Govt. plans to target mortgages to EPC's could leave many homes unsaleable

MovingForwards

My neighbours EPC rated E, could move up 35 points to C but not even meeting where mine is currently at.

Suggests cavity wall, low energy bulbs, storage heaters and emersion.

Alternative options are external insulation with cavity wall insulation, biomass boiler, air or ground heat pump.

Current estimated bills over £4500 a year, ouch.

ProDave

ComicGeek said:

NameUnavailable said:

Section62 said:

Chandler85 said:

While EPC are full of assumptions, because lets face it, the guy has about 10 minutes to do it, they will continue to be ignored unless mortgage companies force them to be taken into account.  Which makes the system worse, if you have people who assume things and then give you a rubbish EPC, so you can't sell your house as easily due to a 10 minute assessment.

For them to be useful they need to be done properly, not all double glazing is the same.  I've seen double glazed houses that the EPC says needs the single glazed windows replacing etc, and these are new EPCs.  It is like the assessor just doesn't look.  Though to be fair, I had a surveyor tell me a glazed internal door was not safety glass and needed replacing due to being dangerous.  The door had laminated glass in it and was perfectly safe, the glass even said in the corner it was laminate...

I touched on this point the other day.  The current EPC system is rubbish in part because people don't treat it seriously. 

People are going to need to pay for good quality energy assessments (in the same way some pay for a level 3 survey) if they want to demonstrate their (non-standard) property actually has a performance level far in excess of the nonsense the current box-ticking exercise produces.

I wasn't aware that we could order a 'basic/cheap' EPC or a 'quality' one, it's just an EPC - what you say makes sense but that relies on a complete change to the current system and there's no mention of that in any of the stuff I've read about what EPC's are going to mean for landlords and home buyers/sellers in a few years time.

So how exactly do you go about getting a good quality assessment?

I have been producing SAP calculations for new build houses/flats for over 20 years now, and have been producing detailed EPCs for new builds since they were introduced - not to be confused with the simplistic EPCs for existing dwellings, these are very detailed in terms of insulation, air tightness and thermal bridging details.

Even as a chartered engineer and lots of experience, I still had to sit through the simplistic training course to produce EPCs for existing dwellings - the problem is that there just weren't enough experienced assessors to meet demand, so the govt had to lower standards.

To provide a quote, arrange a date/time, drive to the house, do the survey, complete all the paperwork and lodge the EPC, paid etc took me about 2 hrs on average. I needed to charge £150+vat to do it properly - when other assessors started to charge £40 (no vat) to provide the 'same piece of useless paper' as some saw it, then there wasn't any way I could carry on offering this service. With lodgement and travel costs, ongoing admin and training costs, I knew assessors working on less than the minimum wage.

So I'll happily keep sitting in my office working on new build schemes only for more money, and not have to deal with joe public. 

You get a good quality assessment when firstly you pay enough to cover the costs of experienced assessors, and when the govt software is flexible enough for these experienced assessors to adjust things - neither is going to happen with a mass market product like an EPC, which is trying to standardise something that varies massively between dwellings and even between different occupants in the same dwelling.

Top post.

I might have mentioned here but I have just completed a new self buildbuild well insulated house that achieved an EPC A94 by the SAP assessor, based on the known construction method so known U values for walls floor and roof, actual Uw window values and actual air tightness test result.

It still even with all the correct information estimated my annual electricity usage to power the heat pump at almost 3 times what we actually use.

When selling a house, a far more useful and far easier thing to verify and publish would be the last few years actual energy bills.  That would be so simple to include.

As an asside someone on a building forum I use created a simple heat loss spreadsheet.  Just enter wall floor roof and window details sizes and U values and it simply calculates heat loss.  That gave a far more accurate estimate and much closer to the real world figures than the very much more complicated calculations in the SAP report.

p00hsticks

ComicGeek said:

NameUnavailable said:

Section62 said:

Chandler85 said:

While EPC are full of assumptions, because lets face it, the guy has about 10 minutes to do it, they will continue to be ignored unless mortgage companies force them to be taken into account.  Which makes the system worse, if you have people who assume things and then give you a rubbish EPC, so you can't sell your house as easily due to a 10 minute assessment.

