A few clicks and you can learn a lot about your flat!
Do you live in a money-guzzling flat and your energy bills are far higher than average? Curious about which category your house falls into: energy efficient A, or perhaps 'wasteful' E? How much would insulating the attic or regulating your heating improve your energy consumption? Try out our on-line 'Lakcímke' energy certificate calculator, and get answers to these and many similar questions concerning your home.
The Energiaklub and the Energy-efficiency Cluster have prepared this unique, fun, on-line calculator- the first of its kind in Hungary – which helps give an idea of how one's home energy situation looks.
The basic idea of the calculator is to help the user complete an evaluation by being led through a series of simple, easily understandable questions. There are the types of questions to which most property-owners more or less know the answers already. Has the attic been converted? What kind of windows do you have? Can the heating be regulated? When was your house built? Clear diagrams make understanding even easier, but should someone get stuck at one or another question, then the 'Lakcímke' Home Energy Certificate publication, available on the website for downloading, helps clarify things. Using pictures and a serious technical background, the software provides an estimate of the home energy rating based on the given answers.
The calculator also allows one to try out, for example, how much installing insulation or regulating heating would improve home energy consumption. However, the calculator is not only useful because it can roughly calculate which category the house belongs to. While providing the answers to a dozen and a half or so questions, we think all the way through how many different factors there are that influence our home's energy situation, something which in itself can encourage savings!
While the playful calculator is not a substitute for the detailed, technically calculated work of a professional certifier, underpinning the 'Lakcímke' - Home Energy Certificate, it does help us understand what the certificate is based on.
Perhaps many readers already know that from 2012 the Home Energy Certificate will be compulsory for buildings used in Hungary. The on-line calculator allows a glimpse at the certification process, too: what is behind the paperwork, what happens during certification, what is being evaluated in the home, what do the many coloured lines and the related letters mean?
Whoever decides to have a 'real' energy certificate prepared for their home will find help for this too on the Lakcímke – Home Energy Certificate website. The user-friendly database allows one to search in one place amongst almost 100 contacts to dedicated professionals eligible to carry out certification and belonging to the Hungarian Chamber of Engineers and the Hungarian Chamber of Architects.
Besides this, the legislative background to the energy certification can also be found on the website, but for those who would simply like to save money on their electricity and gas bills; it is worthwhile having a look through the site's practical questions.
August 23, 2010.
