EnergyPerformance.homes
The Hearth Record
Home / About

About the Hearth Record

EnergyPerformance.homes is an independent publication about one job: helping readers understand home and building energy performance, from a first EPC to a staged retrofit, without confusing a general guide with advice for a specific home.

A comfortable home interior in the evening with warm light, thick curtains and a well-sealed window

Most energy advice is published by people selling a measure, a system or a service. Their guides are brochures with tips in them. This desk has nothing to sell. It reads primary regulation, official guidance and professional method, and explains, file by file and stage by stage, what the evidence supports, what varies by country, and what only an assessment of a specific home can decide.

What this site is

A home and building energy performance authority site, not merely an EPBD site. Its backbone is home and building, current performance, assessment and audit, certificate and rating, deficiency, improvement measure, retrofit, installer and professional, regulation, evidence, and improved performance. Coverage includes EPCs, audits, insulation, heat pumps, solar, retrofit planning, renovation passports, building energy modelling, EPBD, minimum energy performance standards, assessors, certificates, software and implementation requirements.

What we are not

We are not assessors, installers, consultants or a directory, and nothing here is a recommendation of a firm, product or installer. We do not generate leads. No guide promises a saving, a rating improvement or a grant outcome, and no guide advises a specific household on eligibility, a specific home on a measure, or a specific firm on compliance.

The rule about numbers

Energy content runs on borrowed figures: a saving from someone else's home, a cost with no date, a rating with no method. This site does not publish numbers it cannot stand behind. Figures quoted here come from primary regulation or official guidance, are attributed, and carry the date they were checked. Worked examples use round numbers and are labelled illustrations, and costs and savings are dated snapshots or clearly labelled illustrative ranges, never promises.

How guides are made

Each guide is written against the sources listed at its foot, carries the date its evidence was last checked, and opens with an energy record summarising the file and stage, the question it answers, the evidence level and the first check. If regulation or official guidance changes, the affected guides change and the corrections page records it.

Preferred sources

If these guides are useful to you, you can add EnergyPerformance.homes to your preferred sources in Google so its pages are surfaced for you more often: add this site to preferred sources.