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It seems Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs) have a nasty habit of going out of date: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.
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I won’t be joining Clown World.
Also, don’t they want to ban the use of wood stoves?
I have some sympathy with these people, not much, but virtue signaling seems to be incurring quite a cost.
Well, his house is effectively 12 years old. If he’d had a modern property the heat pump would have worked fine and he wouldn’t want a wood burner. See: it’s his fault for having such an out-of-date property, not the wonderful heat pump at all, at all..
Well, scrap and rebuild reasonably often to make use of modern techniques (a bit like the car trade) it might look better for local efficiency, but…..
Ban the use of stoves? It could cause an awful lot of distress. Apparently approximately two million homes rely on wood stoves as their sole form of domestic heating.
About 7% of daily electricity in the UK is generated by burning wood pellets shipped in from North America. These sparks count as green energy; what difference to a wood burning stove?
“All they do is pump the information into some algorithm and it comes up with the certificate…”
…Therein lies the problem. Too much pull-down-menu thinking.
“Don’t pay attention to ‘authorities,’ think for yourself.”
Richard Feynman (1918 – 1988)
Ah. Must be a new use of the word ‘improve‘ which I hadn’t come across before.
He builds a house (more or less) with a perfect EPC score and 12 years later it’s at 74%? That just tells me the whole scheme is a stinking pile…
I’ll bet that installing the wood stove would have hammered his EPC even more. Probably just as well he didn’t get it re-tested again.
It does really show these schemes are here to drive spending/consumption doesn’t it – almost like all the most powerful banks and governments of the west need that to happen…
“He who believes the authorities have their ducks in a row will forever be a duck.”
MAk, some time in mid-2020
I have little sympathy for these two ducks.
Yes. A valid point worth making.
Just remembered how when our oil boiler packed in four years ago, our longstanding heating engineer advised we could spend £3K to install a new boiler that would heat the house, or £30K on a heat pump and major refurbishment that wouldn’t.
All down to energy density and gradient – “You can’t boil an egg in a swimming pool.”
Well… few hundred years and it might be approaching soft-boiled.
So how is the heat pump then?
“… using £9,500 worth of Government funding.”
Correction: “… using £9,500 worth of other people’s hard-earned money…”
“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… pilfered from other people’s pockets.
That’s greed.
No sympathy for these parasites.
Also ‘The property makes use of solar feed-in tariffs’ which presumably means we are paying them over the odds to feed their solar into the grid. Perthshire is a great location for solar I’m sure.
Not being funny here… but why does this chap actually give a s**t what the EPC score is (this week)?
He’s built a great house to live in, and it’s working well by the sounds of it – did I misunderstand and he can’t get the grant cash or something?
It might depend what’s in their Wills – assume there is one. Otherwise the Treasury will be happy in due course.
If I understood correctly the new EPC was mandatory after getting the grant to install the heat pump. If I were running such a grant scheme I’d demand an EPC to the same standards and by the same
charlatanscompany before and after the works so the ‘improvement’ can be measured.Just guessing, of course, but perhaps they want to sell and move to a properly warm new house? Or perhaps sell up and move into sheltered accommodation or a care home? Or even sell up and spend some money so Rachel doesn’t get so much when they eventually cark it.
Good points JohnK and Soundofreason… I did briefly think was there something in that. Luckily though now he’s got a log burner, so saved himself a ton of hassle, AND has a lovely warm house!
It is good to see saps who go along with the agenda get their arses slapped. One hopes that they will learn and know better next time but they won’t These people can be guided like a horse with a lump of sugar. Some people call them NPCs. In past times it was good to have them around because they kept things functioning without questioning anything. In our time of complete predation and hyperdimensional warfare they are simply a liability.
You should publish the names and contact details for this pair of suckers.
I have some lovely reclaimed swamp land in Florida I would like to sell them.
I am sure if he pays some more tax, all will be well again.