work for My Green Lighting, where we sell dedicated low energy fittings (fittings where you can only install low energy bulbs), which you have to use if your building or renovating a building to comply with the energy saving efficient lighting part of the building regulations.

I would have thought that the same sort of rules apply to EPC too, in that a energy efficient light fitting would be better than an energy saving light bulb - but I'm surprised to hear that in some (all?) cases it's just the bulbs and not the fittings that count.

I can't help wondering if this is a similar situation to the way that some building inspectors allowing low energy bulbs in some cases rather than low energy fittings when the rules were first introduced. There was quite a bit of confusion between what is actually an energy saving fitting!

Hi MGL,

Well, the reason its set for us to record the bulbs rather than the fittings is the Domestic EPC (non-newbuild) is for existing dwellings rather than new ones so for example on my regular patch there are alot of Victorian terraces and if the owners/tenants put in 100% LELs we wouldn't be able to give them credit for it.

I havn't inspected any properties built to the new regs yet actually as because the new regs are so markedly different to the old ones the EPC at build can only be done using Full SAP (performed by the people who used to produce the 2005 SAP certificates required by building control). Full SAP can record a greater level of detail and it would be more appropriate for these people to look at the fittings rather than the bulbs. You can find out for definate by calling NHER or maybe NHBC.

By the way, all of you reading this that have low VOLTAGE lights in kitchens, bathrooms etc these are not low energy and each one counts as half an incandescent. On the plus side though if you have fluorescent strip lights in for example your kitchen or heated garage each one of those counts as a low energy bulb as do LED based lights.

They're phasing the incandescent bulbs out next year I believe so after a point you won't easily be able to buy icans anymore.