The Renewable Heat Incentive is a 20-year government supported scheme. Chances are, at some point during that period you will get audited by Ofgem. One of the easiest things for RHI participants to forget is keeping records of your fuel. In around 70% of audits this is something that either causes a failure or gets a recommendation for an improvement.
Like so many things in life, it’s all about getting into a good habit and sticking to it. That will keep the auditor happy and make sure that you can sleep easy.
The information you need to keep tabs on are your heat use (meter readings), the fuel used (a daily tally and a monthly total) the moisture content of the fuel (ideally taken monthly) and having this all summarised in a neat and tidy spreadsheet.
Now to achieve the gold standard and get a very quick tick in the box from the auditor you need to equate the amount of heat generated by your boiler (or used in individual properties) with the amount of heat contained in the fuel and provide a quarterly boiler efficiency reading.
An efficiency rating of 50-75% is what would be expected.
Any wide difference in fuel amounts or very low/very high efficiencies will lead to greater scrutiny and a possible failure of an audit.
You provide us fuel records and meter readings for the last three years. We will create two spreadsheets one for usage and the other for sustainability and get your numbers in order.
As well as the spreadsheets we will provide you with a set of recommendations on what you need to do going forward in order to keep your records compliant and audit savvy.
We charge £75 plus VAT per hour for this service and it normally takes us no more than 4 hours to do this work for an average client. Obviously, after this piece of work is completed, it is then the clients’ responsibility to keep their records up to date.
You’ll need this service if you have failed an audit and have been instructed to get your records in a better semblance of order. Usually, an auditor will ask for lots of additional information if an audit has failed. As a result, this can take a bit longer for us to help you with. We charge the same hourly rate £75 plus VAT per hour.
Some clients may wish for us to get their records in order and then keep them that way. We would charge the hourly rate to get the figures sorted and then an annual fee (which is determined by the amount of fuel, types of fuel, number of boilers etc)
The client is expected to provide us with details of fuel amount used, moisture content of fuel and meter readings every quarter. We highly recommend that figures are taken on a monthly basis, and this will alert the client or us to the possibility of a heat meter not working or the boiler running inefficiently. It also gets the client into a much more regular routine of checks which is good practice and keeps the boiler in good working order.
It's a pleasure working with SFR. We’ve registered a great deal of olive stones on the system and allocated it to many of our customers. The SFR team is very can do and helpful.
We are trying to create a very robust and simple system for people to register their non-wood fuels and stay within the RHI rules. It’s important to us to take away as much of the bureaucratic pain as possible.
The SFR team make compliance simple. We know that all our records are in order and that is a weight off my mind.