New boiler will cosy more like 1700 fitted as system will need a flush
TRV's are a waste of money
Controls well worth it especially chronostat type
Like the ideas of jumpers I think they still use them in NZ

I've been quoted by a reliable friend of mine £700 for a new Worcester Bosch boiler fitted. £1600 for a complete new system including TRV's! :-) You must live in London. I'm in Staffs.

Hi Simon,

I have seen several HIP's reports unfortunately. Also have a relative working in the EPC industry. A lot of inspectors are simply going round and asking questions of the vendors & ticking boxes and making assumptions - not even evidencing their visits & observations with photo records. You cannot do a proper heat loss calculation without knowing the structure & by making guesses. We had a client complaining about the EPC last week because the guy had assumed 'worse than average' heat performance without even asking questions of the vendor and having been at the property for no more than 10 minutes. As she quite rightly said he could just have easily written down 'better than average'. They guy has no idea what insulation she has - he didn't even go up in the loft. What is presented to the public is extremely basic and in a lot of cases downright inaccurate.

Given a house with say and extension and a conservatory I know that this will be looked at at least 3 different ways due to the 'training' being given to inspectors. Some will do different calculations for each part of the property taking into account the differing construction methods & insulation levels. Some will work out the calculation for the 'core' structure and then average the result for the combined volume and some will ignore the conservatory from their calculations completely. As with everything in life the EPC results reflect the competence and integrety of the inspector.

There is nothing wrong with the EPC idea - I think it is great - but it does not work at the moment. It needs to be split away from HIP's which has been an absolute disaster and made important in its own right. It needs teeth and a proper structure/overseeing body to start weeding out the guys running round to see how many they can do in a day and not doing the job right. It will get tarnished and the important message will be lost the way things are set up at the moment.

Hi Skywalker,

I agree. Take EPC out of HIP's and use it to improve energy conservation / insulation standards. which is where its real strength lies. The government hijacked it by making EPC the main focus of HIP's - when it became clear HIP's would not speed up the house buying process and they needed a justification for a failed policy.

EPC's could be really useful and create a 'sea change' in attitude. That won't happen while they are damed by association with an unpopular and costly HIP's scheme. Also, under the current regime, they will only be commissioned when a house is sold. EPC's (and the essential works recommended within them) need to be carried out on every house for any meaningful reduction. Until a countrywide survey & improvement of the housing stock takes place it will only be minority groups such as yourselves who will try to be more efficient. I don't think the political will exists in this country.

Have you heard of Green Homes yet? It's Gordon Brown's new baby. A kind of concierge service from advice to action. No new money just a reallocation of exiting budgets under one programme. There's no actual substance to it yet, just an outline of what's required. Through my involvement with a group of other energy assessors www.lowcarbongroup.org (I'm a founding member) we'll be taking part in the stakeholders meeting to get this off the ground. One of the things we're hoping to do is increase the level of competency of DEAs so they're capable of giving proper independent advice, and then getting that followed up by installers etc that the homeowner picks from the EST approved suppliers list.

Skywalker what you proposed above is kind of what greenhomes is about, but without the direct funding. That has to be channelled in from elsewhere, like CERT grants, and rebates and discounts. If anyone else reading this has ideas - post them up - I'll make sure they get through into the discussions which could affect gov policy. I think the idea of mandatory assesments isn't quite there yet, but if the scheme is successful - and more accurate, then maybe it will get a green light in a year or so.

PS Those boiler prices... this is the first site I came to with prices on. My old house is a 105 m sq 1995 estate box so only 15kw heat demand ... http://www.plumbnation.co.uk/site/worcester-greenstar-15ri-regular-boiler-natural-gas/
£640 inc vat in case the link doesn't work. Take off some trade discount - and factor in mine is a straight boiler swap mounted on an external wall and not a new install - £700 installed is easily achievable. Apparently you can get seconds if you want it even cheaper. I.e. a dent / scratch in the case.

Simon

Tony

Yes them too. All I care about (in this scenario) is the amount of energy being used by homes/houses and reducing it. From a national perspective this is a very good idea and a worthy use of tax payers money delivering tangiable benefits to the entire population. It is irrelevant who owns/lives in the property. It is even worth having a contingency for enormous houses, although only a small part of these is usually 'occupied'.

I am with you guys, have to ask difficult questions though - its my job!

