Anyone for an air source heat pump?

This man would very much like you to have one. His name is Peter Ferguson and he owns and runs Trianco, the Sheffield-based, metal bashing oil-fired boiler maker. I spent a couple of hours with him on Monday, listening to his tale and sharing his dreams and aspirations.

Oil boilers are a mature market. There are perhaps a million of them dotted around the country, mostly in out of the way locations where mains gas can’t reach. Each year, 60,000-odd new ones get installed, mostly as replacements. Trianco have a slug of this market, around 10%, but it’s not growing. Oil boilers, just like solid fuel boilers before them, would seem to be yesterday’s technology. Even with the recent move over to condensing boilers, there doesn’t seem to be much mileage left here for long term growth plans.

The question is what will replace them. The world and their aunt are all harping on about renewables and carbon-free or carbon-lite power systems. With climate change slowly moving centre stage, it’s hard not to conclude that this is where the future lies. But there is still a lot of doubt as to which of the new technologies will succeed and which will fall by the wayside.

Ferguson reckons he’s spotted a market gap here and thinks that Air Source Heat Pumps (ASHP) may just be the next big thing. ASHP are the smaller and lesser known relative of the ground source heat pump (GSHP) which has, in contrast, had quite a lot of attention in recent years. ASHP differs from GSHP in three crucial respects:
• it doesn’t require digging up the garden and rolling out 100s of metres of tubing
• instead it works by taking heat out of the air
• it’s cheap compared to GSHP and to all the other green power systems.

To date, people have thought of heat pumps primarily as space heating devices. Ferguson’s Eureka moment came when he saw that it would be beneficial to position ASHP against solar thermal panels, as an alternative method of delivering hot water for the tap. Instead of spending maybe £3,000 or more installing solar panels on your roof, which, if you were lucky, would deliver just over half your hot water requirements throughout the year, here is a solution which would cost half this price and which would provide all your hot water. Because it’s a heat pump, it delivers around three times the energy it requires to run it, so potentially you could draw off say your 4,000kWh of hot water (typical of a modern household of four) for an outlay of just 1250kWh, cost around £100 a year.

He is particularly interested in the small ASHP units, which are rated at 3kW output. The one in the photo I took is the larger 5kW one, so you can imagine that the 3kW one is almost half this size. Crucially, it is small enough to fit through the average loft hatch, and this in itself opens up a whole new market for heat pumps — small houses without gardens. The unit can get plumbed into the loft where the air temperature will, in any event, be a little higher than outdoors, and in about two hours a day it will be capable of delivering 150lits of hot water, enough for a couple of people. It’s not a renewable power source, as it uses electricity, but because the way heat pumps work, it will use about a third of the electricity an electric immersion heater would use, so it will deliver 6kWh of heat energy for just 2kWh of juice burned.

Will it catch on? Well, it may do. The one thing that makes Ferguson very bullish about his ActivAir heat pumps is that he can sell them for £695 + VAT. Compare that with solar panels (at around £2,500), or indeed any of the other renewable or carbon-lite technologies, and you can see that his ASHP units may well find a new market.

The downsides are that the units are a little on the noisy side to be happily operating indoors. And the recovery rate, the time taken to replenish your hot water cylinder, is rather slow. The 3kW unit would take over two hours to recover, as compared with 30 minutes for a similar-sized cylinder heated by a conventional boiler.

There is also the cost calculation to run through. Although ASHP will deliver three units the heat output for every one unit of electricity required to operate it, that electricity is always going to be more expensive than mains gas. And if the mains gas is a third of the price of mains electricity, then your cost saving vanishes. As it stands, mains gas is rather more expensive than this at the moment, but not by a lot, so the running cost saving is there, but only just. Unless of course you manage to run your ASHP unit on Economy 7, in which case it becomes very cheap to run indeed. But then you’d have it whirring away for a couple of hours every night whilst you slept. If you mounted it correctly, you wouldn’t hear a thing, but it would always be a concern that it could keep you awake.

Trianco’s ASHP units are available in larger sizes. As well as the 3kW output, there are 5kW, 7kW and 12kW. This largest size is capable of taking on GSHP as a whole house space heating solution. Many people feel that it’s got to be less efficient than GSHP because outside air temperatures are habitually lower than winter ground temperatures, but Ferguson’s units work at good efficiencies down to —3°C, which is about as cold as it gets in southern England these days. And at £1895, it is way cheaper than any GSHP unit I have come across.

At the moment, Ferguson is importing his ActivAir units from China, but has high hopes of bringing the metal bashing and assembly functions in house as sales demand rises. It’ll be fascinating to see whether he manages to establish ASHP as a serious contender for the future of home heating. It won’t be for a lack of trying.

OFT Investigation

News that the Office of Fair Trading is launching an investigation into the housebuilding industry had me exclaiming “OK, but why now?” Nothing has really changed that much in the past ten or even twenty years; certainly not the nature of the cozy cartel that exists between the housebuilders, the planners and the amenity groups such as the Council of Preservation for Rural England (CPRE). Both the low rates of new housebuilding and the poor standards of that housebuilding are symptomatic of a general market failure, but then this is no ordinary market.

The OFT would seem to want someone to blame for this state of affairs. Housebuilders point to intransigent planners, planners point at huge landbanks being held back to artificially inflate prices. According to the BBC website, the OFT have appointed an eight-strong team to take representations, but I expect them to get pushed from pillar to post and back, and to end up more or less back where they started.

