subject: What factors affect the display energy certificate rating? [print this page] What factors affect the display energy certificate rating?
What factors affect the display energy certificate rating? In the other hand in Display Energy Certificate calculation we base the calculation on actual meter reading and we never make any assumptions and we never create any standardized model. However it is still not the perfect model. One of the main problems with DEC is we can not show effects of renewable energy in software if we are not sub-metering the units, it means if we have CHP units but we don't have the meter readings for electricity or gas we can not benefit from these systems. another huge problem with DEC is when we calculate the display energy certificate software automatically compare it to the benchmark and provide us with a comparison which we called rating, but we might have some facilities in our site which might not be included in the benchmark, unless we sub meter these areas separately we can not omit them from our calculation, this problem normally cause much worse rating than actual building.
Unfortunately the meter reading is the only input to the DEC software. It gets much more complicated when we look at the recommendation report in display energy certificate, as in recommendation report we go throw all of the systems in the site and briefly identifying the systems conditions. Surprisingly recommendation report has no effect on DEC rating and as you realize it doesn't mater how good or bad your utilities are as long as your bills showing a low consumption you get a good DEC rating and vice versa. The only factors effect the DEC are as below: Gas and/or electricity consumption, total floor area of the building, building type and benchmark, metered renewable energies on the site, too little for such an important document.
Also similar to EPC, SAP and SBEM, DEC is been created for comparison purposes only, so you can just compare the rating of one site to the one with identical application. For example you can just compare swimming pool No1 to swimming pool No2 not to the school next door. You can't even compare the DEC and EPC from the same site as they are two different certificates and based on two completely different calculation methodologies. Display energy certificates are renewed every year and because of that, it is possible to monitor and compare the energy consumption in the site and observe any improvements. Also the recommendations in the display energy certificate are quite good some are free or very cheap to perform so even after a year some improvements are possible to achieve.
