Your Best Guide To Sap Assessments And Their Importance For Your New-Build Project

SAP assessments may be a bit confusing to those who have to deal with them for the first time, but those in the know will tell you that SAP assessments are necessary – and there are ways to ensure that you have a high score with your SAP assessment as well. SAP assessments are a requirement for new dwellings in Building Regulations, and developers and contractors have been familiar with SAP for years since it was first introduced in 1995. If you aren’t fully familiar with the SAP assessment and would like to get as much information about it as you can, here’s your best guide to SAP assessments and their importance for your new-build project.

What Sap Is

The SAP assessment is the official approved testing system when it comes to assessing a new building’s energy rating. A Standard Assessment Procedure assessor should be registered with a certifying body and should be duly accredited. The rating from the SAP assessment is a way of showing the comparison between the energy performance of different buildings, and the rating can range from 1 to 100+, with 100 showing a building’s zero cost on energy and 100+ referring to the fact that a building can export or sell energy back to the grid. It follows that if you have a high SAP rating, then your fuel expenses will be lower, and you will also have lower carbon dioxide emissions.

The assessment establishes a building’s expenses on energy based on its construction, its internal lighting system, its heating system, and any renewable energy sources or technologies it uses. It doesn’t include the energy that is used for appliances or cooking.

What The Assessment Does

The SAP assessment does three basic things: it determines the SAP rating of a building, which refers to how much it costs to run the building on energy, it demonstrates the building’s compliance with Building Regulations (Part L), and it is used to create the EPC or Energy Performance Certificate of the building. An extension to a building or a conversion may also require a SAP assessment, but the rules may be slightly different.

Why It Is Important

If you want to adhere to the requirements of existing building regulations, then your building needs to pass the SAP assessment, as confirmed by the experienced SAP assessors from TheBuildingComplianceTeam.com. If you don’t pass, the building control authority will not confirm the development, and you cannot let or market your property in the end.

Another reason why the SAP assessment is important is that it can help you minimise your building’s energy consumption and use, reshaping your building’s energy profile to make it much more efficient and friendly to the environment. Also, the SAP assessment also provides you with the EPC or Energy Performance Certificate, which is an important document that is on the public registry – which means that it will be seen by any prospective tenants or buyers of the property.

You can pass the SAP assessment if you meet several targets for compliance, such as how well your dwelling’s fabric can contain heat, how well your building makes use of solar energy, how high your quality of construction is and how good your systems are, and how low your carbon dioxide emissions can be.