For them to be useful they need to be done properly, not all double glazing is the same.  I've seen double glazed houses that the EPC says needs the single glazed windows replacing etc, and these are new EPCs.  It is like the assessor just doesn't look.  Though to be fair, I had a surveyor tell me a glazed internal door was not safety glass and needed replacing due to being dangerous.  The door had laminated glass in it and was perfectly safe, the glass even said in the corner it was laminate...

I touched on this point the other day.  The current EPC system is rubbish in part because people don't treat it seriously. 

People are going to need to pay for good quality energy assessments (in the same way some pay for a level 3 survey) if they want to demonstrate their (non-standard) property actually has a performance level far in excess of the nonsense the current box-ticking exercise produces.

I wasn't aware that we could order a 'basic/cheap' EPC or a 'quality' one, it's just an EPC - what you say makes sense but that relies on a complete change to the current system and there's no mention of that in any of the stuff I've read about what EPC's are going to mean for landlords and home buyers/sellers in a few years time.

So how exactly do you go about getting a good quality assessment?

 
Even as a chartered engineer and lots of experience, I still had to sit through the simplistic training course to produce EPCs for existing dwellings - the problem is that there just weren't enough experienced assessors to meet demand, so the govt had to lower standards.

I'm sure I'm not the only one around at the time when EPCs were first bought in (as part of the now defunct idea of 'sellers packs') who can remember the media and the bloke down the pub all saying that training to be an EPC asssessor was the next career road to riches, in the same way that people are saying that about HGV drivers today.

Gavin83

Doozergirl said:

[Deleted User] said:

Doozergirl said:

another_casualty said:

Doozergirl said:

You should probably re-read your signature and follow your own advice, @another_casualty


Have you read the thread?  There's a
sensible conversation happening, which you're welcome to join.  

Thanks@Doozergirl for the advice . 

This is true it is a sensible conversation which I have joined.
I'm trying to work out how am I supposed to pay for a new boiler for example if my present one is ripped out . How much would it cost to pay to get a Victorian converted flat up to standard ? Why should  we pay ? Obviously loft insulation isn't much of an issue . 

Home owners have a responsibility to maintain their properties etc but for all of this green issue to be rammed down our throats by 2030 when we will still have to pay for everything doesn't seem possible .   It is possible I have got the wrong end of the stick of course..

Your choice is to pay either in upgrading the house or in increasing energy costs.  Fossil fuels are a finite resource, even if you don't care about your own consumption.  

I have insulted many, many houses over a period of two decades. We've had a very long time to start taking this seriously.  There's no throat ramming.    The state of our planet shouldn't be a party political thing but some will offer to help consumers more than others.  If you're not going to vote for anything then you will get what you are given.  

Problem is a lot of people, especially FTBs, are struggling to afford houses already. With extra cost an no assistance it's just going to make the situation worse.

They are the ones that should be paying less for an unimproved house.  

I've spent a long time on this forum pointing out that it isn't all
kitchen and bathrooms.  Maybe now people will be forced to wake up to the fact that the fabric of the building is what needs improving, not the aesthetic. 

The more I think about this, the happier I am that we start recognising what awful
housing stock we actually have and start doing something about it.   

You can easily blame buyers for this as much as sellers. No one walks into a house and goes “wow, this is well insulated and check out that heat pump!” However I expect it’s common for people to be wowed by an impressive kitchen.

I’ll stand by what I said, I don’t think most people really care about how energy efficient their house is and don’t really care about climate change as a whole. Certainly not enough to do anything serious about it anyway.

Whether people are forced to care or not remains to be seen.

ComicGeek

ProDave said:

ComicGeek said:

NameUnavailable said:

Section62 said:

Chandler85 said:

While EPC are full of assumptions, because lets face it, the guy has about 10 minutes to do it, they will continue to be ignored unless mortgage companies force them to be taken into account.  Which makes the system worse, if you have people who assume things and then give you a rubbish EPC, so you can't sell your house as easily due to a 10 minute assessment.