To my mind, the problem really starts with 1947 Town & Country Planning Act, which effectively nationalised land use. Instead of land being freely brought forward for building by whoever fancied their chances, the new planning authorities started ring-fencing areas suitable for development. As these areas were often large, the small players were effectively cut out from the market. Over the years, this policy of concentration and densification has grown more and more pronounced and the whole development process has been professionalised. The current consolidation going on in the housebuilding industry is merely the latest phase of a process that dates back to 1947.

What the OFT should be looking at is how development took place in the 1920s and 30s, when there were very few controls and no massive national building concerns. There was genuine competition back then and also a high rate of housebuilding. Also they should look closely at what has been happening in Ireland. And France. And Germany. And Scandinavia. And North America. And Australia. They will quickly find out that what goes on in the UK is unique. Other countries build more houses and they generally have far fewer quality issues. Land is often set aside by rural communities for small developers and selfbuilders to create homes and thereby organically grow communities. New development isn’t restricted to all but a few mega-sites, as it is in the UK. Mega-sites may be regarded as sustainable, but they do nothing to enhance competition. The land supply in the UK is now so restricted that the whole process is managed by a small number of very large businesses, who carve up the cake between themselves. The fact that there is little competition is because there is often only one new housing site for miles around.

But rather than blaming everybody or indeed anybody for letting this state of affairs come about, the OFT should come to realise pretty quickly that it’s a creation of our restrictive planning policies. If you really want to reform the housebuilding industry, that is where to start. I don’t think it’ll even be on the agenda.

Snaplite: energy efficient lighting

Last week, I went to visit Snaplite, a company making downlighters, based just outside Birmingham. It’s an unusual outfit, which has carved a niche for itself by concentrating on quality. Whereas the lighting market generally is awash with incredibly cheap Asian imports, Snaplite have chosen to manufacture their products in the West Midlands and to concentrate on providing well-built housings for the various lamps out there.

The business is based largely around the skills of a guy called Peter Jones (not the tall one on Dragon’s Den) who likes to tinker around with lights in his garage. He hit on the idea of manufacturing fire-rated downlighters and Snaplite became the first company to offer these into the UK market in 1998. To date, they have been pitching themselves largely at professional housebuilders but now they are becoming interested in the selfbuild sector, which is how I came to be interviewing them, having met Anthony Ottway (pictured here with Graham Stevens) at the Homebuilding & Renovating show at the NEC in March, where they had taken stand space.

If you go back a few years, to the 1980s, downlighters were regarded as sophisticated and aspirational. Back then, the ceiling-mounted spotlight was still the thing. People did use downlighters in the home but not that often. That started to change when low-voltage halogen lamps became fashionable. People saw what they did in shops and in restaurants and instantly they wanted that same effect back in the home. An industry was born.

Not that this did our overall energy consumption any favours. Whilst low-voltage halogens are around twice as energy efficient as ordinary tungsten bulbs, you need a shed load of them to flood light a room. Instead of a modest house having perhaps 20 or 25 light central pendant fittings, a fully downlighted equivalent would probably use around 60 or 70, typically four in each small room and as many as ten in the main living areas. That’s an awful lot of lights. Anyone considering planning for energy efficiency would do well to bear that in mind.

But it’s another aspect of building homes which brought Snaplite to prominence and that is the problems associated with making holes in ceilings. In the early days of downlighting, no one gave a toss. It was all regarded as part of the fun of using downlights, just a detail to be undertaken as quickly and cleanly as possible. But holes in ceilings are not good news. Although the devastating effects of fire spread through ceiling holes and socket boxes had been known for some time, the fire regs had always ignored them, preferring to concentrate on testing wall and ceiling assemblies built without penetrations. But holes for downlighters not only increase the risk of fire spread, they also let through noise and condensation, and they are a source of air leakage. Additionally, because downlighters burn hot, you need to leave space in the ceiling recess around each light. That’s a whole catalogue of construction woe.

Rather than ignore these problemos, Snaplite hit on the wheeze of designing them out. It then hit on another wheeze of highlighting these problems to the housebuilding industry: their 1998 launch of the fire-rated downlighter made much of the problems raised by competitor products.

Then came interest from the acoustic wonks. When Part E, the sound regs, were beefed up in 2003, a very similar concern surfaced: holes in ceilings were really bad news for people wanting to acoustically separate flats. A fire rated downlighter turned out to work pretty well as an acoustic downlighter as well; not surprising really, because the issue is pretty much the same. The downlighter has to be re-engineered so that the heat is directed down as opposed to being allowed to dissipate in the ceiling void, and the housing around it has to be made from pressed steel and it has to be reasonably airtight. There is, in effect, an integral fire hood. If you do all that, as Snaplite did, then your fitting is pretty much bound to be fire proof, airtight and acoustically-rated.

So Snaplite has product which is fire rated (Part B), acoustically rated (Part E), doesn’t let condensation through (Part C), and is also airtight (Part L –airtightness requirements came into effect for the first time in 2006). Also because of the design of Snaplite’s downlighters, you could lay insulation across the back of them without having a break in the insulation. Competitor products required you to leave a large 600mm gap around the downlighter because they burned so hot. In an era where insulation was at last beginning to be taken seriously, leaving a hole that big made no sense.

Of course, a Snaplite downlighter wasn’t cheap, especially when compared to stuff flooding in from China, retailing for two or three quid. But for a while no other downlighters even tried to compete in quality, and they carved out a good market with the more scrupulous builders, egged on by both local authority building control and the NHBC who were impressed by Snaplite’s approach.

