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BER after Solar PV

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    #32
    Boscoirl
    Registered Users Posts: 2,235 ✭✭✭Boscoirl


    I have an SEAI and BER question, didnt want to start a new thread so i'll throw it in here.

    Has anyone being successful in getting the SEAI grant for PV on a listed building?

    Our house is a listed building, and we are looking to put in PV, we would be putting the panels on the garage roof as we cant put them on the house roof(not that we would want to)

    From reading the SEAI site we need to get to a C rating to be eligible, which I think would be a tough ask for us. is there any consideration given to listed protected structures? there is reference on their site to say that they are exempt from BER, but it doesn't say it in relation to the grants.

    When we bought the house,our engineer did a BER assessment for us and gave it a rating of F, and while we have done improvements since, I am not sure if it would have brought us up enough.

    I have sent a mail off to SEAI to see what they say, but was just wondering if there was anyone here that went through something similar?


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    #33
    mp3guy
    Registered Users Posts: 3,957 ✭✭✭mp3guy


    Finally got my new BER cert after having my PV installed, got a lot of insight into the process from the assessor.

    Here's the background;

    House built in 2005 with an 85.6% efficiency oil boiler, unknown BER at that time.

    BER was B3 (147.31kWh/m2/yr) in 2013 after extra insulation was added to the attic/eaves and cavity walls pumped.

    In 2019/2020 we put in a new 92.7% efficiency oil boiler, replaced two front doors with new tripled glazed ones, replaced all lights with LEDs, closed one fireplace and replaced the other with a closed solid fuel stove. My assessor told me this brought up our BER to B2 (112kWh/m2/yr).

    Now the fun starts. In November I had 10.24kW of PV panels installed. Having an EV/charger/battery storage/hot water diverter is completely ignored for the BER, only the annual panel output (other rather, inverter output) is counted. Their software estimated a yield of around 8.5MWh per year.

    Now, according to my assessor (who had some back and forth with SEAI on this), for energy you save in your home, you get different amounts of energy "credit". For example, if you reduce your oil usage you get some factor times that energy quantity in kWh to account for not only the lower amount of oil used, but also the transport/procurement of that oil.

    For electricity from the grid, that factor is actually as high as 2x. The explanation behind this is efficiency loss from generation at a plant through substations to your home means if 1kWh of energy is made on site, by the time you use it in your home you only really get 0.5kWh.

    So that means I'm credited 17MWh of energy a year, which boosted my BER all the way up to A2 (35kWh/m2/yr)!

    According to my assessor and SEAI whom he asked, yes, this does mean if you bought an F-rated house and lashed dozens of panels up without doing anything else, you could drastically improve the rating.


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    #34
    [Deleted User]
    Posts: 0 ✭ [Deleted User]


    mp3guy wrote: »

    According to my assessor and SEAI whom he asked, yes, this does mean if you bought an F-rated house and lashed dozens of panels up without doing anything else, you could drastically improve the rating.

    Is that not completely logical though, given the BER is a rating based on the energy consumption of the house, therefore if you are generating your own power to offset the power consumption, it would obviously improve the rating.

    On the other hand you'd want to be crazy to do what you mentioned ;)


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    #35
    mp3guy
    Registered Users Posts: 3,957 ✭✭✭mp3guy


    Deleted User wrote: »
    Is that not completely logical though, given the BER is a rating based on the energy consumption of the house, therefore if you are generating your own power to offset the power consumption, it would obviously improve the rating.

    On the other hand you'd want to be crazy to do what you mentioned ;)

    I think it is and it isn't. BER is sometimes (perhaps wrongly) used as a proxy for how easy it is to heat a property and maintain that heat. If you're generating tonnes of electricity and using it all for your EV and have a stone cold house then the BER is misleading. On the flip side if you dump all that power into storage heaters or a load of batteries + heat pump, it'll be very representative.

    This is the problem when you try to boil down everything into a single number I suppose.


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    #36
    slave1
    Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 18,812 Mod ✭✭✭✭slave1


    Is there not a fixed formula based on square footprint of your house to work out the PV panel benefit. Panels times 1.47 divided by square meter gives energy reduction BER impact

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    #37
    mp3guy
    Registered Users Posts: 3,957 ✭✭✭mp3guy


    slave1 wrote: »
    Is there not a fixed formula based on square footprint of your house to work out the PV panel benefit. Panels times 1.47 divided by square meter gives energy reduction BER impact

    I'm not sure of the specific formula, but there's no bound on the amount of energy the panels can produce, it's not capped based on your house size or anything.


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