For them to be useful they need to be done properly, not all double glazing is the same.  I've seen double glazed houses that the EPC says needs the single glazed windows replacing etc, and these are new EPCs.  It is like the assessor just doesn't look.  Though to be fair, I had a surveyor tell me a glazed internal door was not safety glass and needed replacing due to being dangerous.  The door had laminated glass in it and was perfectly safe, the glass even said in the corner it was laminate...

I touched on this point the other day.  The current EPC system is rubbish in part because people don't treat it seriously. 

People are going to need to pay for good quality energy assessments (in the same way some pay for a level 3 survey) if they want to demonstrate their (non-standard) property actually has a performance level far in excess of the nonsense the current box-ticking exercise produces.

I wasn't aware that we could order a 'basic/cheap' EPC or a 'quality' one, it's just an EPC - what you say makes sense but that relies on a complete change to the current system and there's no mention of that in any of the stuff I've read about what EPC's are going to mean for landlords and home buyers/sellers in a few years time.

So how exactly do you go about getting a good quality assessment?

I have been producing SAP calculations for new build houses/flats for over 20 years now, and have been producing detailed EPCs for new builds since they were introduced - not to be confused with the simplistic EPCs for existing dwellings, these are very detailed in terms of insulation, air tightness and thermal bridging details.

Even as a chartered engineer and lots of experience, I still had to sit through the simplistic training course to produce EPCs for existing dwellings - the problem is that there just weren't enough experienced assessors to meet demand, so the govt had to lower standards.

To provide a quote, arrange a date/time, drive to the house, do the survey, complete all the paperwork and lodge the EPC, paid etc took me about 2 hrs on average. I needed to charge £150+vat to do it properly - when other assessors started to charge £40 (no vat) to provide the 'same piece of useless paper' as some saw it, then there wasn't any way I could carry on offering this service. With lodgement and travel costs, ongoing admin and training costs, I knew assessors working on less than the minimum wage.

So I'll happily keep sitting in my office working on new build schemes only for more money, and not have to deal with joe public. 

You get a good quality assessment when firstly you pay enough to cover the costs of experienced assessors, and when the govt software is flexible enough for these experienced assessors to adjust things - neither is going to happen with a mass market product like an EPC, which is trying to standardise something that varies massively between dwellings and even between different occupants in the same dwelling.

Top post.

I might have mentioned here but I have just completed a new self buildbuild well insulated house that achieved an EPC A94 by the SAP assessor, based on the known construction method so known U values for walls floor and roof, actual Uw window values and actual air tightness test result.

It still even with all the correct information estimated my annual electricity usage to power the heat pump at almost 3 times what we actually use.

When selling a house, a far more useful and far easier thing to verify and publish would be the last few years actual energy bills.  That would be so simple to include.

As an asside someone on a building forum I use created a simple heat loss spreadsheet.  Just enter wall floor roof and window details sizes and U values and it simply calculates heat loss.  That gave a far more accurate estimate and much closer to the real world figures than the very much more complicated calculations in the SAP report.

Absolutely - and I can give you numerous examples of where the EPC has also underestimated heating costs by a similar margin. I'm not attempting to defend the ridiculous figures quoted, but that varies more with individual choices than people like to accept - running the heating at higher temperatures and for more hours etc. Occasionally I find someone who states that their figure was accurate, but even a broken clock is right twice a day!

It's the same with quoted fuel consumption for cars - just because the figure quoted is 40mpg doesn't mean that you will get that on every journey, and will depend on how you drive, weather conditions etc. I still hear people complain that they're not getting the quoted figure when they're only driving 1 mile to the shop after defrosting the windscreen. Quoted figures for white goods are more accurate as they have fewer variables, but even they don't quote in £s.

The EPC is useful when comparing houses, ie this one is more energy efficient than that one, in the same way we should be doing with cars. It should never have had annual energy costs quoted. I do agree that real energy bills would be useful, but that will vary between occupants as well.

