Tackling the ‘energy performance gap’ in new homes

A new Building Energy Performance Improvement Toolkit (BEPIT), the fruit of a major government-funded research project, has being launched by sustainability organisation Bioregional. It is now being offered as a service to the housebuilding industry, following the first ‘real world’ test results that show it can achieve major improvements in the energy efficiency of new homes.

Modern housing should waste far less heat than older homes, 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, says Bioregional. During the construction process, the high levels of insulation and air tightness that underpin this performance often become compromised.

The £1.3mn BEPIT research project set out to understand precisely how this happens. Funded by government innovation agency Innovate UK, it used a major low carbon housing project in Oxfordshire as its laboratory and test bed. On-site researchers spent thousands of hours looking and learning about what happened during a real-life build to compromise energy performance, liaising with the developer, the main contractor and sub-contractors. The study examined the issue from design through procurement of building materials and then through all 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’; a collection of minor problems scattered through the construction process built up into one big problem of poor energy performance.

 The research was used to create the toolkit for working in detail with all the key players involved in the housing project, to alert them to these problems at the right time and help to overcome them throughout the construction process.

 Initial tests have shown encouraging results on air-tightness, and further testing is now needed to demonstrate that using BEPIT achieves an improvement in insulation performance, with less heat leaking out through the building fabric, says Bioregional. 

 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. 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.’