A new government-backed toolkit has been launched to help housebuilders close the energy gap in newly built homes.
The Building Energy Performance Improvement Toolkit (BEPIT) is the result of a £1.3m four-year research project spearheaded by Innovate UK and was tested on a housing project in Oxfordshire.
The study examined energy performance from design through procurement of building materials and then through all of the construction stages to completion, building up a large database of photographs and technical details.
The key conclusion was that “the devil is in the detail” when it came to the building process and a collection of minor problems scattered through construction built up into one big problem of poor energy performance.
The toolkit will now help alert all the stakeholders in a housing project to these problems at the right time and help to overcome them throughout the construction process.
Initial tests have shown highly encouraging results, with a 40% improvement in average air tightness between the first and second phases of construction. The BEPIT approach was fully applied during construction of the second phase.
Further testing is now needed to demonstrate that using BEPIT also achieves an improvement in insulation performance, with less heat leaking out through the building fabric. But the air-tightness results demonstrate that the toolkit can deliver significant improvement.
Bioregional, an organisation which partners with businesses to deliver major sustainability improvements, is now offering BEPIT as a service to the house building industry.
Bioregional was the lead partner in the research project, with other partners including developer A2Dominion and Loughborough University’s School of Civil and Building Engineering and Wilmott Dixon Energy Services.
Bioregional chief executive Sue Riddlestone said: “After four years of in-depth research, we can now offer the housebuilding industry a service that really works to tackle a serious and long-standing problem – the energy performance gap.
“This is an issue which harms the industry’s reputation, contributes significantly to carbon emissions and costs occupants billions of pounds in lost energy savings. We want to use BEPIT to make a real difference.”
