With the Building Regulations being recently updated, it is pertinent to ask: “When is a legal requirement not actually a legal requirement?” Or, to put it more accurately, what is the worth of a requirement that the government doesn’t compel anyone to comply with? 

At this current time you would think that we cannot afford to miss any opportunities to make homes more energy efficient when installing a compliant heating system. Yet this seems to be the case with hydraulic balancing.  

It has been a longstanding legal requirement in the Building Regulations that fixed building services, such as heating systems, must be “commissioned by testing and adjusting as necessary to ensure they use no more fuel and power than is reasonable in the circumstances.” 

When the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) carried out its Boiler Plus review in 2018, it noted that many installers therefore consider that this legal requirement extends to the need to balance a heating system as it is a key element of commissioning a boiler. 

In fact, BEIS went on to state that “we would like to put beyond doubt that hydraulic balancing is an expected practice”. You would be forgiven for thinking that such an unequivocal statement would have led to greater government efforts to ensure that hydraulic balancing is indeed carried out. 

Unfortunately, this was not the case. The Boiler Plus review concluded by noting that this practice isn’t currently enforced and that it “doesn’t feel right to impose it upon householders.” 

To summarise, nobody is going to be compelled to do something that is considered a legal requirement; one that will benefit householders by making their heating system more efficient. This is at a time when government has grand ambitions to make all of our homes use as little energy as possible. 

While there may be legitimate concerns about the lack of installer familiarity with balancing that led to this decision, how will this situation ever improve if we simply ignore the issue?

Expecting to achieve high levels of building energy efficiency while missing opportunities to enforce actions that will deliver improvements is simply not logical. What makes it worse are the series of opportunities that have been missed over many years, which mean that our homes are now less efficient than they could be – making the task of improving them even harder. 

For example, it used to be the case that installers replacing a boiler had a requirement under the Building Regulations to divide the system into two heating zones; usually achieved by adding TRVs upstairs. 

This requirement was taken out in 2006, on the basis of what amounted to a technicality that changing the boiler shouldn’t require additional changes to the system. This was despite the fact that installers mostly saw the sense in making the system cheaper to run while it was drained down and more economical to do so. 

We know that many installers had to stop fitting TRVs with boilers when they found after 2006 that they were being undercut by others working to the minimum standards and no more. In real terms, the likely impact of those TRVs not being installed since 2006 totals £1.1 billion that affected householders have spent on energy they could otherwise have saved, according to internal BEAMA research.     

Looking ahead to the new version of Part L coming into force this June, we hope that the belated reintroduction of the requirement for TRVs to be installed with a boiler replacement will start to repair some of the damage done by that short-sighted decision 16 years ago. But there are other areas in the regulations that need to be properly emphasised and enforced if they are to achieve any potential benefits.

One of these is the new requirement to carry out a heat loss calculation for the dwelling to ensure that the new or replacement boiler is not significantly oversized. While this might, in itself, seem like an additional burden for installers, it will actually make a significant difference by allowing a boiler to be commissioned correctly so that it is optimised for the building it is in, and can therefore be operated as efficiently as possible. 

The concern is that this could also fall foul of the issues perceived by government with regards to balancing, in that not all installers will initially be familiar with heat loss calculations, and that the cost of the process this will be added to the installation cost. 

That would be another short-sighted decision, considering heat loss calculations will be increasingly important with low carbon heating systems, so a chance to develop the skills and processes for doing this should be embraced now.

Building Regulations are very much at the frontline of the transition to net-zero. We will be able to judge how real the government’s commitment is to its net-zero targets by the level of enforcement it puts in place for the very measures that these regulations define as being vital for energy conservation.