All About Your EPC – Updated for 2022
In our first two articles about EPC ratings, we break down what an EPC rating is, how it affects your property, how your EPC is calculated and how you can improve it.
We’ve recently got wind of a brand-new SAP report that is really favouring infrared heating systems. If you’ve come straight to this article, I would recommend reading our first two about EPC ratings using the links below. If you wanted to stick around here, we’ve given you a small breakdown of what a SAP and a RdSAP report is.
All About Your EPC Part 1 – https://www.warm4less.com/news/all-about-your-epc-rating/
All About Your EPC Part 2 – https://www.warm4less.com/news/all-about-your-epc-rating-part-2/
‘’SAP stands for ‘Standard Assessment Procedure’ and is a formula that is used to calculate your EPC rating. The SAP is essentially a very thorough list of calculations to judge the overall performance of your building. In turn this is what produces the final EPC certification’’ ‘’The ‘Standard Assessment Procedure’ is used to produce the EPC certificates for new build properties. The RdSAP (Reduced Data Standard Assessment Procedure) however is used to produce the certificates for already existing homes…’’ ‘’While the RdSAP has its benefits, there is one major flaw in this assessment. It is a ‘reduced data’ assessment…’’ ‘’For example, with the RdSAP formula the infrared heating will fall under ‘’Electric Panel Heating’’ which is considered very inefficient. With the SAP formula that is used for new builds, you can disclose exactly how much power you are drawing using your electric heating.‘’ You can read this full article using the link to All About Your EPC Part 2 above.
In the brand new 2022 SAP report the criteria for heating systems has changed a fair amount. You can see the full, 199-page report linked at the bottom of this article. Below are a few parts that we’ve extracted that are relevant to far infrared heating:
Page 166, Electric (direct acting) room heaters: Panel, convector, or radiant heaters:
page 167, Category 11: Other Space Heating Systems.
Here’s a breakdown of what this means:
Heating Type – The first table refers to any heaters that fall under the category of panels, convector heaters or radiant heaters. The second table refers to purely ceiling mounted heaters.
Efficiency – The new SAP 10.2 report states that all panel heaters, convection heaters, radiant heaters and ceiling panels are all now regarded as 100% efficient.
Heating Type – Heating systems, heating controls and fuels are assigned a code number for identification purposes for internal use
Responsiveness – This relates to the temperature reduction once the heating has turned off. You can read more about this in table 9b of the article.
RdSAP – this is the big one… ‘’Systems marked “rd” in the right-hand column are part of the reduced data set’’
As you may have read in our other article, it’s difficult to get an accurate EPC rating using ad RdSAP report and we advised looking into getting a full SAP10 report instead.
That has now all changed, and the above tables are included in the RdSAP report and will be factored into the assessment at a 100% efficiency rating whether your property is a new building, existing property, renovation etc.
On page 122, it also says ‘’Reduced Data SAP for existing dwellings RdSAP procedures for use with SAP 10 will be added in a future update.’’ Which means there’s still more to come!