But these days, the competition is catching up. Snaplite are not the only show in town and wholesalers now stock various types of fire rated and acoustic rated downlighters at prices which undercut UK-made Snaplite’s output. Snaplite point out that the industry is full of sharks and that much of the so-called fire-rated kit on the market is nothing of the sort and that, furthermore, there is really no effective way of policing this situation. Their problem is that, having done all the hard work of establishing that ceiling penetrations are a problem, and engineering a solution, their market may be taken away from them by a bunch of cheapskates.

The solution is of course to innovate still further, to stay one step ahead of the game. To this end, they are courting the selfbuild market in the hope that here is a group of specifiers who may be prepared to pay a little more for quality. With the increasing interest in energy efficiency, many selfbuilders want help in designing a low energy lighting scheme that looks good and provides good quality light. They have launched a compact fluorescent range called Emerald, which is designed for ambient lighting in halls and stairwells, and they have added a range of low energy pendants, wall lights and illuminated mirrors so that they have a more rounded range, the sort of thing which a selfbuilder might think of as a one stop shop. LEDs are beginning to feature in this range as well, although to date mostly as shelf lighting and in strips.

Snaplite have also started offering a design service aimed at selfbuilders wanting both quality and energy efficiency. If you are looking at spending over £3,000 on a lighting scheme, which they argue is not an exorbitant amount for an upmarket house, Snaplite will undertake a design for you for £100, refunding £50 of this if and when an order gets placed. It’s an interesting proposition and one I can see may be attractive to a lot of selfbuilders.

Who Owns What: Update

The news that Hanson is to be taken over by Heidelberg Cement in an £8billion deal virtually brings to a close the British ownership of its building materials sector. Whilst the City scribes have been using the takeover as an excuse to rerun the colourful history of Hanson Trust, they have largely ignored the fact that a whole slice of our industry has disappeared from our stock market in less than ten years.

Simultaneously, the much smaller Baggeridge Brick is being taken over by the Austrian brick giant Weinerberger in an acquisition worth just £87million.

The rout is all but complete. What’s left? It looks to me that there are now only two medium sized companies quoted in London that are active in this area. They are:

• Ennstone, the aggregates and readymix business, worth £180million
• Marshalls, the paving and landscaping people, worth £500million

Here follows a list of what went where.

RMC: readymix concrete and cement. Now owned by Cemex of Mexico. Also own Russell roof tiles and Rugby Cement and Thermabate

Blue Circle: Britain’s original cement company and a constituent of the first FT30 index in 1953, taken over by Lafarge (large French conglomerate) in 2001

ARC: taken over by Hanson, which already included the old London Brick Company, Thermalite and the old Marshall’s precast floors business. Now of course Hanson the predator has itself become prey.

Castle Cement: now part of Heidelberg Cement, quoted in Germany, and about to be merged with the Hanson interests, monopolies commission permitting.

Bradstone: a brand owned by Aggregate Industries, a UK asphalt and concrete conglomerate which was itself taken over by Holcim of Switzerland in March 2005 for £1.8bn

Tarmac: now the Industrial Minerals Division of Anglo American plc, which includes Tarmac Topfloor and Durox

Ibstock Brick: taken over by CRH, large Irish conglomerate, in 1999

Celcon: Owned by H+H International A/S, a Danish company.

Baggeridge Brick: about to be taken over by Weinerberger of Austria

Redland: taken over by Lafarge

BPB: once British Gypsum, bought by St.Gobain in 2005. As well as plasters and plasterboard, it owns Artex and Rawlplug

Marley: now owned by Etex Group of Belgium

Boulton & Paul Joinery: originally bought by Rugby cement, sold to privately owned US joinery business Jeld Wen in 1999

John Carr: another independent joinery producer, also owned by first Rugby and merged with Boulton & Paul, now subsumed into Jeld Wen

Magnet Joinery: once quoted, now owned by the Swedish kitchen company, Nobia

Premdor Crosby: owned by Masonite of Canada, quoted in Toronto

Anglian Windows: based in Norwich, went public in 1992, MBO in 2001

Velux: private Danish company

Osma: always owned by Dutch group Wavin. Wavin is short for WAter and VINyl! Used to be part owned by Shell but I now jointly owned by Overijssel Water Board (who started it in the 1950s) and CVC Capital Partners, private equity.

Terrain: sold by Caradon to Geberit. Swiss plumbing supplies company, in 1999

Hepworth: bought out by Vaillant, sold on to Wavin

Baxi Potterton: now part of a plc owned by private equity, includes Heatrae Sadia, makers of Megaflo
Aqualisa: part of Baxi group

Myson Radiators: owned by Rettig, a privately owned Finnish company

Pilkington: leading glass manufacturers, bought by Nippon Glass in 2006

Ideal Stelrad: based in Hull, once part of Caradon, sold to HSBC private equity in 2002

MK Electric: part of Caradon group, which seems to have disappeared

Celotex: private UK company, MBO from larger American business using the same name

Kingspan: Irish public company

Jablite: brand name of Vencil Resil, taken over by Synbra Group BV from Holland

Rockwool: Danish public company

Sadolin and Sikkens: part of European conglomerate Akzo Nobel which includes what was left of Courtaulds and Crown Berger paints

Dulux: still part of ICI, as are Cuprinol and Hammerite

Jewson: UK’s largest builder’s merchant, owned by St Gobain

Travis Perkins: Britain’s No 2 builder’s merchant, independent, bought Wickes in 2005

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What is multi-room audio?

What exactly is multi-room audio? Or more precisely, what is the point of it? Whilst I can’t say that this question has been exactly eating me up for years, yesterday I got the chance to quiz one of the industries’ experts, Adrian Ickeringill, who is runs Systemline’s Modular project which aims to get multi-room audio into houses being built by developers.

