Lifetime Homes: the 16 steps

Lifetime Homes, as a concept, has been around since 1991. The idea is to make housing usable by people of all abilities and in all phases of life, including childhood. It’s not just about the disabled!

It was developed by a group of housing experts, drawn together by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. A few of the ideas were incorporated into Part M of the England & Wales Building Regulations in 1999, but the Lifetime Homes concept as a whole is still only widely used by Housing Associations. The Code for Sustainable Homes awards eco points for building to Lifetime Homes standard and, as it stands, the standard will have to be incorporated into all new homes by 2016. You won’t be able to score the 90% rating required to meet Level 6 of the Code without it.

There are 16 design features which combined make up the Lifetime Homes standard:

• Car parking space should be easily capable of enlargement to attain a width of 3300mm

• The distance from the car parking space to the home should be kept to a minimum and should be level or gently sloping

• The approach to all entrances should be level or gently sloping

• All entrances should be illuminated

• Communal stairs should provide easy access and where levels are reached by lift, the lift should be fully wheelchair accessible

• Doorways and hallways have to be at least 750mm wide, or at least 900mm wide when the approach is head-on

• Dining and living areas should have space for turning a wheelchair and there should be adequate circulation space for wheelchair users

• The living space should be at the level of the entrance

• If homes of two or more storeys, there should be space at entrance level which should be used as a convenient bed space

• The design of the property should incorporate a provision for a future stair lift and a suitably identified space for a through-the-floor lift from the ground to the first floor

• The design of the property should provide for a reasonable route for a potential hoist from a main bedroom to the bathroom

• There should be a WC situated at the entrance level of the property and a drainage provision enabling a shower to be fitted in the future

• Walls in the bathrooms and toilets should be capable of taking adaptations such as handrails

• The bathroom should be designed to incorporate ease of access to essential amenities such as the bath, basin and WC

• Living room windows should begin 800mm from the floor or lower and be easy to open

• Switches, sockets, ventilation and service controls should be situated between 450mm and 1200mm from the floor

Comment
Most of these features can be incorporated into most house designs fairly easily and with minimal additional cost. The ones that are likely to cause problems for designers are:

• The requirement for larger bathrooms, especially the future proofing of the downstairs loo as a potential wet room. In small houses, this is a considerable space eater

• Future-proofing a lift shaft: again this is tricky in small houses

• Wide parking spaces

Ideally, from a Lifetime Homes point of view, we would all be living in generous bungalows. However, this runs completely counter to the prevailing mood in planning which demands that we squeeze as much as possible living space into the available footprint. Indeed, another part of the Code for Sustainable Homes awards points for using the basement and/or the loftspace. It’s not difficult to build a four-storey house that conforms to Lifetime Homes standard, but arguably it goes against the spirit of what Lifetime Homes is all about, which is making the whole house accessible to the physically impaired. Box ticking 1 Common sense 0.

Eco Bollocks Award: Terminal 5

News has reached me of the fantastic efforts BAA have been making to help preserve the environment at Heathrow’s Terminal 5, due to open in March 2008. It’s taken the sustainable approach to building very seriously.

Terminal 5, which is so big that it is actually three terminals, designated 5A, 5B and 5C, will use two separate water systems, one for drinking and the other for toilet flushing and irrigation. Water for the second system will be sourced from an in-house rainwater harvesting system, topped up with a borehole supply. They hope to be able to collect and re-use 85% of the rain falling on the terminal catchment area.

In addition, all the bathrooms will have dual flush toilets, and the taps will have on-off sensors combined with aerated flow. BAA trills that it aims to reduce the demand from the public water supply by up to 70%.

Come on guys, stop trilling. It’s an airport.

Is Hydro the only acceptable sorm of generation

It has happened to me again. I was asked to help a client who wanted to install a solar PV system to generate their own electricity. No urgent need for it other than the clients "want to do their bit for the environment". Once I explained the probable costs involved, shockingly they quickly went off the idea. I suggested either wind or water but these did not meet with too much enthusiasm either. Turns out they are active in a protest group trying to stop a wind farm being built on the hill opposite their front door and having their own wind turbine did not sit too well. They have plenty of wind (which is why they are building the wind farm opposite) and it was possible to see the cogs turning - was it possible to do it and avoid being hung by their mates?

