Housebuilder's Update

OFT Investigation into Bid Rigging

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Brinkley) — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 15:19:00 +0000

People may be shocked that 112 firms have been accused of bid rigging, but my guess is that the practice is so widespread, that it’s almost universal. It’s certainly just as common down at the smaller end of the building game as it appears to be up amongst the big boys, and I can remember it going on on a casual basis all over the place when I was involved in the jobbing building market.

Here’s what the current edition of the Housebuilder’s Bible currently has to say on the topic:

One practice which is now becoming prevalent is for busy builders to get together and divide up the work in a way (and for a price) that suits them – it’s called covering. It works like this. A job is put out to tender – typically by an architect – to four or five local builders. Some of them are so busy that they simply don’t want to take on any more work. Architects tend to regard refusals to quote rather badly and the builders feel that, rather than risking losing the possibility of quoting for future work, they would like to put in some price, any price. So the next step is to chat with the competition – it’s not hard, it happens naturally anyway – and soon an informal cartel is in place.

Reg: ‘Have you been asked to quote for the old Rectory Job at Chipping Butty?’
Charlie: ‘Yes. I like the look of it.’
Reg: ‘I really can’t see any way we could do that one – could you do us a favour and cover us.’
Charlie: ‘Sure – I’ve no doubt you’ll be able to return the favour soon.’

So Charlie puts in his price and tells Reg to put in a price maybe £20,000 higher. Reg knows he won’t get the job but he hasn’t spent any time or money quoting for it and he hasn’t upset the architect so he’ll stand a chance next time around when he does want the work.

Occasionally the builders know all the other tenderers on any given job – in matters like this the grapevine works extremely efficiently – so that there are cases where every builder on the tendering list has been in on the scam. They all know who is providing the lowest quote and, consequently, the lowest quote is in reality quite a high one. Such a complete stitch-up is perhaps rare but frequently two or three of the quotes will be for show purposes only.

Partly this problem stems from the way building work is procured in the first place. And in particular the practice of builders quoting for free causes a lot of problems. It sounds too good to be true and of course it is. It takes a good deal of time to generate an accurate quotation and most builders simply send tender documents off to a quantity surveyor who carries out the work for them (for a scaled fee, depending on the size of the job). Now builders often end up quoting for five or six jobs in order to win one so the overheads of quoting for jobs they don’t get becomes a significant business expense in itself. Anything that helps to ease the load of having to quote for jobs is manna from heaven for builders so you can see the attraction of any informal price fixing arrangements they might concoct.

Planning Alerts.com

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Brinkley) — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 18:37:00 +0000

Want to know what’s cooking, planning-wise, in your street? Visit Planning Alerts.com, key in your email address and the postcode you are interested in and you will receive email notification of any new applications in your neighbourhood. It’s in beta and not all local councils are yet included but it’s a good idea, and its free. Alerted to this by Geoff Jones.

GD Fever

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Brinkley) — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 07:02:00 +0000

What are these people watching? It’s a Wednesday night in Cambridge, there is European football on ITV and Sky, but no, they are not watching the footie. The Brit Awards are also on featuring Sharon Osbourne swearing at Vic Reeves, but they aren’t watching that either.

They are all gathered here to watch Grand Designs. Could this be the start of a new trend? The subject of the programme was an extraordinary house being built on a steep hillside in Bath and this particular group was brought together by Baufritz who supplied the above ground parts of the structure in the programme. Being a super efficient German housebuilding operation, they were pretty confident that Kevin McCloud was going to be complimentary and they invited a group of friends, prospective clients and staff along for beer and nibbles.

So were they over the moon? Or sick as a parrot? “Too much of the programme was spent on the groundworks” was a frequently heard observation, along with “Tiffany was magnificent” and “I never knew a staircase could be a thing of such beauty.” And no doubt about this result: England 0 Germany 2.

FIRST PASSIVHAUS IN UK?

noreply@blogger.com (Tim Pullen) — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 11:13:00 +0000

I have been lead to believe, and I think Mr Brinkley will confirm, that there are no house in the UK built to the German Passivhaus standard. I think Mr Brinkley was considering building one but I don’t know if he has done it. In any event, I have just come across what I believe to be the first.

It is actually 2 flats, a 1-bedroom and 2-bedroom, built in the inner city of Cardiff, by an Italian lady. The lady is in fact an architect, educated in Munich, so it is perhaps less surprising that she adopted the Passivhaus standard.

The property is a very contemporary looking house, built in the quiet cul-de-sacs of the Roath area of Cardiff. It has a slightly surreal feel being surrounded as it is by Victorian terraces. The 2 properties next door are also modern-looking but in a more traditional way, which helps to soften the impact of the house.

For those that don’t know the Passivhaus standard was established by the Passivhaus Istitut in Darmstadt, Germany is 1996. Since then around 6,000 houses have been built and certified to the standard, across Europe and the USA. What Passivhaus means, in broad terms, is that the building is insulated to a level that allows the sun and other passive heat gains to produce enough energy to heat the home. Passive gain is the heat from daily activity, given off by people, cooking, the shower, making toast, boiling the kettle. Pretty much everything we do produces heat which can be captured and circulated from warmer rooms (bathroom and kitchen) to cooler rooms (lounge and bedroom) by a heat recovery and ventilation system. Passive solar heat always plays a big role in this design of house and, as is typical, this house has a south-facing wall that is entirely glazed. These are triple-glazed sliding doors that give good access to the garden in summer but allow heat to be captured in winter. They have a U-value of less than 1 compared to 1.8 for the best double-glazed windows.

On the day I visited, the outside air temperature was 50C. The temperature inside was a very comfy 190C. This is a little lower than the typical central heated house, indeed my office is at this moment 210C, but feels cooler than the Cardiff house. This is attributed to the walls of the Cardiff house being lined in plywood. The lady who built it said “wood gives off less coolth than stone”. And I believe her. Mine is a stone cottage and the walls are cool to the touch. Her walls felt warm.

This house has a has a number of remarkable features.

1. It has no heating. No boiler, no fireplace, no stove, no fan heater, nothing. And it is warm.
2. It is a timber-frame house built entirely by local labour. It is not a pre-fab manufactured by hyper-efficient German engineers. She used ordinary Welsh builders with no special skills and no special knowledge. In fact these guys were learning on the job, which did lead to a bit of budget and schedule over-run.
3. The house came in at around £1,200 per m². Which may be a bit high for the standard of finish achieved, but is within bounds and would show a profit if she sold it.
4. The house has lots of solar energy on the roof, both thermal which generates around 70% of her hot water, and PV which generates about 50% of her electrical demand (and these are included in the £1,200 per m²)
5. The whole house, every last detail, is recyclable. Further, most of it is reusable, i.e. it has been built in such a way as to be immediately removable, without damage, to be re-used in another house.
6. She has installed rainwater harvesting to reduce her water consumption from the mains to less than half the normal.

A house that needs no heating needs a lot of insulation. This house has 380mm in the walls, 200mm under the floor and 430mm in the roof. This insulation is all hemp, which has low embodied energy and ever sequesters CO2. This compares to the normal UK standard of 90mm in the walls, 75mm under the floor and 270mm in the roof. In also needs a very high level of air-tightness to prevent heat losses from air movement, and that is where the contractors encountered most of their problems. They were just not used to building to these levels of precision and had to re-do a fair bit of the work.

The point of all this is that it can be done. What this lady has proved is that a self-builder can build a highly efficient house, with trivial running costs (she estimates her annual energy bill at less than £200) without recourse to specialist materials or suppliers. Under the Code for Sustainable Homes the house would easily reach level 4 and maybe level 5.

What she has shown is that all the bleating from the house building industry that zero carbon is unachievable is nonsense. If the process that this lady has pioneered were taken up by the big companies it could be lifted to level 6 and zero carbon emissions without too much trouble. And bring in affordable, sustainable and profitable houses. Is it not time that the house building industry stopped whinging and got on with building the houses we need?

Climbing on a Sustainable Bandwagon

noreply@blogger.com (Tim Pullen) — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 10:08:00 +0000

I have just had the rare privilege of attending an RIBA accredited seminar on “Innovation in Natural Ventilation”. For a sustainable building guy like me that is hot stuff. In these days of passive houses, ultra high insulation and ultra low air movement, Innovation in Natural Ventilation is just what I need.