Systemline is a small part of the Armour Group. Armour is itself an AIM-listed micro-conglomerate that specialises in car and home audio and electronics. It’s a difficult market to be in because, whilst it’s undoubtedly a growth market, the products keep changing and so you have to be nimble if you are to survive. Armour history reflects this: it was big in in-car entertainment but found itself getting sidelined as car manufacturers started putting the kit in as standard. Armour switched attention to the burgeoning home entertainment market and it started acquiring smaller businesses like Systemline. But now this market has been turned upside down by the arrival of the iPod, which has rendered all manner of products obsolete. When you have a digital jukebox in a slick white case, who needs a media server the size of a video recorder?

Systemline reacted by creating a wall mounting for the iPod, so that you can dock your iPod and play it through their Systemline ceiling speakers. Whilst this is neat, it is hardly earth shattering, and Adrian let on that one of their key markets is now furniture, by which he means building-in speakers and screens. To aid this, in 2005 Armour purchased Alphason, a Lancashire based business specialising in screen support cabinetry. There are, apparently, much juicier margins in the furniture than in the hardware.

Adrian’s job is to sell multi room audio to developers. He does this by first getting them to install Systemline speakers into their show homes and flats and then persuading the developers to offer Systemline’s products as an extra, all just added onto the mortgage. Whilst this is unlikely to be a sale clincher, the developers like it because they get a cut for doing very little work and they get the cachet of selling smart homes, which is seen as being increasingly important, especially in many urban apartments. There are different levels you can opt for. At its simplest, you can get a few built-in ceiling speakers; or you can opt for home theatre and lighting control, in fact the full home automation kit. These systems are now seen as being somehow separate from home data cabling, which is basically about connecting computers to each other and to the internet. I had always lumped them together in my mind but it seems the way the market is going is to differentiate the two. The internet is increasingly being seen as a commodity whereas audio and video remains an aspirational purchase.

We talked briefly about the non-appearance of Part Q, a phantom building regulation that has been mooted for a long time, which would require a structured cabling backbone to be installed into every new home. Apparently, Portugal has become the first (and as yet only) EU state to introduce a Part Q-type requirement. Apparently, high level discussions have been taking place in Britain about whether to follow suit but methinks it’s unlikely to become mandatory any time soon, especially as the dust is still settling over all the many recent building regs changes which have upset the industry. The trouble is that this is an industry still evolving and there would be great danger that you would end up building in technology that would be rendered obsolete within a few years.

National Self Build Centre: opening soon

I’ve just got back from Swindon where I visited the soon-to-open National Selfbuild & Renovation Centre. It’s quite a departure for the world of selfbuild, a permanent exhibition centre that will be open seven days a week throughout the year.

It’s the brainchild of the Buildstore group and in particular their CEO Raymond Connor, who has been building up to this for several years. His hope is that it will provide a one-stop shop for any and every one planning new homes, renovations or improvements. It’s a big complex, about the size of a B&Q Megastore, and it includes a Potton show house and a fascinating deliberately dilapidated Victorian cottage where you can look at the problems and solutions facing renovators. My own favourite bits were the cut-aways of floors, walls, roofs and drainage systems: I have never seen the inside of a septic tank — a notable first.

By any stretch of the imagination, it’s a huge gamble. Buildstore are planning for 100,000 fee-paying visitors a year; if they get that, it will be judged to be a major success for them and for their many exhibitors. It’s not an unrealistic proposition because there are at least this number of people who visit the various selfbuild exhibitions at the moment, but a permanent exhibition of this scale is an untried concept. Connor’s hope is that it will grow the market and help put selfbuild on the map: others are sceptical that people will be persuaded to pay £10 each at weekends to visit what is in effect a giant showroom. But what can’t be doubted is that it is going to happen and you have to admire the vision and determination that have got it off the ground.

From what I saw yesterday, I would recommend a visit if you are at all interested in understanding the building process, even if you have no plans to build anything anytime soon. It struck me that it’s a great educational facility and I can quite see parties of school kids being taken around here in years to come. But that, of course, is not why it’s there: its purpose is wholly commercial.

I hope it works out for them: the country has seen nothing like it before and we will all be that little bit richer for having such a centre. The opening of this centre marks a step change for the selfbuild movement in this country.

Pellet Boilers: the Okefen examined

To Welshpool, to take a look at Europe’s most advanced pellet boiler. I am guest of Andy Buroughs and his company Organic Energy. Andy Buroughs has been in the renewables business for 20 years, mostly in solar panels, and has recently got interested in pellet boilers after visiting Austria and tracking down Okefen. He has become the UK agent for Okefen and also for another Austrian company, solar panel maker Gasokol.

Now the Okefen pellet boiler is a very impressive piece of kit. I instinctively feet that a pellet boiler is a sort of upmarket wood stove but I am surprised to see just how upmarket a wood stove can get. This is, as Andy points out, the Mercedes of wood-fuelled boilers. It doesn’t actually burn the wood pellets, it gasifies them and then burns the resulting gas at something like 93% efficiency. As there is as much heat value in a wood pellet as there is in heating oil, by weight, you can see that it is a very efficient method of extracting heat from wood. And, of course, the pellets aren’t shovelled in by hand: they are fed in automatically by an auger or a vacuum tube (you choose). And the grate doesn’t need riddling out every morning – the residue can be cleaned up once every few weeks. Indeed, on a forthcoming model, available sometime in 2007, things should have moved on to such a point that the proud owner of an Okefen pellet boiler can get by with an annual visit from someone who a) delivers a year’s worth of pellets into the hopper b) empties the ash can for the year and c) carries out the annual service.