A bit of further investigation dug out that uncle, who owns the farm next door, has "a bit of a stream. Probably too small". A swift survey showed that the stream has the potential to support a 2kw turbine - enough for 3 houses. The clients, their uncle and the guy next door are now looking to club together to put the turbine in, and have free electricity for the next 20 years.

Every time I do a seminar I tell the audience to check their stream, however small it may seem. But they never do. They always think I don't mean them because their stream really is too small. But I do, and it probably isn't.

Foundations: alternative approaches

There’s a new house going up on our road. The groundworkers have just finished the excavations: it’s on a backland plot and there are tree root issues, as there often are on backland plots. The photograph shows the state of play today, ready for a foundation pour on Monday. I was talking to the builder and they’ve been asked to go down 2.4 metres in some places, plus adding slip membranes around the trenches. He reckoned that they would be using around 100m3 of readymix, around 15 truckloads.

That is one hell of a lot of readymix for a single house, although it’s not perhaps that unusual in this day and age. The NHBC in particular is incredibly hot on using shedloads of readymix concrete to overcome ground movement problems. Foundation issues are still the largest cause of claims on NHBC policies and over the years they have become more and more wary of clay ground and, in particular, tree roots. The list of species-which-spell-trouble seems to grow ever longer with every revision of the notorious Chapter 4.2 (Building near trees) of the NHBC standards.

But consider that the house at the front of the plot (on the left of the photo) is also surrounded by trees. It’s been there since the 1880s (at a guess) and I doubt very much that it has anything much in the way of foundations — the Victorians used to just spread out the bricks at the base of the wall to make up footings. And I don’t think it’s been unduly affected by subsidence. Subsidence doesn’t really happen much in our village.

So why are we putting 100m3 of readymix into the ground under this new house? The readymix alone will cost the builder at least £6,000, not to mention muck away costs for around 100m3 of spoil. And at around 300kWh/tonne, making this much concrete will release around 9 tonnes of CO2, coincidentally the same amount as the average Briton produces each year.

Remember, it’s not the weight of the house that is the issue. 300-odd tonnes of house spread out across 50 or 60 linear metres of foundations is no great load. Compared to a 40 tonne lorry being held up by a few tyres, it’s nothing. All that concrete isn’t there to hold the house up but rather to stop it moving around: the reason the foundations go so deep is to get down to ground which doesn’t shift about through the seasons.

As I surveyed the foundation trenches of this house this morning, I couldn’t help thinking of the story of Caroline Barry’s straw bale house which was built off a base of car tyres. OK, it’s maybe a little too ethnic, a little too Glastonbury for your average builder, let alone house buyer, but there’s more than a germ of a good idea here. Rather than striving to get down to bedrock, such a house would be designed to float on the ground, with the base quietly absorbing any ground movement.

Maybe it’s idle fantasy — and feel free to explain just why —but surely there must be a more intelligent way of supporting a house than just pouring more and more concrete into the ground?

Are flourescent lamps efficient

I have been asked a few times lately if it is better to leave fluorescent lights switched on as they use so much energy to start up? And, are fluorescent tubes (and by extension compact fluorescent lamps – low energy lamps)really efficient?

Fluorescent lamps, be they standard strip lights or compact fluorescents, use gas discharge technology and it takes 3 to 15 minutes (depending on the type of lamp) to vapourise the gas, get up to temperature and reach full luminosity. It takes no extra power to do this, just a bit of time. So the argument for leaving lights on relates to time rather than energy. If you are popping in and out of a room all day you probably want to leave it on. Otherwise turn it off. To put it simply a light left on uses more energy than a light turned off.

Fluorescents are more efficient than incandescent lamps by a factor of about 4. To be technical, they produce around 90 lumens per watt compared to about 20 watts for incandescents (these figures vary with the type of lamp but are broadly accurate). It is why incandescents have been banned in Australia and are being phased out here. They give a different quality of light, which is what leads to the idea that they are not as bright and therefore you need more of them. My Grandma said the same when her gas lamps were replaced with nasty electric bulbs, but she got over it.

