It might not be the most 'glamorous' of topics, but energy-efficiency and future-proofing our properties is an important consideration in today's world of rising energy costs, especially if you want to run a profitable property development businesses.

To discuss how we can save money as landlords and developers, we sat down with Plumbing & Heating Engineer Steve Wright (@stevewecotech) and quizzed him on all things energy!

It was a really valuable and insightful chat, and Steve gave us some great tips to work on now in order to potentially save money in the long-run. Here are just a few of the things we discussed:
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1. The immediate changes you can make to your properties, and the limits you should be taking control of.

For those looking to make a cost-saving right now, and within the properties you already own, there are a few simple changes you could make.

One of those would be to ensure better heating controls – by either replacing existing heating controls or simply controlling them better.

Most HMO landlords provide bills included, so it's really important that you take control of that heating system, whilst still ensuring that you're providing your tenants with warmth to a design temperature.

Quite often landlords will find that when they visit their properties on inspections or visits, the temperature inside the property feels well above design temperature, with tenants having set a heat setting that is unnecessarily warm. A few simple things you can do to avoid this becoming a repeated issue with tenants is to:

• Consider installing a smart thermostat
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• Reduce stats to a maximum of 21 degrees (design temperature)
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• Reduce boiler thermostat to a maximum restrictive usage of 60 degrees – which is the temperature of the output of water in the heating system (whether you're on a combi boiler, or a system boiler with a hot water tank) - this ensures tenants are not able to turn the heating up whenever they want

• Reduce the cylinder (the thermostat temperature) and ensure it's set correctly with hot water temperature stored at 55 degrees and no more (any higher than this and you will be paying to overheat your water)

• Make sure that when you're setting up all of these different settings, that you remain in control of them. This could mean restricting physical access to controls, or indicating and noting where settings are set so that if you go back on an inspection visit you know if they have been altered

• You could work with your managing agent to include setting checks in your monthly reports as a requirement, and monitor the usage month-by-month
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2. The measures and infrastructure you need to be considering at design stage.

If a property developer is at the start of a development project, and is thinking about things like central design and instructing a heating engineer, we'd advise asking a few key questions to ensure you're considering all the options out there to your project and your budget. Those questions might be:

• What heating controls are you looking to put in?
• What special measures are we going to put in that are above and beyond?
• What is the industry basic?

For example, something that's becoming more well-known in the industry at the moment is low temperature heating systems – which involves designing a central heating systems that will run at lower temperatures and therefore reduce costs.

Traditionally, a heating system will be designed to run at 70-80 degrees, which is the temperature of the water within the radiator. If you can reduce that temperature by fitting larger radiators, you can reduce it to around 40, 50, 60 degrees – requiring a lot less energy to reach and maintain that temperature. This means that by spending a little bit more on larger radiators during the design-stage, you have the potential to make a significant saving in the long-term.

Deciding on the correct radiator size will involve communication with your heating engineer, architect, and plumber – looking over floor plans, budgets, and also your heat loss calculations, so that an educated and sensible decision can be made.

Be sure that your heating engineer has made proper heat loss calculations (preferably at the very beginning of pricing for a job), so that they know the full requirement of the heat loss of the building, and each room individually, in order to plan for the correct radiator sizes.

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3. The latest cost-saving systems and products.

During the session, Steve recommended Inspire home automation smart thermostats - a product used throughout BEESPACE properties.

They offer two smart thermostat options; a wireless and hard-wired option. The wireless option allows you to take control over everything, including hot water and heating controls across all of your properties, all done wirelessly through an app. You can use this tool to restrict all usage, including on the physical thermostat itself.

You can even utilise the intelligent software to control serviced accommodation properties – linking it up to a SA booking system to automate heating the property before a guest arrives, and turning it off once they have left.

Having a tool like this is brilliant to monitor and control the energy usage across your properties, and in some circumstances will even notify you when the temperature in a house goes above a certain setting. With humidity sensors, you'll be able to pinpoint if a tenant is using things like an electric heater, and where that might be located in the house.

Whilst some letting agents/landlords may understandably not agree to this level of monitoring, we understand why this may be necessary in some situations (especially in todays financial climate) to reduce energy costs and retain margin. These tools can be used to exercise clauses in contracts regarding heating, giving you a digital insight and report about the usage should the need arise.

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4. How to improve the EPC rating of a property.

Another hot topic in the property industry right now is EPC ratings – which also sits hand-in-hand with energy efficiency and ensuring that your property isn't losing the heat that you're paying to put in.

From a lenders perspective, they now require a property to be at a minimum EPC rating of C, so what more can you do to bring your rating up?

Looking at the breakdown of what's included on the EPC certificate itself, we can see that heating controls are a major factor affecting the rating, as well as:
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• installation values
• double glazing
• ventilation
• insulating walls correctly
• making the building more airtight if you're going back-to-brick so that it's thermally efficient (filling holes, foam gaps, silicon around windows, ensuring windows are sealed internally, seal around fitted joists)

These may all seem basic, but it's important we consider the infrastructure of a property and evaluate if it's helping our property to run as efficiently as possible.

Enjoying the read? You can hear the rest of Steve's amazing advice inside The Hive now, as he continues to cover:
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⚡️ Gas vs. electric – when and what to use?
⚡️ What current funding is available
⚡️ The importance of understanding terminology & keeping informed