Wow, that really is hi-tech. Renewables without tears.

However there is a big ask here. The cost of the kit comes to around £12,000. From this you can deduct a £1,500 grant from the Low Carbon Building Programme, but even so, that is a ball-achingly large amount of money for what is, after all is said and done, a boiler. This price would include the pellet hopper arrangement but doesn’t go anywhere downstream from the boiler itself. No hot water tank, no radiators or underfloor heating system.

The Okefen is competing with such kit as oil boilers — cost maybe £2,500 including storage tank— and ground source heat pumps — perhaps £8,000 up to £10,000. OK, you get to burn a green fuel, unlike the alternatives, but even if pellet supply turns out to be as cheap and as plentiful as promised, it is never going to stack up financially. One of the very first things Andy said to me was that the Okefen “was very much an aspirational product.” I didn’t quite understand what he was on about until I got home and processed all the cost information. Now I see what he means. It’s a hell of a big ask.

But I have no doubt that there will be a number of well-heeled selfbuilders who will see the Okefen and fall in love and just have to have it. It’s a bit like that. It may even become the Aga for the Zero Carbon generation.

Although I wouldn’t try cooking on it. But then, I wouldn’t recommend cooking on an Aga either.

Men of Straw

These two young men want to build houses out of straw. David Menell (pictured left) and John Ogle have started a business called Conscious Construction and they have a mission to make straw bale building mainstream. Or at least, a little more mainstream than it is right now. Which wouldn’t be difficult because there are only ten straw bale houses in the UK.

Thus far, if you want to know about straw bale building, you beat a path to the door of Barbara Jones, the diminutive dynamo behind Amazon Nails. Barbara learned about the technique in North America and brought her knowledge back to the UK where she has refined it and almost single-handedly driven it into the public consciousness. But her work is often community-based and is usually at the non-profit end of things. She is more teacher and guru than businesswoman.

John and David are approaching it from a different perspective and are hoping to move straw-bale building onto another level. Not surprisingly, they have learned about straw bale building techniques from Barbara and she is apparently keen to support their new venture. They want to develop straw bale as a viable alternative to rival other non-standard building systems, such as SIPs panels or ICFs (both of which have featured in the blog over the past few months).

I must admit I had never considered this to be a likely development before. Straw bale seemed just too….whacky. For a start, there are a whole bunch of fears to work through. Fire. Rodents. Moisture problems. Asthma. You name it, people worry about stuff like this. When you are investing your life savings into a house, you want to minimise your risk, not take part in some construction experiment. You need a comfort zone and straw bale ain’t there yet. But it’s also fair to say that it’s not that far off either. Amazon Nails’ pioneering work over the past 15 years has addressed all these issues and although the number of straw bale homes in the UK is still tiny, there are enough around to know that, as a technique, it works. And in North America and Denmark, there has been loads more development work carried out which further enhances the credentials of straw as a walling material.

And once you get past the fears, there are lots of things going for it as a building method. It’s cheap and abundant – it requires no manufacturing at all. The walls are wide – typically 450mm – but they provide good insulation and they can be easily made into interesting shapes. Covered with flexible lime renders, straw bale walls look fantastic. And they can accommodate all aspects of modern living like double-glazed sealed units and cabling. In many ways, straw bale has similarities with ICF construction but without having to use truck after truck of readymix. I can see that there is real potential here, but I can also see that unlocking that potential is going to be a long hard sell. Thanks to exposure on programmes like Grand Designs, there is an awareness that you can build structures using straw bales, but that’s still not quite the same thing as building your own home out of them. That’s still an option for the brave, but maybe, just maybe, it’ll move mainstream much quicker than might be expected. Maybe, just maybe, Conscious Construction have timing on their side.

Masterframe sash windows

Sometime in 2002, I was out taking photos for a forthcoming edition of The Housebuilder's Bible when I chanced upon a Bellway estate taking shape in Burwell, Cambs. The picture is on p165 of the current edition, No 6. The estate is done out in very trad styling and most of the elevations use sash windows. What troubled me was that I assumed these sash windows were timber but on closer inspection I reckoned that they might be uPVC. So I took a closer look at one…in truth I wasn’t really sure what they were made of. I was stumped. As someone who makes a living out of knowing about building homes, I felt ever so slightly humiliated and was glad there was no one there to share my discomfort.

I had stumbled across the product of Masterframe, a very unusual window company based in Witham in Essex. The windows were uPVC but the uPVC itself has been through a process called foiling, a rough veneering, which gives the surface the feel and character of painted timber. I am not alone in my confusion. It’s very convincing and it fools a lot of people. Planning officers who are instructed from their first day at planning school that it’s “timber good, uPVC bad” have been known to have to eat humble pie after they couldn’t tell the difference.

On Tuesday this week, I got to visit Masterframe as guest of their owner Alan Burgess (pictured here). He is a very affable and enthusiastic guy who has been working with windows all his life. Something of a reluctant entrepreneur, he only started Masterframe because he had seen a brilliant example of a uPVC sliding sash window which no one wanted to put into production. He became convinced that there was a market for such a product and so began his quest to make the perfect sliding sash window – out of plastic.