I wouldn't call SAP calculations complicated (we used to complete them by hand before computer software came in!!) and the heat loss calcs within are specifically not for design purposes. Not least because every SAP uses east penines weather data as an average UK condition for direct comparison - it would make sense to have regional variations, so those dwellings in colder areas have to have more insulation, and those in city centres have to better measures to deal with overheating in summer.

For commercial buildings we can model energy usage on an hour by hour basis, so can look at interaction between heat gains and losses, solar gains and shading, detailed plant activities etc. For houses this is lumped into a 'per month' value which can never be accurate.

MovingForwards

@ProDave years ago copies of the bills were handed over and the solicitor would tell the client the figures from them, not sure if it was a requirement of the conveyancing procedure or whether it was just particular firms who asked for it.

Gavin83

Section62 said:

Gavin83 said:

Section62 said:

Chandler85 said:

The more long term answer is surely to upgrade the electricity infrastructure to everywhere and also increase power generation from renewal sources, such as tidal, wind, solar, hydro electric etc.  Maybe Nuclear as well.

This isn't really the whole answer.  Even renewables have an environmental impact, let alone the financial cost.  The future is going to require us to use energy more carefully, and use a lot less of it, rather than simply creating more generating capacity to maintain the status quo.

And how do you suggest that’s achieved? As time goes on more and more houses are built and each has more and more electrical devices in it. With the push to electric cars this’ll just push up demand further.

Note I said 'energy', not electricity.  But sticking with electricity, despite all the additional houses built, and more people living in them, were you aware that the UK's final user electrical consumption has decreased from 349TWh in 2005 to 296TWh in 2019 (pre-pandemic).  Consumption in 2020 fell further to 280TWh, showing how changes in our activity can have a significant impact on total use.

The trend has been the reverse of what you expected.

However, reducing the use of gas, petrol and diesel will certainly result in an upward change in the consumption of electricity.

The point is that we cannot reasonably expect to supplant our gas, petrol and diesel usage with an endless supply of electricity.  A quick look at the Mtoe data for the different energy sources shows just how unrealistic that expectation is.

There will need to be a meeting-in-the-middle between increased generation and reduced demand, with a big dollop of smarter usage added on top.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1006701/DUKES_2021_Chapter_5_Electricity.pdf

Gavin83 said:

Before you suggest it energy rationing is not an answer. There is no way in a million years any Government would be brave enough to suggest such a policy.

Fuel duty escalator?  Congestion charging (in London)?  You might not see that as a form of rationing, but that is what it amounts to.

'Rationing' will be through the age-old governmental technique of taxation, rather than the paper coupons of the 70's.  And definitely not switching off the electricity supply as happens in some less-developed countries.

Would you have said in early 2000 when a packet of fags cost an average of £3.67 that no government would be brave enough to push the average price up to £11.44?  I'm sure there were lots of people who would have done.  Let's resume this conversation in 2040 when people will marvel at how you could once buy gas for heating at any time of day for a couple of pence per kWh.

(Average cost of fags data)
https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/timeseries/czmp

In regards to your first point I do find that interesting so thanks for the info. I’m curious as to why electricity consumption has reduced though. I struggle to believe people are using less than before so would it be due to more energy efficient appliances, which can only be a good thing. There’s only so much energy efficiency you can apply to an appliance though.

I expect offices are a large consumer of electricity as well and given most would have been closed that might account for a dip in the electricity from the last year. I used to live in a flat which had a view of Canary Wharf. Most of the offices there would have their lights on (and presumably more) 24/7. That seemed like a complete waste of electricity to me.

I expect taxation might well increase on energy. However this’ll just lead to the situation you get with most taxes of this kind, the poor will suffer and struggle for energy and the richer will carry on as before, not really noticing the dent the extra taxation brings. 

I think energy tax is a harder sell than the likes of the congestion charge though. If someone can’t drive into London it isn’t the end of the world. However if they can’t afford to heat their homes or cook or even refrigerate their food that won’t be good press for the Government at the time. You already get the news articles in winter about how 90 year old Mavis is sitting at home, having to choose between eating or heating. Imagine how much worse that could get.

