Energy bills have changed the way people think about buying a home.
Not long ago, running costs were almost an afterthought. They were something you’d factor in vaguely, after the location and the number of bedrooms and whether the kitchen felt right. Now, for most buyers, they’re part of the core calculation. How much is this going to cost me every month? What am I actually committing to?
That shift is understandable. The last few years have been genuinely tough for household finances and people are making smarter, more considered decisions about where their money goes. Buying a home is the biggest financial commitment most of us will ever make and increasingly, buyers want to know not just what a home costs to buy but what it costs to live in.
But for many buyers, the financial picture is only part of it. There’s a broader responsibility that comes with building new homes and we don’t take it lightly. Every home we build will stand for decades. The decisions made at the design and construction stage, such as how much energy it generates, how little it wastes and how lightly it sits on the land around it, have consequences that outlast the sale. We build the way we do because we think that matters, not because a regulation requires it.
That thinking extends to how our homes are built, not just how they perform once you’re living in them. We source materials and labour locally wherever possible, which reduces the environmental cost of construction itself, with fewer miles travelled and less carbon generated before a brick has been laid.
At Risby Homes, the financial efficiency of running a home and the environmental impact it has in the process, are important considerations. If you’re weighing up new homes in East Yorkshire, understanding how a home performs on both counts is one of the most important questions you can ask.
The EPC rating: what it means in real terms
When you buy or sell a property in the UK, it comes with an Energy Performance Certificate, an EPC. This gives the home a rating from A (the most efficient) to G (the least), based on how much energy it uses to heat, light and run.
It’s a straightforward scale but the financial difference between one end and the other is anything but small.
According to research published by the Home Builders Federation and Octopus Energy in February 2026, the average new build home costs around £1,574 a year to run on energy. The average older home rated F or G costs closer to £2,192. That’s a difference of over £600 a year – every year – simply by virtue of where and how the home was built.
Put another way, moving from an older, poorly-rated home into a well-built new build home in East Yorkshire is worth roughly £50 a month back in your pocket, without changing how you live or what you use.
Nearly all new build homes achieve an EPC rating of A or B, while less than 5% of older properties in the UK reach the same standard. The gap reflects decades of tightened building regulations, better insulation, improved heating systems and, increasingly, on-site renewable energy generation.
Part L: the regulation that changed everything
The reason solar panels now appear on new build homes across the country comes down to something called Part L of the Building Regulations, the section that governs the conservation of fuel and power in new homes.
Since 2022, Part L has required new homes to produce significantly fewer carbon emissions than the previous standard. For most housebuilders, the most practical way to meet this is a combination of high-quality insulation, efficient heating and renewable energy generation, most commonly solar photovoltaic (PV) panels.
What this means in practice is that solar panels are now a legal requirement on most new build homes. They’re no longer a premium upgrade or a green lifestyle choice, they’re the baseline.
Which makes it worth asking: if all new homes have solar panels, what actually sets one apart from another?
Where Risby goes further
At Risby Homes, we work with a trusted local solar company who do the installation properly and who we know will be there if you need them afterwards. A panel fitted correctly, by people with real accountability in the region.
But what’s more significant is how many panels we install.
Building regulations set a minimum requirement – the number of panels needed to meet the compliance threshold for a given footprint. We routinely exceed that. The Willow, for example, has 31 panels fitted across both the east and west elevations of the roof. Why both sides? Because a home facing east-west gets energy generation across a longer part of the day. East-facing panels capture the morning sun, while west-facing panels continue working into the afternoon and early evening. Fitting panels on one side only would mean leaving generating capacity unused for half the day.
That’s a decision made for the benefit of the homeowner living there, not the tick-box to say we’ve met the requirement.
There’s another reason we fit panels across both elevations: it simply looks better. A roof that’s considered symmetrically, with panels that complement the architecture rather than being bolted on wherever compliance requires, is a home that holds its kerb appeal.
