Knowledgebase
Scottish Building Regulations 2002
Posted by Andrew Bairstow on 14-Mar-19 10:52 AM
These instructions apply to DesignBuilder version 5.

A Section 6 2002 calculation is part of the assessment process for identifying if a building requires a Section 63 analysis and is performed during the EPC calculation.

The status of the check

BER < BER 2002 ?

Is reported in the recommendations report:



However, this will report a fail however small the margin between the BER and the 2002 estimate.

It may be useful to know how large the margin is prior to commencing Section 63 Analysis. Whilst this will be reported in DesignBuilder v6 it is not reported in DesignBuilder v5.

However, this data can still be found from the file generated by SBEM for producing the EPC Certificate.

The EPC input file created by SBEM using DesignBuilder is always named model_epc.inp. It can be found in the SBEM folder which contains all the executables for the version of SBEM used for the calculation. For example, DesignBuilder v5.4.0 accesses SBEM v5.4.b and stores the relevant files in folder 54b.

This is accessed through the interface:





The file can be read in any software which handles text eg Word






If the BER is quite close to the 2002 TER then a simple solution might be enough to pass the 2002 test and avoid the need for a Section 63 assessment: