Residential BER Certs
A Residential BER Cert is required whenever a house or apartment is offered for sale, letting or inhabitated for the first time. At Commercial Energy Ratings we issue several thousand BER Certs per year so we are best placed to provide your BER in a speedy and cost effective manner.
A Residential BER cert is also required if you are applying for a SEAI Grant (see our section on Home Energy/Grants).
To prepare a Residential BER cert, one of our Assessors will visit your property and conduct an indepth on site survey. During the Assessment the property is measured and drawn and areas of window and door openings are also noted. The Assessor will investigate insulation, materials of construction, glazing, heating, hot water and lighting systems. The BER survey is a non intrusive survey i.e. we are not permitted to drill holes in walls or dismantle panels to investigate levels of insulation so if this infomration is not readily visible or documented in a specific format then the assessor will apply defaults based on SEAI guidelines.
Once the survey is complete our Assessors will work on the assessment back in the office. They will draw the dwelling using computer aided software to ensure accuracy then they will work out the area of each floor, roof, wall, window and door along with their materials of construction and age band. Once this has been done the assessor will create a model for the dwelling using the SEAI approved software and will enter other details for the dwelling including the heating, hot water and lighting systems in the dwelling.
When all information has been entered and checked, the programme is run and a resulting rating is calculated. The ratings are assigned from A1 to G with A1 being the best. In addition to a BER Cert, an Advisory report is also required to be produced. The Advisory report is automatically generated from the SEAI approved software application and the assessor has limited editorial rights over the report.
Examples of both Residential BER certs and Advisory Reports are available here