Project: EPC Improvement
Market: Energy Efficiency
Location: Farnborough
The Challenge
Brennan House is a 30,000+ square foot office building in Farnborough, built in 2004.
The landlord felt the building’s EPC rating had room for improvement, both in terms of energy efficiency and in appeal to potential tenants, and asked our team to help.
Using Low Carbon Alliance’s intelligentEPC® service, we were able to improve their EPC rating to A, primarily by avoiding the use of harmful ‘default data’.
The Solution
We began by reviewing the pre-existing EPC assessment of the building, which revealed that a considerable amount of data regarding the building’s physical attributes had been left as ‘default data’.
This effectively means that the assessment software that calculates the EPC rating considers these attributes of the building — e.g. flooring, heating, walls, etc — to be ‘worst case scenario’, or as energy inefficient as possible.
We often find with these cases that buildings are much more efficient than the assessment initially shows — and that the use of default data results in a significantly lower score than could be achieved.
Our team then did the detective work to discover as much accurate data as possible regarding the building, including; air conditioning (VRF); gas boiler; hot water heater; and specific details of the lighting, including light fittings.
The Outcome
A new assessment of the building was then conducted, incorporating this researched, accurate data. The result? A new EPC rating of ‘A’!
This was particularly impressive when considering that the building uses gas heating for some of the core areas, and there was no need for costly and unnecessary renovations.
Our team’s thorough research to avoid the use of default data provided value, both in terms of the improved EPC rating and the cost avoidance of superfluous building works.