How is an EPC assessment conducted?

We like to talk to you on the phone in advance of visiting your property, and make sure we understand your needs.

People usually need an EPC in order to sell their property legally or in order to rent it out, but there are other situations where an EPC is also required. We ask you about the property, number of bedrooms, whether there are any extensions, conservatories etc. This helps us prepare in advance if there is anything unusual.

We ask if you would like us to talk about Energy Performance Certificates (some people are very familiar with them but some are less so), and we check to see if your property already has an EPC in place - this is easy to check on the publicly accessible EPC register.

We like to see if we can locate a floorplan online for your property in advance. This can make the visit easier for us if one is easily available, but it's not important.

Currently we are able to issue EPCs for existing domestic properties. EPCs are also required when a property is first built, but a different assessment procedure is used, and we currently cannot issue those.

When we visit your property to carry out an EPC assessment, we show you our ID card. This shows a photo of the assessor, and the logo of the accreditation scheme that we are signed up to, and our membership number. In our case we are accredited via Elmhurst Energy. They provide us with the back-end tools and support that we need to carry out our work.

During our visit, we need access to every room and the loft, and we take various measurements, note down information and make a simple floor plan.

We also take photographs for audit trail purposes - A propertion of our EPC assessments are automatically audited by our accreditation scheme, and some further audits are triggered by particular features of a property or data that we record.

The majority of our work includes:

We assess when the property was built

Measure the exterior wall thicknesses

Determine the type of external walls

Determine if we can see evidence of retrofitted cavity or external wall insulation

Determine the ground floor type

Measure ceiling heights on each floor

Measure the floor area of each floor

Measure the length of any party wall (if applicable) on each floor

Measure the Heat Loss Perimeter on each floor

Count the number of light fittings in the property, and distinguish which ones have low energy bulbs fitted.

Measure the depth of loft insulation.

Determine the type of party walls, if you have them.

Take details of the main space heating (usually central heating) system

Keep our eyes open for any 'Secondary Heating' systems

Take details of how domestic hot water (DHW) is heated.

Take details of windows

Take a count of external 'doors'

Take details of any Solar Thermal or Solar PV systems

Check whether to include any Conservatories or Portches

...

There are various things that we can deduce from looking at yout property, but there are a few where we would need to see documentary evidence in order to include in the assessment. This includes for example any internal wall insulation - e.g. insulated plasterboard etc.

At the end we take the information away with us and enter it into our web-based system. This is provided to us by the accreditation scheme that we are members of - in our case, this is Elmhurst Energy.

The system generates the EPC certificate. We then email this to you, and you only then make payment at the end of the process.