Re land lords, why not include a portion of heating and DHW in the rent? Tenant pays x-amount per square meter, landlord pays the rest?

(Okay some pretty big problems with that idea but I'll throw it out anyway...)

<blockquote><cite>Posted By: tony</cite>What incentive would there be for a landlord or housing association to do anything even with a grant?</blockquote>

From October next year it will be mandatory for landlords to obtain an EPC (Which will be valid for 10 years - so is equivalent to £10 per year before anyone starts to moan). So tenants will get an indicative cost of how much the house will cost them to run. Tenants are expected to get wised up fairly quickly on the EPC shceme - it will be mandatory to show the EPC to any prospective new tenant. You can use the same EPC over and over, but if you make some upgrades it would be better to get a new one to reflect the changes. If you have an old boiler and no insulation - they'll be looking for somewhere cheaper to run as it could add another few hundred quid a year to their costs.

The good news is that as a landlord you can already spend £1,500 on a new boiler / insulation and the like and then claim it back against you income tax you'd pay on rental income (assuming you're not running at break even with the mortgage paymetns to avoid paying tax already!?). It's called LESA - Landlords Energy Saving Allowance. It was update in the budget to include a few more thing like solid wall insualtion for £1,500?)- that you can now claim for. Note this is per property you own - not just per landlord. So if you buy an old 4 storey victorian and then subdivide it into flats you can claim £1,500 per flat.

I'm not sure about this, but it may be possible for your tenants to claim the free grant for loft/cavity insulation if they are recieveing benefits. My supplier, Atlantic gas, is part of the Scottish and Southern group - their small print says...
"2. Offer only available for domestic owner-occupied properties. (note tenants may be considered but inclusion will be at the sole discretion of Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE)."

What I know is that from the grants given by the utilities 40% have to apply to "Priority Group" customers - which covers all sorts of benefits and pensions etc. However the utilities have a hard time finding people in this group (they pay referral fees to outside agensices) and even then have trouble giving it away free as people don't trust them. So it could be worth encouraging your tenants to apply as it is them that will gain from lower bills. (And you as landlord get a free upgrade ;-)

Finally - the improvements may make a slight differnce to your house value if you come to cash it in. If you mention to a buyer that you have a new condensing boiler and have upgraded the loft insualtion and had cavity wall insulation fitted, it won't make them like the location any more, but it might make it easier to sell than one that doesn't have the improvements - it says to prospective buyers you've been looking after the house. Not running it into the ground as a landlord.

Housing assocations are a whole different ball game. They HAVE to meet minimum standard called Decent Homes. The same as council stock. There's rumour this could become a requirement for Private rented too, in the same that you have to have a gas certificate and electrical safety test. So in that case it wouldn't be a benefit, it would be a statutory obligation.

Simon.

<blockquote><cite>Posted By: Bowman</cite>How about: the property OWNER pays a annual local tax based on an energy efficiency rating and size (the money would be ring fenced for upgrading council owned property), and the property OWNER pays a stamp duty on SALE, also based on the above. All work would be VAT free and could be offset against tax.</blockquote>

Council owned property is much much better than private rented. Much of the old prefab stuff that is normally not possible to insulate, has now been externally insualted and reclad in bricks/slips to make it look better at the same time. Likewise most local authority houses have cavity wall insualtion, loft insualtion upto 250mm, double glazing, and modern boilers. Avergage SAP rating is somewhere around 65 I believe - which is pretty good. My 1995 4 bed detached had a SAP lower than that. Do any local authorityies hold Victorian properties? My guess is not as I think the idea of council houses didn't start till the 1930's.

Ringfencing may be better suited to applying to measures that would not otherwise happen. Like moving someone into temporary rented while their house is gutted, insulating under the floors and external solid walls, and fitting vapour / wind barriers and upgrading to Low E Argon filled glass and blocking up the chimneys, except maybe a wood buner in the lounge (as backup heating for when the russians refuise to supply gas to the UK becuase we won't extradite someone) - but with a flue sealed to the chimney. Then they can move back in. ;-)

This kind of refit for a resident could also attract carbon offset funding under the CDM/JI. WWF have propsed a Gold Standard that was to be applied in industrialised countries - to increase uptake of renewables. So they'd pay for the wood burner, a heat pump and/or solar h/w. However insulation is the most important which would come from the governement pot. This doesn't have to be a handout, several shcemes have already been run where its an interest free loan. Our group is talking to some pretty imporatant stakeholders about this, and they've keen to work with us to make it happen.

