More on the UKs home energy saving approach

I reported yesterday on how the requirements for buying a new house have changed dramatically since the last time we looked.

As an aside, I mentioned the Home Information Packs. These are a new, compulsory, initiative to make the process of selling and buying a house much easier. There's a fair amount of controversy surrounding the packs, not least because the content and focus of the pack was reduced significantly, so it now no longer contains information that would be useful to a potential buyer, such as the results of a structural survey, or information on potential flooding or subsidence.

Those issues aside, one of the elements that has been left in is the energy report - a survey by an energy specialist (if you can find one) will give a report on how energy efficient the house you are selling is, and from that buyers will be able to work out whether it's going to cost more to run the house compared, say, to the heavily insulated and draught-proof house but otherwise identical house next door.

I can applaud that part - we've seen houses that have boilers that are approaching 20-30 years old, and long overdue for replacement, and other houses without double glazing or loft insulation. These all contribute to increased energy costs, and that means it's bad for the environment and your pocket.

This is of course just another part of the ongoing approach to improve the efficiency of consumers (and I mean that in the general sense) or energy to help reduce energy use and wastage. We're already seeing the process in computers with iniatives from people like Google, and I know there are many organizations looking to provide a standard for PCs so that when you buy your next computer you can work out how much it's going to cost.

Returning to the UK home energy policy, I think the biggest problem is that many people will not understand the significance of what they are reading. The new rules come into force on the 1st June, so it wont be long before we find out the impact.