What is a BER CERT?
You could look at a BER (Building Energy Rating) as just a legal requirement when you buy or rent. If you’ve bought or rented somewhere to live in the past couple of years, you’ve probably seen one.
BER for Selling or Renting?
If you’re selling or renting your own house, you are legally obliged to have one to show buyers and tenants.
Or you can look at a BER as a good and easy place to get an idea of what your own house is capable of.
The national average Energy Efficiency Rating is band D, and most houses can be refurbished to get into band C. Many can get well beyond this into B2-B3. The average house emits around 6 tonnes of CO2 per year (some considerably more) and again refurbishment will bring this rate down considerably. Whether your interest is carbon reduction, fuel cost savings or energy efficiency overall, a BER can tell you where you are now, with good recommendations tailored to your own house for how to improve.
BERs look at the heating systems and construction of your house – what it’s built from, how much it’s insulated, how efficiently it is heated and so on. How you use the hardware is up to you, but the right hardware can make it much easier to make savings. BERs don’t look at how you use the hardware, that’s up to you.
Energy leaks out of every house, mostly by heat loss. This score is a measure of how much energy has to go into each square metre of your floor area to keep it comfortable for a year. The current number and Letter is what your house scores at the moment.
A house with an A rating would require virtually no energy to run at all. The Letters are grouped into the graphs into bands A-G, with A being the best and G the worst. The calculation is per square meter of floor space in your home; it combines a measure of the rate of energy loss (heat leakage through walls, floor and roof, for instance) with a measure of how efficient your house’s heating systems are at creating that energy. It’s based on a standard set of assumptions about occupancy and heating standards that almost certainly don’t reflect the way you use your own home!
And yet this is incredibly useful because it allows us to strip out the effect of our own personal behaviours and look just at how to make the hardware of the house more efficient. The assumptions include a number of occupants that are based on the floor area, and that heating will be on for 9 hours a day during the week and 16 at weekends, with a temperature of 21 degrees in the main living areas and 18 elsewhere.
Advisory Report for BER rating
Next to each recommendation is a projection of what carrying out each recommendation will do for your Building Energy Rating.
Some of the measures are quite expensive, some have quite long payback periods and some (like solid wall insulation) are well worth doing but are quite an upheaval to achieve.If you look at this section you will see quite clearly the advice are rated high or low in cost factors, Solar panels will be high and ceiling insulation will be low.
The list of recommendations is very much keyed to your house and what’s there. You won’t see recommendations for loft insulation if you have a reasonable quantity of loft insulation already. These aren’t generic recommendations; these are calculated for your house specifically.
A BER Rating Assessor can be in and out of your house in a couple of hours, often less. In that time and for remarkably little money you can have an independently verified, professionally confirmed assessment of where your house is, where it can get to and how to get it there.