At Risby, energy performance and good design aren’t in competition, they’re the same decision, and the thinking starts even before the foundations are laid. The orientation of each plot, the positioning of driveways and the relationship between the home and its surroundings are all considered with solar gain and shading in mind. A home that’s positioned and designed to make the most of natural light and warmth is more efficient before a single piece of technology has been added.
Pre-wired for the future
Solar panels on your roof generate electricity. What you do with that electricity is a separate question and one that’s becoming increasingly important.
Battery storage systems allow you to hold onto the electricity your panels generate during the day and use it in the evening, rather than drawing from the grid when energy costs are typically higher. It’s a technology that’s becoming more accessible and more popular.
All Risby homes are pre-wired for battery storage. If you want to add a battery system, whether now or in the future, you can do so without engineers pulling your walls apart to run new cables because the infrastructure is already there.
The same thinking applies to other services. Risby homes are also pre-wired for television aerials and satellite connections. If you want Sky or a similar service, you simply connect. No unsightly cables running down external walls, no remedial work and no compromise to how the home looks. It sounds like a small thing but these are exactly the kinds of decisions that get made once, at the design and build stage, and that you either benefit from or spend money correcting later.
Underfloor heating: why it matters more than it sounds
Most new build homes use radiators but at Risby homes, we use underfloor heating throughout the ground floor and it’s one of those differences that’s hard to fully appreciate until you’ve lived with it.
Think about a January morning. The alarm goes off, you come downstairs and the floor is warm underfoot before the kettle’s boiled. No wrestling with a thermostat trying to take the edge off a room that’s stubbornly lukewarm. The whole ground floor feels the same warmth because that’s how the system is designed to work.
Underfloor heating achieves this by warming a large surface area at a lower water temperature than a conventional radiator needs. Because it doesn’t have to get as hot to heat the same space, it runs more efficiently and costs less to operate. The heat distributes more evenly, rises gently and stays consistent. It’s not a small comfort upgrade, it’s a fundamentally different experience of being at home in winter.
It’s also one of the details that separates a Risby home from most new builds in East Yorkshire, where radiators remain the standard even in otherwise well-specified properties. At Risby, underfloor heating to the ground floor is simply how our homes are built. It’s not an optional extra, or an upgrade on a price list, we include it as standard.
A note on heating technology more broadly
Part L and the Future Homes Standard that follows it are pushing the industry towards lower-carbon heating systems – in particular, air source heat pumps, which extract warmth from outside air and use it to heat the home.
Heat pumps are a technology the industry is moving towards and we’re watching that carefully. For now, we continue to build with gas central heating, a system that is well understood, well supported and proven in the kinds of homes we build. Our priority is always that the home works reliably and comfortably from day one. When the technology and the infrastructure around it has matured to the point where we’re confident it delivers that without compromise, we’ll adapt accordingly.
What we can say is that every decision about how a Risby home is built and heated is made deliberately, with the people living in it as the primary consideration. Not to chase a specification sheet and not simply to meet a minimum standard.
Energy efficiency: an honest summary
Energy efficiency in a new home is not one feature, it’s the sum of a lot of decisions. From the insulation in the walls and the heating system, to the renewable energy on the roof and the thinking behind how all of those things work together over the years you’ll spend living there.
All new homes have to meet Part L but not all of them go beyond it.
At Risby Homes, going beyond is just how we build. We put more solar panels on our homes than the regulations require because it’s the right thing to do for the people living in them and for the broader picture of how new homes should be contributing to the world. We pre-wire for batteries and future technologies because we’d rather a home be ready for what’s coming than need pulling apart later. We use underfloor heating because it’s better and if something’s better, that’s reason enough.
That approach costs more to get right but a Risby home isn’t priced on how little we can include, it’s priced on what it actually takes to build a home that works properly, from day one and for the long term.
The saying used to be: buy the worst house on the best street. With a Risby home, you’re always buying the best house on the best street.
If you’re considering a new home in East Yorkshire and want to understand how our homes are built, not just how they look, we’d welcome the conversation. Our newest development, Maple Croft in Cherry Burton, brings everything you’d expect from a Risby home to one of the most sought-after villages in the East Riding. Get in touch or register your interest via our website.