Home owners are in danger of harming historic buildings to make them more ‘green’ because of flaws in the Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs) that are now compulsory whenever a home is rented out or sold, says the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB).
EPCs include an assessment of the heat loss from the house through the walls; known as the ‘U-Value’, this is based on tests carried out on modern materials, such as concrete and brick. SPAB has shown that traditional building materials, including timber, wattle and daub, and cob, are wrongly and routinely assessed as less efficient insulators than they really are.
SPAB calculates that 79 per cent of ancient buildings are wrongly assessed, and this encourages home owners to carry out ‘green makeovers’ on ancient buildings that could make the situation worse. Jonathan Garlick from SPAB said people are applying insulation onto ancient walls to make them more efficient which prevents the walls from breathing and can therefore cause damp. ‘By using the wrong type of insulation you cause other problems with health and possibly degradation and deterioration in the wall itself,’ he said.
Dr Caroline Rye from the University of Portsmouth, who carried out the research on behalf of SPAB, said traditional buildings are already green. ‘If you judge traditional buildings by modern standards you get inaccurate results,’ she said. ‘If you test the efficiency of traditional walls using different methods you get better results. Traditional buildings were designed to keep the weather out, which just happens to be good for heat efficiency. They were also as concerned with fuel efficiency as we are now because they had to go and cut the wood down themselves.’
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