Display Energy Certificate

Information requirements for preparing a Display Energy Certificate

Communities and Local Government (CLG) have published guidance that will help you identify whether you need to produce and display a Display Energy Certificate (DEC) and obtain an Advisory Report (AR) for your building.

This guidance is available at www.communities.gov.uk/epbd The guidance here indicates what information occupiers will need to provide in order to obtain a DEC and AR once it has been ascertained the building(s) occupied qualify under the regulations.

More explanation is given in the accompanying document (“detailed guidance for occupiers”), which you may wish to work through with your accredited Display Energy Certificate (DEC) energy assessor. The basic information you will need, though, is summarised briefly below.

• Check whether you have correctly interpreted the CLG guidance and identified the building or buildings for which you will need to display a DEC. You may need to confirm this with an accredited energy assessor.
• Locate and identify your incoming energy meters and any other (sub-) meters that separately meter energy being produced from On-Site Renewables (OSR) and Low and Zero Carbon (LZC) technologies, or energy used in your building for specific purposes different to your normal activity.
• Find and collate any actual energy consumption data you have from your energy meters and any sub-meters covering the (approximately) one-year period to the current date. Include in this information any records of delivery of liquid fuels, and of solid fuel, together with records of stock or tank levels over the same period.
• Contact your energy suppliers to get estimates if you have no meter readings available. Where relevant this may include your supplier of district heating or cooling.
• If you do obtain energy from a district heating or cooling system, contact the supplier to obtain a statement of the carbon dioxide burden of the energy supplied to your building (e.g. kg CO2 emitted per kWh of energy delivered).
• Obtain or calculate your building areas, bearing in mind that the assessment will use the Total Usable Floor Area (TUFA). You may be able to use an alternative metric but measuring TUFA directly will provide a more accurate result.
• Find and collate any readily usable plans of your building that would help the assessor to confirm or to measure any unknown floor areas, and any simple plans and schematic drawings that would enable the assessor to locate and identify significant features of the building, its occupancy and use, and the energy consuming services provided.
• Find and collate previous energy survey work that has been carried out on your building, as this can help advise in the generation of the Advisory Report.

Note that, if your building is recent then you may have been provided with, and may have continuously updated the information in, a building log book. If so, most of the information needed for the assessment of DEC's should be contained in the log-book.

With the Optimal system this data can be automatically logged, create and email reports to the relevant departments in your organisation.