So I duly pitch-up to the local college, full of anticipation for a couple of hours deeply immersed in thermal stacks, heat plumes, low pressure zones, thermal atria and natural convection. What did we get – a bloke selling windows.

A very nice bloke, who knows a lot about windows, but then there is only so much you can know about windows. He did tell us about a new window – parallel opening rather than top, bottom or side hung. Which was interesting for about 15 seconds but struggled to fill a 2 hours seminar.

The bloke’s sole claim for the sustainability of his windows was that opening a window means putting less cooling into the property. Which even he agreed was a bit thin in terms of sustainability credentials. These are, after all, glass panes in an aluminium and stainless steel frame. None or which are particularly sustainable.

By the end of the seminar the issue that was really making me cross was the title of the seminar. It had only one word of truth in it. There was no innovation (parallel opening windows might be an interesting spin but we have had sliding sashes for quite some time) and nothing natural. True, windows provide ventilation but that hardly warrants a 2 hour RIBA accredited seminar.

This was, in truth, another example of the double glazing industry finding a new way of selling an old product.

My view is that sustainability is a serious issue. Maybe I am bound to say that, but why wouldn’t I? I make a living from untangling the conflicting and often misleading information provided by companies purporting to offer a sustainable product. The Windsave wind turbine is a case in point. At £1,200 for your own micro-generation plant it looked like a good idea. The fact that it fundamentally does not work in the way the manufacturer’s suggest caused all sorts of people all sorts of problems, but didn’t seem to worry the manufacturers too much. Or the DTI who spent so much in grants for this one machine that it brought the whole grant scheme for all renewable energy technology crashing down.

Sustainability is said to be “meeting the needs of the current generation without impacting on the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. If the domestic housing industry is going to change to meet this challenge it has to be on the back of good information, with products that are truly innovative and that really are sustainable.

Maybe it is time for labelling! The BRE produce a guide to sustainable specification and RIBA have accredited this course. Maybe it is time for a star rating system for sustainable products so that the consumer (and the professional specifier) know what the real credentials of any product are. My guess is that the windows I saw today would struggle to get a single star, while wooden sliding sashes would be up at a 4 star rating.

Are these no heat homes?

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Brinkley) — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 08:18:00 +0000

“We are building homes with no heating systems already.” That was the bold claim made to me by Andy Porter of SIPS@CLAYS at the Harrogate Homebuilding & Renovating show back in November.

“Well, if you are, I’d like to see one,” I replied.

And so it came to pass that on Wednesday of last week, I met up with Andy and he took me to see two of their newly completed homes, one near Beverley in Yorkshire and the other in Accrington, Lancs, both of them what I would call classic selfbuilds.

Both homes had been constructed with Kingspan Tek SIPS panels, 142mm thick, with a U value of 0.2. This is hardly surprising as this is the construction system that SIPS@CLAYS specialise in — they were one of the original Kingspan Tek project partners. One of the houses was double glazed, the other used imported Swedish triple glazing, and both had been fitted with mechanical ventilation with heat recovery (MVHR). Neither house had anything in the way of conventional space heating, but both had wood burning stoves and both had solar thermal panels on the roof.

And what were they like to live in? Had they been cold during our recent cold snaps? Were the residents togged up with woolly hats and scarves, regretting their decision to be so bold as to do away with space heating?

Joan Barker, the builder of the house near Beverley, was still in the process of finishing off the house. She and her husband had moved in about a week before my visit (when it was really cold) and she said that it had been a little chilly for the first two days right after the move, and she admitted to using a couple of 2kW convector heaters to get up to comfort. But since then, no extra heating at all: and the wood burner was only being lit in the evenings. I would have said that she was already one happy bunny, and felt vindicated by her decision to do away with radiators and/or underfloor heating.

In Accrington, David and Jane Hartley had been living in their home since the summer and had had longer to figure out how it was responding. They kept their multifuel Dunsley stove going throughout the winter months (using coal only at night to keep it going) and the MVHR system distributed the heat around the house quite effectively. The room temperatures varied between 14°C and 18°C — not warm by current central heating standards but they found it quite comfortable. Although the stove is located in the middle of the large central living area downstairs, they tended to spend much of their evenings in an upstairs lounge and they noticed that the temperatures were more even upstairs than downstairs, where two of the peripheral rooms were noticeably cooler than the main living area where the stove is. This may be an effect of the uneven distribution of heat via the MVHR ducting.

