Posted 02.06.17
Bioregional: Article link
The new Building Energy Performance Improvement Toolkit (BEPIT), which was launched on 1st June, is the fruit of a major government-funded research project and is now being offered as a service to the housebuilding industry.
Modern housing should waste far less heat than older homes and save its occupants hundreds of pounds a year in energy costs. This is because of successive uplifts of the energy efficiency standards set out in Building Regulations.
But new homes routinely fail to achieve their design levels of energy performance, research has shown. During the construction process, the high levels of insulation and air-tightness that underpin this performance become compromised.
The £1.3 million, four-year-long BEPIT research project set out to understand precisely how this happened.
The key conclusion was that "the devil is in the detail"; a collection of minor problems scattered through the construction process built up into one big problem of poor energy performance.