Section62

Gavin83 said:

In regards to your first point I do find that interesting so thanks for the info. I’m curious as to why electricity consumption has reduced though. I struggle to believe people are using less than before so would it be due to more energy efficient appliances, which can only be a good thing. There’s only so much energy efficiency you can apply to an appliance though.

It is theorised to be energy efficiency, although I suspect costs may be a factor as well.  Lighting changes and the switch from CRT screens to LED are the kind of easy wins.  Definitely agree that in terms of domestic settings we are at or very near peak efficiency though.  Further efficiencies will be harder to win, which is why I think the next move will be in relation to TOU*.

Gavin83 said:

I expect offices are a large consumer of electricity as well and given most would have been closed that might account for a dip in the electricity from the last year. I used to live in a flat which had a view of Canary Wharf. Most of the offices there would have their lights on (and presumably more) 24/7. That seemed like a complete waste of electricity to me.

I'd expect services (HVAC and IT) would represent a substantial proportion of overall energy use in most offices now - and whether they got switched off during the pandemic would make for an interesting PhD.  Again, I suspect a lot of equipment was left on because it isn't easily shut down without consequences, and many offices were likely to have at least skeleton staffing needing ventilation and temperature control to still be operational.

The graphic (and text beneath it) on page 3 of the DUKES link in my previous post is quite informative.  Industrial consumption was down 9.3%, 'commercial' down 11.2%, domestic up 3.9%.  I haven't checked the definitions, but I guess 'commercial' will include retail and food/drink, with the latter having usage (cooking/washing) which is quite energy intensive and would have been more or less completely unused for long periods of time - not sure the same would apply to refrigeration/chilling though.

Gavin83 said:

I expect taxation might well increase on energy. However this’ll just lead to the situation you get with most taxes of this kind, the poor will suffer and struggle for energy and the richer will carry on as before, not really noticing the dent the extra taxation brings.

I believe the taxation on energy will become 'smart'.  For example that people/property will have a base allowance, and consumption above a certain level (and more so at peak times) will be taxed at higher rates to discourage excessive consumption and/or too much demand in the peaks.

Thus '90 year old Mavis' won't need to worry about heating or eating, and could pay less if the taxation is skewed heavily against excessive consumption.  She might want to cook dinner before 4pm though, or wait till after 7pm.  And leave it till 10am before putting the washing on.

Such a taxation system could be fiendishly complicated.  But I'd point to the changes in car tax - where once everyone paid the same rate for a car/van, but now you can only work it out with the help of a website - as an illustration of the willingness of both government and public to accept complex 'environmental' taxes driven by specific policy initiatives.

Gavin83 said:

I think energy tax is a harder sell than the likes of the congestion charge though. If someone can’t drive into London it isn’t the end of the world.

Tell that to the central market traders and other workers/tradespeople who have no alternative but to take a vehicle into central London (outside peak hours), but were hammered by the charge implemented by a politician who is about as socialist as you can get.

(Meanwhile the 'rich' residents who could afford to keep a car tractor in central London were given generous discounts - crazy, huh?)


*Edit: And obviously given the subject of this thread, improving the energy efficiency of the whole property, not just the appliances and fittings inside it.

oz0707

I have a reasonably efficient house. My bills are certainly low and it's comfortable most if the year. Although next place will 100% have air con. 

However I wouldn't support this policy. What about some of the terrible new builds thrown up now. What's more efficient a 400 year old stone cottage or a newbuild which gets knocked down in 50 years. Some of the materials used in modern building are terrible and won't last. Why do we need anything other than the market to dictate  prices. If energy is cheap inefficient houses will be equally attractive. If energy is expensive the reverse will be true. What else do you need?

onylon

When selling a house, a far more useful and far easier thing to verify and publish would be the last few years actual energy bills.  That would be so simple to include.

I agree that the EPC is just a box ticking exercise and has next to no relationship with how much energy it will take to heat your house but neither will the bills of the previous owner. My husband and I work from home and use lots of power hungry equipment so any house I lived in would automatically get a terrible rating no matter how energy efficient the building was. My in-laws keep their house very very warm as my MIL has some health conditions that mean she feels the cold, so likewise they would get a poor rating.