Masterframe now produce several hundred sash windows a week. They don’t install; they are mostly selling to installers, including some of the big boys like Anglian. Much of their product goes into the replacement replacement market. That is to say houses where the original boxed sash windows have been pulled out and replaced by aluminium or uPVC casements which are now past their sell-by-date. You can see the architectural devastation brought about by the replacement window market on virtually every street in the UK where the housing stock is more than 30 years old. For many people, the culprit is uPVC, but Alan Burgess never believed that there was anything inherently wrong with the material and has gone on to show that it’s possible to create or maintain authentic British styles whilst using new materials.

If you want to know more, take a closer look at their website. There is a fascinating section entitled Glossary of Terms, broken down into 20 pages, which looks at the detailing that goes into their product, right down to the choice of the brush seal weather stripping and the placing of foam baffles. Every time an issue or a problem arises, they use it to improve the design. The attention to detail reminded me of one or two German businesses that I know of, but the desire to re-engineer a traditional product such as a sash window would seem to me to be something you might expect from the Americans. It makes Masterframe a difficult company to pigeonhole but, in turn, Masterframe make a mockery of the assumption that most of us Brits have, namely that we are hopeless at manufacturing.

Loft Conversions in Fink Trussed Roofs

The loft conversion is a thoroughly modern phenomenon. They started to appear in the 1970s and have spread across the UK from the expensive areas towards the cheaper ones. You see them most often where land prices are highest, which is where people are looking to make their footprints sweat a bit. In an era of low rates of house replacement rates and with 3% stamp duty cutting in on house sales above £250,000, it’s a wonder there aren’t more loft conversions being carried out.

One of the factors stopping lofts being converted is the prevalence of fink roof trusses. This little innovation was widely taken up in the 1960s by British housebuilders because it was cheaper and quicker than building roofs on site in the time-honoured method. A fink truss roof is not easily converted because the integrity of the roof depends on the truss loadings being left in tact and the loadings typically run from wallplate to wallplate across the house. I would guess that around 98% of individual house roofs built between 1970 and 2000 used fink trusses so there must be four or five million homes in the UK (out of a total of 25 million) which have these roofs. They are not impossible to convert into living space but they do present difficulties that are enough to put off the average builder.

The demand for loft conversions has led to one of two innovative businesses setting up which specialise in turning fink roof truss roofs into habitable rooms. One such is Ripon-based Truss Loft which undertakes around 150 conversions a year across the whole country. They thread steel through the loft from gable to gable and build up a floor and roof support off these steels.
At the HomeBuilding & Renovating show at the NEC show last weekend, there was another business looking to crack this lucrative market. Telebeam was started by Digby Rowsell (pictured), a house designer from Wiltshire, who had oft pondered the madness of building all these fink trussed roofs. He hit on the idea of using a telescopic aluminium beam, which could be thread through the roofspace from side to side, thus creating a new floor strong, enough both to support activity in the loftspace and the weight of the roof above it. Rowsell has worked through the prototype stages and had the beams passed by LABC, the Local Authority Building Control body that should mean that it is acceptable to all local authorities.

The cost is around £300 a beam: each truss requires a beam either side, so effectively this means £600 per truss. Trusses conventionally sit 600mm apart, so an 8m long roof would have 13 trusses and the cost of supplying 26 Telebeams would be just under £8,000 (+VAT). That sounds like a lot for a loft conversion but bear in mind that most loft floors require strengthening in any event and that this cost is in for nothing with Telebeam. It’s also not far removed from the extra cost charged by companies like TrussLoft for their services: there is simply no cheap way of converting fink-trussed roofs.

A webpage for every house?

The concept of a logbook for houses isn’t new. “It happens with cars. Why not houses?” goes the well-worn mantra. But no one has ever managed to get the idea off the ground. Stuart Young (pictured here) is going to have a go, with a new web-based business called Property Log Book . Has he got a cat in hell’s chance? Charging £30 a year to keep your documents on his server?

Well yes, he might just be onto a winner. Thanks to changes in the rules about how we buy and sell houses and how work on them is to be certified, it looks as though his timing is spot on.

So what are the changes which are prompting the need for logbooks at last? Firstly, the buildings regs are slowly moving towards a system whereby work can be deemed to satisfy if it has been carried out by competent people, rather than having to be passed by independent building inspectors, which has been the routine since Victorian times. At the moment, electrical work, window replacement, boiler fitting and work on unvented hot water cylinders can, and usually is, said to meet building regs if the tradesman carrying out the work is appropriately qualified. Self-certification is the phrase being used and self-certification is a trend that looks like it is here to stay. We can probably expect to see general builders offering self-certification for entire jobs sometime in the next few years, especially if that certification is covered by an insurance-backed guarantee. If this comes to pass, the role of the traditional building inspector will be greatly reduced. Already, building inspectors are complaining that the nature of their workload is changing and that much of their time is now spent digging out building reg approvals to facilitate house sales.

Which brings us onto the other major change afoot. The imminent introduction of the sellers’ packs, or Home Information Packs. An awful lot of the information required to sell a house is this run of the mill search through the archives to see if the house has actually got planning permission for that extension or if the loft conversion did actually get building regs approval. Why should the local council have to file away all this information? And why should the local council have to retrieve it when the principle beneficiary is the homeowner who, arguably, should have kept it all along. It is likely that the Home Information Packs may cost several hundred pounds to put together; if the house had a complete logbook, most of the queries raised for the homeowners pack would be sorted with just the click of a mouse.

Or that is the hope of Property Log Book, who are selling server space for around £30 a year. They reckon that if you stay in a house less than ten years (and most people move every seven years), this annual investment will pay for itself by reducing the fees for putting together Home Information Packs.

