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Comment by berjin | Hacker News Reader

When you buy a car or a fridge you can look up all the details about the efficiency and houses need to be similar. If every house rented or sold were to require an efficiency rating the market would work a bit better. There are passive house tests with air pressure measurements that can already do this. It would be obvious if it makes _economic_ sense to pay extra for passive. If it doesn't make _environmental_ sense then the energy is not being priced high enough to reflect the environmental costs.

The construction industry is very learn-resistant so standards would bring the price down with higher volumes as with seatbelts and airbags.

Where I live in New Zealand the regulations are actually protecting the construction industry building poorly performing houses with junk materials. People want to build passive but it's difficult because there are barriers to entry for companies wanting to sell components like European style windows.

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When you buy a (new) car or fridge, you’re buying 1 of 10^5 or more identical items (to the limits of industrial process control). It’s easy and cheap to test once and stamp out 50K or 1M energy stickers.

Housing stock (even tract homes) is at/toward the custom end of the custom<->mass produced spectrum (especially used housing, which is the vast majority of units) and that’s before considering the ongoing effects of modifications and substantial repairs, which happen more often to houses than appliances over their useful life.

It probably wouldn't cost that much (relative to both the building and the transaction costs) to require an energy rating as part of a home sale or rental.

Rentals wouldn't need constant testing to make at least some difference in the market (like say one large apartment building is built with more insulation than another one nearby).

Here in a European country the reality is like this:

- property which gets developed for sales gets developed as cheaply as possible, mostly because people are looking to buy the most square meters for their loan capability. We see a lot of barely legal housing and even last year most new builds were with gas heating as it's cheaper to build.

- there is no long term planning, nor is there long term offering .. I guess people are not aware that over the lifetime of their property they pay the price of one-two-three house price as extra heating costs. Just insane.

- some business property developers who will own the property and make money on rentals are definitely optimizing for ongoing costs and things look better.

We actually have this in Europe, at least in Germany landlords need to provide the energy pass when renting or selling a property. Has an easy to understand A-G rating and details on heating and hot water energy use. https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Musterausweis.jpg

I think it is all EU, at least Italy and Spain have it, since some 10 or 15 years.

But it is - in my experience - essentially an exercise in futility (or if you prefer only some added burocracy).

In practice you are never in a condition when you can choose (both for buying or for renting) among several different but comparable houses with different A-G levels.

Everything "old" is G[1], anything new and "luxury" is A or B, all the rest is E, very few houses are C or D.

Whilst - possibly - for buying the energy class might somehow influence the price[2], AFAIK the prices for rent are unaffected.

BTW I woulld personally steer away from houses in classes A or B built more than 10 years ago, as those very likely don't have proper mechanical ventilation.

[1] there is a (terribly managed) government campaign in Italy with very important subsidies for restoration works that result in jumping two energy classes, which in practice means - since everything is G, to get to E

[2] set aside the subsidies, costs for a renovation leading to improving by two energy classes is likely (very roughly) to be 10% of the market price of an apartment and will lead to (still very roughly, and with current extremely high price of energy) to save in energy costs the same amount in 10-20 years.

> If every house rented or sold were to require an efficiency rating the market would work a bit better. There are passive house tests with air pressure measurements that can already do this.

I love the idea but I don't know how practical the efficiency ratings will be in real life. For example, the "patio" door on my apartment has a wheel that has never worked ever since I started living here early last year. This means there is a small gap which lets heat in (?) in the summer and heat out (?) during the winter. I have reached out to the management several times. They make promises every time but have yet to fix the issue. Why would they when I keep paying rent on time every month with auto pay? In my defense, what other option do I have? I don't have a lot of free time as most of my time is taken up by my own work and I can't afford to spend my free time fighting apartment management.

edited for clarity

The idea is that you don't rely on the process but measure the outcome with a device like this blower door tester. Builders are notorious for cutting corners with insulation and sealing air since it's not that obvious to the naked eye. The testing device reveals any cut corners.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msZ_E-4GFs8

Is a tenant going to want to pay for a blower door test every year?

The price would come down if mandated for all rental units, but it’s still going to be a semi-skilled laborer with specialty equipment (and now, a government mandate) for 2 hours minimum, plus all the office, administrative, and bureaucratic overhead associated. That’s not going to be much less than $500 in any case and if you have asbestos pipe insulation, lead painted windows, or other spreadable hazards, you may not be able to test. If you have a fireplace/pellet stove/other solid fuel appliances, you have to have all appliances and ashes cold, meaning some appointments are going to be busts. Other combustion appliances need a shutdown before and startup check after the test.

In just the US, this could be over 100K jobs dedicated to just this task, or 200K if needed for all owner-occupied housing every year (rather than just upon transfer). Whether that’s a good or bad thing depends on your point of view, but I don’t see a likely benefit commensurate with burning that many people on just this task.

@ Blower Door Test: As it may be an indicator it is not a real measurement for insulation or energy demand of a building.

For a compareable result an analysis of the wall and roof structure (structure and surface area) and the corresponsing transmission factors has to be done.

This exists and it’s not even that hard or costly when you consider the purchase price of a house. I had a home energy evaluation completed when I bought my house for about $400. A government could easily require it be provided as a condition of sale. It provides a rating [0] which is good for comparing houses, and also a prioritized list of recommended upgrades.

[0] https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/energy-efficiency/energuide/energuid...

Like BER rating?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_energy_rating

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