EPC Properties and Details Scraper

The official UK Find an energy certificate service is available in Chrome. GOV.UK's terms say most content is under the Open Government Licence, while that licence explicitly excludes personal data and certain third-party rights. The EPC service pages reviewed here did not identify a separate licence for address-level certificate records, so this Actor makes no source request unless you confirm the requested data is covered by applicable reuse rights and you have a lawful basis for any personal data. This default-off confirmation is an attestation; it does not grant rights.

When enabled with appropriate rights, the Actor can discover certificate URLs by postcode and parse certificate details such as address, current/potential ratings, expiry status, floor area, energy/emissions metrics, and recommended improvements. Certificate detail fetching is separately off by default. Search results can include expired certificates; each detail record identifies expiry when the official page exposes it.

Local development

Run the deterministic parser, status, and rights-gate checks with npm test, then validate the schemas with apify validate-schema and saved local rows with npm run validate.

The dataset contains only real certificate records or links discovered on the official service. Request failures, invalid input, and parse failures increase failureCount in the OUTPUT key-value summary; they are never written as dataset records. A run with no saved certificate and at least one failure is FAILED / FAILED. If one or more certificates were saved before a later failure, it is SUCCEEDED / PARTIAL. A clean run is SUCCEEDED / COMPLETED, including a valid search with no matches. The default rights gate finishes as SUCCEEDED / SKIPPED_POLICY without making a request or writing a placeholder row.

The saved local dataset has three historical certificate records, each with 17 top-level fields and nested energy, property, metric, recommendation, and detail structures. The details array retains source key/value pairs, including repeated labels; the records remain unchanged and are not current source evidence.

Runtime security and HTTP caching

The October 3, 2026 dependency remediation updates compatible runtime packages and uses patched basic-ftp 6.2.1. The unpatched http-cache-semantics dependency is explicitly replaced by the independently authored adapter in vendor/no-cache-policy. This disables HTTP response caching and cached-response revalidation, including reuse of old cached bodies or cookies. It is not an upstream security patch or a renamed upstream version. Requests always reach the origin; source gates and finite request limits still apply. Offline integration tests exercise real got caching and the get-uri FTP interface. See the adapter README for its interface and limitations.