The Italian tendency to elude the observance of the law is well known and is often exercised with amazing creativity. Circumvention of the rules is always reprehensible. But, when "creativity" gives way to a much more prosaic falsehood, we are in the presence of truly indecent phenomena. This is what is happening with regard to the rules on energy saving linked to individual heat metering
Legislative Decree 102/2014, amended by Legislative Decree 1414/2016, provides (art.9 paragraph 5, letters b, c) the obligation for those who own a condominium to install sub-meters. But this is not always possible for technical reasons and so the standards oblige the installation of both heat distributors and thermostatic valves on individual radiators. The penalties for those who do not observe these rules are high: from 500 to 2500 euros and it is up to the regions to check and fine.
However, the law provides that in some cases the exemption is triggered: it must be demonstrated that the installation of sub-meters or heat cost allocators and thermovalves is inefficient in terms of costs or disproportionate to the potential energy savings.
To demonstrate all these you need a technical report from the designer or qualified technician. Of course, some technicians tickle the tendency of some condominiums who would not like to spend anything for accounting, reassuring them of the ease of demonstrating that the intervention is not justified.
Models of these relationships are put into circulation, some reliable, some questionable, others blatantly imaginative, superficial and sometimes with false data.
According to one of these reports, the owner of an apartment with 5 radiators would have to spend 1500 euros on distributors and valves with such low annual energy savings that it would take 41 years to get a return on the investment.
Some other technical study has published a map of Italy on a website which shows that in almost all of our country there is no economic convenience for accounting
Furthermore, there are pre-packaged "technical" reports on a very attractive topic: instead of spending 1500 euros per apartment to comply with the law, each owner spends 150 euros and the technical report will demonstrate that the derogation is possible.
Faced with this jungle of superficiality and falsehood, it would be desirable for the regulatory authority ARERA to fix some reference prices for the products used for accounting, as it has already done for services.
Let's see some realistic and unimaginative prices.
For the installation of the heat cost allocator/thermostatic valve package, the real cost is €80.
In short, each user spends around €100 per radiator. So in an apartment with 5 radiators the maximum cost is 500/600 euros, not 1500.
The life cycle for regulation subsystems (UNI EN 15459) is 20 years. So the approximate cost is €5/year per radiator. Even if around €4/year is spent to replace the allocator after 10 years and another €4 for annual readings and calculations, the total cost is around €13/year per allocator/radiator. In short, it is enough to save 13 euros per year per radiator for individual accounting to prove advantageous!
In many European countries, accounting has existed for years and large-scale studies are being carried out to measure the percentage of savings due to individual accounting. This saving is estimated at around 20% as shown by a research conducted by Eurac in collaboration with the national association for heat and water metering -ANCCA- which represents Ista, Oilcontrol, Techem and Zenner: these companies with over 10.000 employees, manage the accounting of a significant part of the apartments accounted for in Europe, with around 110 million units read each year.