So how would it all work? Say you had some windows replaced. At the moment, you are can have the work passed by the local building inspector or get it done by a FENSA-registered installer. If it’s a FENSA firm, then they are required to issue a notification to building control to say that the work carried out met the current building regs standards. They should also give you a similar notification. What you would then do is send the ticket off to Property Log Book who would enter it into your database for easy retrieval. Every house registered with them would have its own web page which can be password accessed by the homeowner. When the time comes to sell the house, the information can be presented instantly to the purchasers or their solicitors.

It’s a particularly good idea for the new homes market. The logbook webpage is capable of holding all the plans and specifications for the new house, together with warranty details, and instructions for running all the systems in the house. Anyone wanting to work on the house can have instant access to this information. It also forms a useful record of tradesmen who have worked on the house, possibly with comments from the homeowner: this sort of information would be invaluable to a new purchaser.

No doubt there will be squeals from the grumps that it’s yet another example of Big Brother’s tentacles round your testicles, but I reckon it’s an idea whose time has come. Only one thing for it. I am going to sign up and test the service.

Envirograf

Last Thursday morning (Jan 19), I drove down to Barfrestone in Kent to meet Derek Ward, the founder and MD of Environmental Seals, aka Envirograf. Derek is in his 70s now but still burns with the passion and enthusiasm of a teenager, always on the look out for new products and new inventions. His thing is fire protection and he has built up a 180-person business making and selling fire protection products throughout the UK and, increasingly, abroad.

Fire protection sounds deadly dull. OK. I can do better than that. Fire protection IS deadly dull. But 90 minutes with Derek isn’t dull and if you show the slightest interest in the subject (and I probably displayed a little too much) he is off and away. Just like a house on fire, in fact!

I first came across his company in the 1980s when they sprang onto the scene making intumescent paints for turning ordinary doors into fire doors, one of the requirements placed on builders doing loft conversions. For builders undertaking loft conversions — and we did quite a few — his paints and varnishes were a godsend. Normally, a fire door is a great heavy beast, an extra 10mm wider than a normal door and a whole lot heavier. You can physically add timber to a regular door to give it extra fire protection but in so doing you destroy the look of the original door. Alternatively, you can paint it with one of Derek’s paints for around £30 a door, much cheaper than a new fire door. Need your wall or ceiling uprating? You can fix an extra layer of plasterboard, skim it, rewire the electrics, fiddle around with the coving and the decoration. Or you can paint it with one of Derek’s paints.

And he doesn’t just do paints. There are lots of other bits and pieces like intumescent pads and sprays, which can fire-proof anything from steel beams to Xmas trees.

Derek is part inventor, part entrepreneur. Pose him a fire-proofing problem and he’ll come up with a solution. His concoctions are not particularly hi-tech: mostly he messes around with conventional materials like PVA glue and Rockwool and he uses a lot of exfoliated graphite which expands when it gets hot, and turns a flat pad a few mm thick into an insulating quilt which stops the heat getting through. That is the key: looking for products which expand under heat and thus provide instant fire protection. He tests the products in his own lab in Kent and when he is satisfied that they provide adequate protection, he sends them off for testing at an independent lab that will give third party certification. Each year the product list grows longer and his annual testing budget has now grown to £400,000. Currently more and more products are being tested in Holland to meet the more stringent European standard EN 13823 which has yet to become established in the UK.

The Envirograf sales list just keep growing and growing. Currently they are making huge number of fireproof hoods for downlighters. Putting a downlighter into a ceiling reduces its fire protection rating from around 30 minutes down to just four. Fire-proof hoods, costing around £6 each, are the answer. They are also beginning to sell a lot of socket boxes with intumescent pads in them. Interestingly, this has been a requirement of the wiring regs since 1992 but it has been widely ignored until recently. Any hole in a compartment wall, such as a downlighter or an electrical socket, is a weak point in the room’s fire resistance, and as building inspectors are slowly becoming more aware of these issues, Envirograf’s tailored solutions are selling into an expanding market.

I asked marketing manager Mike Woolmington what the competition was like. In a word, it’s fragmented. There are lots of businesses selling intumescent paints but often only in 5lt tins. Others make intumescent strips for door openings, but no one else makes both. The Envirograf range is unique: they really are a classic niche business. If you have a problem relating to fire-proofing, Envirograf reckon they will have a cost effective and non-disruptive solution, backed by independent testing and acceptable to building control and fire officers. If you are undertaking alterations to existing buildings which require you to use better fire-proofing standards, it’s well worth getting acquainted with Envirograf’s product list. The chances are they will have something simple which will save you a lot of hassle.

Envirograf can be phoned on 01304 842555.

What's Belgium got to teach us about housebuilding?

To British students of modern manufacturing methods, Danilith are known (if they are known at all) as the Belgian housebuilders with the robot bricklayers. But that is only a small part of the story. For Danilith is a vertically integrated housebuilder of the type that just doesn’t exist in the UK. They are a family business that has been running since the 1920s and they own a large plant in Wortegem, which they use to build as much of their houses as they possibly can. Not only do they prefabricate wall, floor and roof panels, but they make their own joinery as well. They employ 260 people, use very few subcontractors and they undertake around 250 projects a year, mostly individual homes in Belgium and Holland, mostly fully finished.

Let’s just consider this last sentence. 250 houses built each year by 260 people. That, in itself, is remarkable. No one at Danilith works more than an 1800hour year if they can help it — Belgian overtime is very heavily taxed so there is an incentive to stick to the contracted hours. Of these 260 employees, just 30 work in the factory, another 100 on site erecting and finishing the houses and the remainder in various admin roles. So essentially, 130 workers are building over 200 houses each year. That’s just under 1200 hours labour going into each house. In comparison, the standard British site-built home takes 3000 hours to construct. Danilith workers are thus over twice as productive as their UK equivalents.

