CSE’s new HAT
30 January 2013
CSE has developed the Housing Assessment Tool (HAT), a programme that runs in Excel 2007 and gives a rough assessment of a house’s energy efficiency level.
Based on CSE’s Housing Assessment Model, HAT is designed to enable community groups to analyse data about their local housing stock and produce individual energy saving reports for householders.
An automatic mail merge function can be used to generate a householder report, including the option to tailor the text to make it more relevant to the local area. HAT even generates an estimated SAP rating for the properties being analysed.
One potential hurdle to getting people involved in the Green Deal is the first step of paying for a Green Deal Assessment. It may not be worth paying around £150 for this if it turns out that your property is not suitable for Green Deal measures. With HAT, a community group can do a first assessment themselves, which gives a good idea of the level of energy efficiency of a home and what improvements are likely to be the most suitable – it also indicates whether measures are likely to be funded by the Green Deal and ECO. This allows the community group to advise their neighbours about whether to go ahead with the Green Deal process and how worthwhile it will be for them.
HAT is also a very useful tool for community groups aiming to get lots of householders in their area involved in an energy efficiency scheme. For example, if they want to encourage several whole streets to get loft insulation, HAT can calculate the potential energy bill savings that would be made across the entire area.
HATs off to CSE’s Morgan Kuivala and Toby Bridgeman for developing this clever tool.
Read the guidance notes and try it out here: www.cse.org.uk/HAT
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Article originally published at www.cse.org.uk