How a Heat Pump Destroyed One Consumer's Perfect Energy Rating

The Telegraph has been running a number of repent-at-leisure heat pump stories and this latest one is no exception.

Enter Colin Ferguson of Perthshire in Scotland who seems to be the embodiment of a Net Zero politician’s dream. He’s done it all with a ground-up rebuild of his detached house, incidentally just the sort of project that 99% of the British population couldn’t possibly afford:

The renovation, for which Mr Ferguson, now 74, was involved in the labour, was completed in 2013. An energy assessor assigned a perfect efficiency score of 100, placing it in a band typically reserved for new builds. On the certificate, seen by the Telegraph, under suggested “cost-effective improvements” it simply read: “not applicable”.

Then Mr Ferguson installed a heat pump – and his perfect energy rating went up in smoke.

It seems Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs) have a nasty habit of going out of date:

The retired insurance claims manager and his wife, Sue, had wanted to replace their oil-fired boiler with a heat pump, using £9,500 worth of Government funding. This would require obtaining a new energy performance certificate (EPC) after the heat pump was installed, as their previous one was due to expire.

Not only that, the new one can downgrade the house:

The certificates have been criticised in the past for their inconsistency. Assessors often rely on guesswork to work out a property’s efficiency level, and some have been known to wrongly estimate a property’s floor area by tens of square metres. Heat pumps, while greener, can often incur households higher bills. In some cases they have hurt rather than help a home’s EPC score, as the certificates currently reward lower bills over carbon emissions.

“What really annoyed me was the little man who came in an Audi A8 to do the assessment,” Mr Ferguson recalls. “In he waltzed. I had all the documentation from the original build – reams of stuff – and he took one look at it and said, ‘I don’t need any of that’. Had it not been for the fact we’d applied for a grant to put a heat pump in he’d have been out the door.”

Incredulously [the Telegraph probably means ‘Incredibly’ here], Mr Ferguson’s new EPC assessment had fallen to 74, placing it in the C band. The total floor area of the house also appeared to shrink between assessments – from 331 square metres to 279, the equivalent of three large bedrooms.

This can have a drastic impact on the house’s value, regardless of the house’s efficiency.

It’s not that Mr Ferguson’s home has become less efficient, or less green, in the 10 years between assessments – far from it. The property makes use of solar feed-in tariffs, and as a result Mr Ferguson’s home generates more energy than it consumes, turning his bill into a profit. Mr Ferguson’s bills show the retiree spends about £1,300 a year on electricity for his home and electric car, which is entirely offset by the £2,000 he makes selling surplus power back to the grid at times of high demand.

It appears that the way EPCs are assessed is fluctuating. Two different companies carried out Mr Ferguson’s EPCs. Elmhurst Energy carried out the latest one and suggested only one possible improvement – a wind turbine costing £15,000–25,000 – which would save £1,100 per annum (supposedly). The real point is that – guess what? – it seems the goalposts are being constantly moved:

Elmhurst Energy said the methodology of energy assessments had changed “many times” since 2013, and now accounts for more up-to-date fuel prices, carbon emissions and other technologies used in modern homes such as battery storage and heating controls. The company added that since EPCs still reward low bills over carbon emissions, the green taxes applied to electricity mean switching to a heat pump disadvantages homes “despite the fact they are better for the environment”.

To add insult to injury, the heat pump that Mr Ferguson had wanted in the first place does not work as well as he had hoped it would. The installers, Mr Ferguson says, were flummoxed by his unique home. Now, like several other heat pump owners, Mr Ferguson and his wife rely on a wood stove in the winter months to keep warm.

“To be fair to the chap, all these EPC companies use a particular system,” says Mr Ferguson. “All they do is pump the information into some algorithm and it comes up with the certificate. The assessor just gets prompted with questions and puts in an answer, like a primary school kid ticking boxes.”

So, there you have it – a Mickey Mouse system on the level of a small child’s school exercise lying behind a policy being used to coerce the whole population into vastly expensive changes to their homes. A spokesperson for the company tried to soften the blow:

“EPCs do change over time as the methodologies improve. Since 2013, they now account for new fuel prices, carbon emissions and low carbon technologies. The home’s score is actually a good score for what is now a 12-year-old property, even though it may have been built above the minimum regulations at the time.”

If it wasn’t for the drastic consequences of the Net Zero policy for industry and the nation’s economy, the story would be an amusing one. As it stands, it’s painfully easy to see why fewer and fewer people are going to risk the huge cost and disruption of installing a heat pump if it means risking their properties becoming less saleable and still requiring other forms of heating to make them habitable, while funding the EPC assessor job creation scheme.

Worth reading in full.