This is reflected in the prices charged for Danilith’s homes. Their brochure shows that the selling price is almost always under €1,000 per sq m (£690/m2). But in Belgium, new homes attract VAT at 21%, which is included in this figure. It also includes 4% taken for design fees and a mandatory 1% fee payable to a private security firm to oversee the construction sites. The net sales price is in fact just €800 per sq m (£550/m2). It’s difficult to see something of equivalent quality in the UK costing less than £900 per sq m. In fact most MMC advocates say that you can’t build at less than £1,000 per sq m unless you are constructing identikit houses in long production runs. But Danilith’s homes are all different, although the elements used to put them together are modular.

In so doing, Danilith produce a very high quality house. We are used to seeing timber and steel framed houses built in factories but Danilith work mostly with brick and concrete, reflecting the prevailing preferences in the Benelux countries and France. The 10metre-long wall panels passing through the Danilith plant are not unique: in Germany, basements are commonly constructed with prefabricated walls. But Danilith have added to this a robotic brick laying machine which first slices the bricks in two lengthwise and then lays them face down on a flat bed, against some retardant paper. Mortar is subsequently brushed into the joints from above before three more layers, concrete, polyisocyanurate insulation board and lightweight concrete are added to the beds, the whole process taking around four days to cure and the final wall thickness being around 250mm. Finally, the walls are hoisted vertically, to be finished by hand on the last of the production lines. Windows, doors, electrical channels and plumbing runs are all set into the walls as they are being constructed. You can view the 15 stage process on the website www.milbank-danilith.co.uk. Floor panels are constructed elsewhere in the plant. Roughly a house a day passes through the plant: on a traditional British building site this would represent the efforts of around 600 hours work. In the Danilith factory, it’s 25 workers on an 8-hour shift: 200 hours. Plus, of course, a lot of investment in machinery and forty years worth of know-how.

The technology used by Danilith is far from hi-tech. It’s the sort of thing that is used on production lines across the globe. Parts of the process are still carried out by hand and compared to the latest robot car builders it all looks a little primitive. And there are many other smallish housebuilding businesses in Germany and Scandinavia using similar finished-panel systems. However, in the UK, the nearest we come to factory production in housing are the numerous timber frame companies who semi-fabricate wall and floor panels, sometimes referred to as open panel building. This requires insulation, services and finishing on site, both internally and externally.

Danilith see themselves as custom homebuilders first and foremost. Although they make windows and staircases, as well as the wall panels, they don’t sell them to third parties; they only supply their own projects. However, they do undertake a little spec. building from time to time but usually to fill gaps in the production schedule that would otherwise have them laying off staff. This is quite revealing in itself. It’s frankly hard to imagine a British firm adopting such an attitude. Indeed, it’s just the sort of action that shows the gulf between Anglo-Saxon and Continental business practice. Whilst we are busy cutting costs and growing market share, the Belgians are putting the interests of their workforce first and foremost. Whilst many British economists would highlight Danilith’s working practices as being a prime example of Eurozone featherbedding, they would also have to admit that it’s resulted in productivity levels which we in the UK can only aspire to some time in the not-so-near future. The Belgians are clearly doing something right.

This remarkable company would like to transfer some of its know-how to Britain. They have found a willing partner in Milbank, who, like Danilith, area a family-run company with a keen interest in masonry prefabrication. Milbank are big in precast flooring in South East England and have slowly grown their business to embrace haulage and joinery. But they are not housebuilders. Both Milbank and Danilith are keen to start building homes in the UK but there are significant obstacles to overcome in order to establish a British version of Danilith.

Perhaps the biggest problem is that there simply is no tradition of custom home building in the UK. On most of the continent, custom home building is the principal route by which detached houses are built. Individuals buy plots — relatively cheaply — and commission a new house to be built on them, without spending a great deal of time working on the project themselves. In Britain, the new homes market is dominated by speculative builders who build solely for sale: there are around 15,000 individual homes built each year but most of these are taken on on a semi-DIY basis with the selfbuilders acting as their own contractors. The burgeoning timber frame sector prefers to offer a water-tight shell option and lets the selfbuilders finish the houses off in their own time. One or two Continental companies offer a full-build service, notably Huf Haus and the Swedish House Company, but they only account for a tiny number of new homes each year, probably under 100 in total.

Typical of Continental custom homebuilders, Danilith is set up to build one-offs. Everything in the Danilith system is modular but provided the design fits the modules, almost any design can be built. They don’t aim to achieve economies of scale by mass production: their goal is to simplify everything down to a set number of options and to avoid prototyping. That way they avoid mistakes and they keep costs to a minimum, without becoming too repetitive.

Quite why the major British housebuilders have failed to take up factory-building Danilith-style is a mystery. Their pattern book approach to housebuilding, combined with the guaranteed volumes, ought to lend itself to prefabrication. But for some reason vertical integration has never appealed to British builders and no one has ever seen fit to try. The only plc housebuilder to currently use a significant input of prefabrication is Westbury, who have built the largest timber frame plant in Europe (Space 4) to supply some of their new homes. But Space 4 is a long way short of what the likes of Danilith and Huf Haus do.

The big question is this. Can the cost savings shown by Danilith be achieved simply by copying the technology or is the different business culture an essential part of the mix? Whilst it ought to be easy to introduce robot bricklayers, it will be much harder to integrate the Continental work ethic needed to keep the robots ticking over. Mark Brinkley