BEST Compliance have helped a local council by reviewing a sample of their portfolio where Energy Performance Certificates have been undertaken.
Most of these buildings have came back as a F or G grade, and in doing so failed the all important MEES. The council had suspicions that these were not graded accurately and got BEST Compliance involved.
The buildings primarily were leisure buildings from Scout Huts to Youth Centres, over 60% were graded differently to what had been lodged. This didn’t sit well with us so we did research into how this came to be.
After reading the reports kindly provided by the council, we could see massive errors in the reporting and model simulation. The first mistake on one building being the construction type which has a massive effect on the property, the photo of the building on the report clearly had a circa 1980s Cavity wall with a recent extension and when reading the report we found that they had actually used the incorrect type of wall, they had used a solid brick wall with a roof with no insulation. This has a massive bearing on the EPC as a building with no insulation leaks heat like anything and as such requires a lot more heating making the building score very poorly.
Other factors were that the building was heated incorrectly the building was using infra-red radiant heaters however the assessor had used panel heaters.
From what we learnt from the names of the report was that they had used a sub-contractor to gather the data and relayed it back to their office, the data had obviously been gathered incorrectly or interpreted wrong. We then had a look at the author of the report, the author was not a qualified energy assessor, whilst this isn’t illegal its most definitely frowned upon and then it was supposed to be checked by an energy assessor which it blatantly was not.
The client had tried to contact the company that produced them many times without success.
Our client was facing a major refurb to get an E grade and could potentially of closed down a valued youth club. We were lucky the council employee was on the ball and put a stop to this early on.
The morale of the story is to always read through your reports and always ask questions on your property, all good assessors love to talk about the Assessment and help guide clients to a more efficient building.