So have they done it? Are these no heat homes, or are they merely modern variations of houses that might have been built in Beverley and Accrington 100 years ago, heated by solid fuel fires? Are we simply using modern technology (fans and ducting) to shift heat around a house more effectively? These are all interesting questions which I am not sure I can provide a coherent answer to just yet. But in the absence of any genuine Passive Houses in the UK thus far, these SIPs homes stand out as being as close to the new paradigm as we are likely to get in the next few years (being super insulated, pretty airtight, and mechanically ventilated) and they do look to be providing comfortable living conditions with a minimal energy input, which is after all what this low energy thing is all about. I guess the success or failure of these schemes should ultimately be assessed by the size of their fuel bills and in neither instance had they been in occupation long enough to make a judgement on this.

Thermal stores: Witherspoon's vision

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Brinkley) — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 07:17:00 +0000

The thermal store has been knocking around for a long time (at least since the 1980s) and in truth it’s had rather a chequered history. The concept is simple: it’s a hot water battery. You use it like a bank account — in fact, some people prefer the term heat bank to thermal store: you add heat from whatever source you choose, and you withdraw heat from it for your space heating and domestic hot water, indirectly via heat exchangers. As water is capable of storing around five times more heat than concrete or any other solid building material, many designers have got very excited about the possibilities for thermal water storage.

Over the years, the performance of thermal stores has struggled to live up to the hopes, and many of the early examples ended up being energy drains. Space heating and, in particular, domestic hot water require relatively high water temperatures and the fact that the thermal store has to deliver them indirectly, via heat exchange coils, meant that the water in the tank had to reach 80°C in order to deliver an acceptable output and this factor more than cancelled out any potential energy savings.

However, there is one man in Britain who has been busily beavering away on the design of thermal stores for years and he thinks he has overcome most, if not all, the problems relating to thermal stores. That man is Brent Witherspoon, pictured here with one of his prototypes, his company is Chelmer Heating. He has built up a successful business supplying whole house heating systems based around his thermal store designs and he is about to launch another thermal store, known as the EcoCat.

I went to see Brent just before the Xmas break and he spent two hours telling me all about the EcoCat and the thinking behind it. Whereas his existing thermal stores are designed to run on Economy 7 or to be hitched up to an oil or gas fired boiler, the EcoCat is aimed at green power sources, specifically heat pumps, solar panels and wood burners. In particular, Brent sees the EcoCat as a solution to a problem heat pumps have in producing domestic hot water: whilst they work efficiently at raising temperatures through 35°C (enough for underfloor heating), they don’t look so clever when asked to do more work. If you want hot water for the tap at 60°C, then you might just as well use an ordinary electric immersion heater, which is what a lot of heat pump designs do (though they tend to keep rather quiet about it). The Eco Cat is designed to get around this by incorporating an unvented hot water cylinder within it. When the sun shines, the solar panels will supply the bulk of the domestic hot water: and when it doesn’t, there is a small electric boiler to boost the temperature up from what the heat pump can sensibly do.

The EcoCat addresses another problem which Brent has identified: the typical output of a heat pump is 40lts per minute, whereas the typical requirement for an underfloor heating system is less than 20lts per minute and, when some of the circuits are shut down, this can fall to just 5lts per minute. This imbalance results in the return temperature of the water in the underfloor heating system being too high for optimal efficiency, which causes the heat pump to turn on and off far too often and thus perform way below the intended efficiency level. Brent’s design sidesteps the problem by asking the heat pump to heat the water in the EcoCat, rather than feeding directly into the underfloor heating system. It’s an interesting feature and it’s one that thus far Brent is having trouble convincing heat pump manufacturers that they actually need!

But the principle of the EcoCat is to take the proposition of the thermal store and refine it to the point where it really does add value. As you might imagine, it’s quite a complex beast and it sells for over £2,000, way more than any conventional water storage medium you might choose as an alternative. On the other hand, it’s cheaper than virtually all the low carbon and renewable technologies you might think of using in a new house and its purpose is primarily to get them to work together in the most efficient manner possible.

