A practice built around
honest assessment
Nova Referentium was established to provide property owners in Portugal with clear, independent technical assessments — not sales pitches dressed as advice.
Portugal's building stock has a story
Much of Portugal's residential and commercial building stock was constructed before modern energy efficiency standards existed. Stone-walled townhouses in Porto, tile-clad apartment blocks in Lisbon, concrete villas in the Algarve — these buildings were built to last, but not to conserve energy in the way we now understand.
When the SCE system was introduced to bring Portugal in line with European energy performance requirements, it created a regulatory moment: property owners now needed an official certificate before they could legally sell or rent. That certificate requires a qualified technical assessment.
But the certificate alone — a letter grade on a document — tells you very little about what is actually happening inside your building's thermal envelope, or what you could do about it.
Three principles behind every assessment
Independence
We have no commercial relationship with any supplier of building materials, insulation, glazing, or heating equipment. Our findings are shaped entirely by what the technical data shows — not by what generates a sale.
Clarity
Technical assessments produce technical data. Our job is to translate that data into language that is useful to a property owner — specific, practical, and free of unnecessary jargon.
Precision
An EPC is only as accurate as the assessment behind it. We take care to measure and document correctly — because an inaccurate certificate creates problems down the line, and an inaccurate advisory report leads to poor decisions.
Trained on Portuguese buildings
The Portuguese construction tradition uses materials and techniques that differ significantly from northern European building practice. Granite and schist walls, hollow clay brick partitions, ceramic tile cladding, timber-framed roofs — each of these has specific thermal characteristics that must be understood accurately to produce a meaningful energy assessment.
Our technicians have direct experience with these construction types. When we encounter an uninsulated granite wall or a single-glazed timber window, we know how to assess its thermal performance correctly and how to explain its impact in a way that is useful to you as the property owner.
We are also familiar with the practical realities of older Portuguese buildings: the informal alterations made over decades, the mixed construction periods within a single building, the absence of original technical documentation. Part of our work is making sense of what is actually there — not what the plans might suggest.
This grounded, practical approach is what distinguishes a thorough assessment from a superficial one. The SCE certificate may look the same either way. The advisory report that accompanies it — and the decisions it enables — will not.
Want to know what we would find in your building?
Contact us to discuss your property and what a technical assessment would involve.