However all of this is missing one key point. Even if you have the most inefficent building in the country with a SAP score of 1 (there are lots around), if you don't turn the heating on you aren't making any emmissions. So the best place to tax any emmission is on fuel consumption - not on the structure of the house. That way you pick up efficiency due to lifestyle choices as well as insulation and renewables. E.g. waering jumpers and turning thermostats down, living in smaller homes, and not having the heating on 24x7 and opening the windows when the radiators get too hot.

We pay circa 85% Tax on road fuel. And 0nly 5% on home heating. I wouldn't propose a flat rate, but a step charge increase - starting at 0% to keep people out of fuel poverty, but increasing upto an silly number like road fuel - for when you get into double or quadruple the national average. People living in 1 bed council flat hardly emit a puff, while people living in "Captains of Industry country houses" are belching out CO2 with the energy bills scarely noticable in their household budget. Our tax system needs to reflect this.

Simon.

On the refurbishment disruption front, what about some HMG contribution towards temporary rented accommodation rather than towards the work itself?

When installed it will last only a few months, or at best, a couple of years, unless the system was very clean (unlikely) or new to start with or it all flushed out.

Only if the boiler is not a new condensing one with micro fins and low water content.

If someone was mad enough to put in a new one with a CI heat exchanger then may be ?

It strikes me that "sustainable" is just coming to mean "minimal".
For a building to be truely sustainable it would mean that at the end of its life after 200 or so years of occupation it had had no net impact on the planet, in either energy or other evironmental terms.
In other words the house, and the families who had lived in it, had covered their footprints and it would be like finding a lost civilisation deep in the jungle.

Once a house is built and occupied, nothing short of exterminating the occupants is going to make it "sustainable". What we mean is minimising their impact, which begs the question, why do we need that family, what is its contribution to the well-being of the world to justify its environmental cost?

It seems that everyone has been goin on about making the current building stock has less environmental impact. It seems to me that ideas for the future should appear somewhere... or is that all put in a different thread? I think in a big way we've temporarliy been sidetracked from sustainability through the use of cement and all the products associated with to maintain is feasibility. Buildings were sustainable until OPC was invented at the beginning of the 19th Century and all the plastics are going to run out in a short while anyway so to retune ourselves into being sustainable is is simple a matter of reverting to the old ways of building. I'm glad that it will soon become a thing of tha past as we run out of plastics to make it watertight. We've been using inappropriate building materials long enough to realise their impact on the environment and the problems with construction with mortars harder than the stones and bricks they hold in place as well as the obvious environmental impacts of any kind of pouring or concrete. These small measures will do little and we still seem blissfully unaware of the impact that the diminishing oil reserves will have on us when they fail, just look in the shop window and see what rubbish we are making out of the dwindling supplies in the face of the inevitable as we speak. To be sustainable we just need to look some years into the future to see what materials won't be around to continue to use... cement and plastics. Seems pretty obvious that to move to preindustrial building technologies and borrowing insulative ideas from around the world such as hemp and sheep wool, we can make these old style buildings more efficient, wood burning is completely sustainable and currently many places are fuel by oil!

Other good ideas are coming from the natural building world and they show great potential for people to be making their own housing out of locally sourced materials, putting general builders out of the market, but they've had so many run ins with planning, strange to think that although the government says it wants a move towards sustainability, the most sustainable house designs are still outlawed.

Lime has sttod the test of time and comes up trumps in terms of sustainability and can be used in all instances (except dams and skyscrapers) and it's cheaper to produce and has far less impact. Most damp problems that plastic dpc's are there to solve only happen due to cement use anyway so cements and plastics go together, when we run out of plastic we can no longer use cement. I got the life span of a well known dpc company, they said it would guarantee 25 years only, does this mean that in 25 years all the buildings are going to leak like buckets? Sustainable building is about making buildings to last hundreds of years, it's about getting away from a throw away approach to buildings. Notice how although we're making buildings stronger than ever they are having an increasingly short life span and buildings which looked absolutely fantastic 15 years ago due to their inovative designs are being ripped down for looking ugly and too far from the golden ratio. It all starts with the Architect.

Over population is alao an issue and we will find ourselves moving from polife through neccessity as soon as this current post indutrial boom has elapsed.