domestic energy assessors

You can see or download here, "A guide to generating Energy Performance Certificates for similar dwellings owned by the same landlord" by the CLG

Cloning is the CLG speak for batch sampling, basically you take a large number of properties that  have been split into 'coherent' groups by a social landlord you then find a median which can be used for the remainder of the stock.This is the process that allowed CLG to keep a large number of DEA's quiet following their pathetic backdown last year.

Example; You have 50 properties on a list, select a sample of @18 and assess them. Produce the reports and see if they fit within the parameters of the Guidance Doc. If they do, great - pick one that falls into the middle of the pack and copy it for the remaining 32 that you havn't looked at.

In fairness, the priciple is very sound, it works on the probability factor, ie if you look at a large enough sample from a coherent batch of properties and decide on a single one as being the 'average' for the sample, then most  of the remaing batch will fit the same profile or be a very close match to it.

It doesn't work if some of the batch are solid brick and others are cavity, if some are mid floor flats and others are detached houses; you have to apply common sense and break the whole list into groups that are similar, ie all houses are semi's built between 1950 and 1975, have 3 or 4 beds, partial double glazing. It doesn't matter if they are spread over a wide geographical area because Social Landlords tend to operate a blanket approach to maintenence, ie they all get the same at roughly the same time because economies of scale mean low supply price (cheap).

There was a guidance document issued and some 'training' was conducted to get the 'Social Housing Pilot' off the ground last September time. Unfortunately I can't find the guidance doc on the CLG site any more but if anyone REALLY wants to see it I will email a copy over, or if there are enough of you who want it perhaps Manuel will post it as a download?

www.energyassessorbirmingham.co.uk

Hopefully this will help those who have not come across 'cloning' before.

In the desperate time immediately before the introduction of HIPs (or should that be the 1st desperate time, as opposed to now?) CLG tempted Social Landords with grants so that they could get their stock assessed, basically this was a move to placate all of us who had expected to start working but couldn't because of CLG U turns etc...

The grants were time sensitive, ie spend it quick 'cause the cheque will self destruct, Mission Impossible style, after about 2 months. To facilitate the high volume production of EPC's the CLG (in conjunction with others, ie BRE) issued guidance on 'Cloning'.

Basically this is a sampling methodology where you quickly assess a number of properties to establish if they are about the same in terms of size, style, construction, thermal characteristics etc.... Once you have convinced yourself that you have a group of say 50 properties that fit the bill then you take a sample of these (about 18) and do a full EPC assessment on each, from the results you select what is known as a median, ie a typical example that represents the group within specified limits.

You then use this as THE report for all of the other properties in the group that have not been assessed, you use the exact same data to lodge EPC's for each property as if it had been assessed but state somewhere that this is 'cloned from RRNxxxxxxxx' or is for 'Social Housing RRNxxxxxx' It is basically Batch Sampling, ie select a sample and assume that everything else is the same.

There are guidance documents and formulae that give sample size and what to do if the selected samples return results outside the expected range of variance. The guidance also stated that the Landlords would present the data already sorted into coherent groups of properties to make life a little easier, however from experience the only similarity in the property groups that were presented to me was that people were living in them!

See my next missive, part 2 where I hope to be able to give some links to relevant documents, I’ve just got to go and find them again.

www.energyassessorbirmingham.co.uk