Whats is ECO4
How Does The ECO4 Grant Work?
UK Homeowners can now claim Free Solar Panels thanks to the latest iteration of ECO. The ECO4 grant is officially titled “The Energy Company Obligation“. It was put through parliament in 2013 and phase 1 ran from 2013 until 2015. After each phase it gets tweaked and updated. We’re now in Phase 4, of ECO4.
There’s been some changes to how ECO works. Firstly, Free Solar Panels are now covered in the grant. Secondly, the grant now works alongside your homes SAP rating and EPC band. In short, EPC stands for Energy Performance Certificate. It’s a rating for how energy efficient your home is. Similar to the way electrical products now come with a rating of A++ to G, EPC’s run from A to G. The cheaper your home is to heat, and the more efficient it is in terms of running costs, the higher up the bands it’ll be.
You can check if your home has an EPC, and what the rating of it is here for free.
Phase 4 of the Energy Company Obligation, or ECO4 has set guidelines in terms of these bands, and while homeowners are free to ask for whichever measure they would like to be installed, such as solar panels, ultimately we need to install as much as we need to in order to move your home to its minimum EPC band.
Homes in the D and E bands must become a C rating or higher. Homes in the F and G bands must become a D rating or higher.
The bands are worked out by SAP scores. A G rated home starts at a 0 SAP score, and the highest A rated home will have a 100 SAP score. The bands run across set thresholds the same way you’d grade an exam. Each measure has its own SAP rating and we must install enough measures to get it from one range, or band, to a set higher one (explained above).
Using ECO4 to raise SAP Scores and reduce Energy Bills
Traditionally with ECO, in particular in ECO3 homeowners could request different types of insulation and a heating measure. There needed to be a Primary measure which was wall insulation to then qualify for the heating replacement. This meant that those who applied for the grant could get wall insulation and a boiler, but other areas of the home would still be lacking in terms of energy performance and efficiency.
The new ECO4 approach is a whole-home approach. This new method means that the whole house is likely to be updated.
When you apply for the grant you can request any measure you want, but we may have to throw in some more work to actually qualify your specific home for the grant. If we install just the solar panels and it doesn’t move your home from an E to a C, for example, then the project won’t be granted funding for and we won’t get paid for the install.
Each of the measures we install are covered under the funding and come with guarantees, so it’s not a case where you get the insulation for free but have to pay for something else – all measures including the Solar Panels are included in the funding. This means that as well as the free solar panels, you can also receive free cavity wall insulation, free loft insulation and perhaps even an air source heat pump too!
The best set up for saving money on your energy bills, as well as future-proofing your home, is to insulate the walls and loft to contain the warmth better, then adding an electrically powered Air Source Heat Pump, which is powered by free Solar Panels. If we can also install a solar battery, which unfortunately isn’t currently covered through ECO4, this means that your heating could be entirely free, and the electricity powering your home could also be heavily subsidized.