While we are on the subject, I have also been asked if fluorescents have nasty chemicals and gases in them, and the answer is yes! They have 5mg of mercury in a 40w tube. It is a tiny amount, less than the size of a pin head – but poisonous nonetheless. They also have a phosphor coating to the glass (which is what fluoresces and produces the light) which is not pleasant, but not poisonous. The gas in the tube is usually argon which is inert and harmless.

There are new lamps about to hit the market that use xenon gas – no mercury and no phosphors – which are even more efficient. These will produce over 120 lumens per watt.

Pumping heat

Spent the weekend dispensing bon-mots and advice in Harrogate at the Homebuilding & Renovating show, one of six held throughout the UK each year. This year I have been delivering a short lecture on sustainable homebuilding and it has sparked some interesting questions and comments from the audience. However this Sunday it all got a little fiery when someone asked about the difference between air source and ground source heat pumps and whether either made sense for his building project. Rather like the output from these heat pumps, my response was just a little lukewarm.

What I specifically said was that heat pumps don’t make much sense if mains gas is available but that there should be a reasonable payback against oil. “You are doing well if you get a Coefficient of Performance of more than 3.0,” I said. I have been consistently saying this for some time now and at least one heat pump manufacturer, Kensa, seem happy to agree with me.

But up stands this man in the audience who said that heat pumps could now deliver over 6.0 — i.e. twice as much heat output for the power input. Before I could stop myself, I blurted out “That’s rubbish.” It obviously hit a nerve, because he stood up and started getting shirty with me. “What do I know about it” sort of stuff. I have no idea who he was but can only guess he was working for one of the many heat pump suppliers exhibiting at the show.

This made me go all defensive and I started quoting a couple of studies back at him that showed that heat pumps often don’t deliver what manufacturers claim. If only to prove that I do know something about it, if not exactly ranking at world expert status. This of course made matters worse and our man turns around and walks out of the seminar theatre in an act of brazen defiance.

You could have heard a pin drop. Normally, these events pass by without any rancour at all and everything is sweetness and light from start to finish. Here there was a definite feeling that someone thought I that I was being out of order and should be upbraided.

What I think this shows is that the heat pump market is maturing fast, perhaps a little too fast. By all means consider the merits of using a heat pump, but don’t get sucked in by the hype, and beware claims of extraordinary efficiencies achieved.

How sustainable are the sustainable suppliers?

It occurred to me the other day that my local builder’s merchant is selling a range of sustainable and eco-friendlier materials in an entirely unsustainable and non-eco friendly shed. At first this seems a bit of an anomaly. If he is going to pretend to be eco-friendly then he should at least make some effort to make the shed LOOK eco-friendly. If we are to be completely right-on then everything up to and including the gas that was used to cook the breakfast for the driver of the lorry that delivers our sheep wool insulation should be from a sustainable source. If not it just adds to the carbon footprint and negates the whole point of trying to build sustainably.

But life ain’t like that. The builder’s merchant operates from a building that was erected some years ago and he is not going to change that. Should I bleat about the building not being sustainable or be grateful that the scales have fallen and he is seeing that there is a market for sustainable materials?

Take my own case. As a sustainability consultant it might be expected that everything about me is ecologically sound. The truth is that I run a oil-fired boiler to heat my house. It is fast approaching the end of its useful life and that will be the time to switch to something more sustainable – possibly wood pellet or a log-burning stove with back boiler I have just found at less than £1,500.

Changing before now would mean throwing away a perfectly good machine with life still in it and adding to the carbon overhead with a new piece of kit.

Similarly, I drive a beat-up old car. Some say it is because I am too mean to buy a new one. I say it is because the carbon overhead of a new car is too big to think about and an old car has no embodied CO2 left in it.

So maybe the answer is - all we can do is what we can do. There is a clear and growing movement to building sustainably. It may still be slow movement, but if we do what we can it will get quicker.