Where Brent sees an economic advantage for his system is that you can build a low carbon heating system around it using an air source heat pump rather than the more expensive ground source version. The fact that air source heat pumps are less efficient than ground source is compensated for by the use of solar thermal.

Brent reckons he can install a heating system for a new house for less than £15,000:
Air source heat pump rated at 17kW - £4,500 (he currently uses the Unico system)
Underfloor heating pipe and controls: £4,000
EcoCat Thermal Store: £2,300
Flat plate solar panels: £3,000
Electric boiler: £900 (this is to get DHW up to temperature in the winter).

So what Brent is essentially offering is a whole house heating and hot water system, based around his unique vision of what the thermal store is capable of. He has identified that it is not enough just to sell a thermal store: to get them to sing, you have to design the whole house heating system around it.

HIPS update

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Brinkley) — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 09:08:00 +0000

Whilst the housing market may be taking a bath, many people (OK… Kirstie Allsports) are tempted to blame the introduction of HIPS which are now required on all new homes in England & Wales. But the price of providing these seems to be falling by the day. There are now apparently 10,000 trained Energy Assessors and they are getting as little as £60 a house for their efforts. Methinks they’d be better off with a window cleaning round. Many estate agents are swallowing the extra costs within their fee structures in any event.

Compared with the huge increases in stamp duty on property purchases, brought in by Chancellor Gordon Brown in his first budget in 1997, the cost of HIPs is nothing but a minor irritant.

Sign of the Times

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Brinkley) — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 11:48:00 +0000

Welcome to the Property Snake.

Lifetime Homes: the 16 steps

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Brinkley) — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 05:38:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Brinkley) — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 06:54:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Tim Pullen) — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 16:05:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Brinkley) — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 11:36:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Tim Pullen) — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 13:44:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Brinkley) — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 19:10:00 +0000

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?

noreply@blogger.com (Tim Pullen) — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 16:07:00 +0000

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.

On Carbon Offsetting

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Brinkley) — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 06:58:00 +0000

A couple of weeks ago I went to a gathering organised by Cambridge Energy. The subject of debate was Carbon Offsetting: fix or fig-leaf? And very interesting it all proved to be.

I am of the camp that thinks it's pretty much fig-leaf. The first person I bumped into there was Andy Brown, an old acquaintance of mine who now works at Cambridge Architectural Research. Andy is even more of a fig-leafer than I am. He runs something called Cambridge Carbon Footprint in his spare time; I am not completely clear what it does but one thing it doesn’t do is sell carbon offsets.

The speakers at the event were a mixed bunch. Fiona Harvey of the Financial Times gave a run down of some of the carbon offset scams she had uncovered recently. These included a company selling offsets which consisted of sequestering CO2 by pumping it down into oil wells, when the real purpose of this operation was to increase the gas pressure in the wells and thereby help to extract the last of the oil down there.

Then Michael Schlup told us about the Gold Standard, a sort of UN backed quality assurance scheme for carbon offsets. I wasn’t convinced but he made the interesting point that you can’t realistically offset within Europe because the total amount of CO2 released is already capped (at least in theory, by Kyoto): it therefore only works in territories where there is no capping. Hence so many carbon offsetting schemes being Third World projects.

Now many people are cynical about rock stars offsetting their world tours by planting mango forests in India, but are happy to accept the principle of offsetting home produced renewable energy in order to obtain zero carbon status for a housing project. But logically, it’s all offsetting. As is buying electricity from a green supplier. Unless you aim to live entirely off grid and entirely without recourse to fossil fuels, which most people think is virtually impossible in the Western world today, then you can only approach being carbon neutral by trading your excess renewable power or biomass sequestration project, or by getting someone else to do this for you.

So despite all the scams and the indulgences it attracts, the principle of offsetting is sound. But it still sticks in the craw: the idea that I can burn more carbon if you do something to absorb that carbon. There is, whether you like it or not, something rather unpleasant going on here. It has been expertly satirised by Andy Brown’s son, Alex Randall, who runs the Cheat Neutral website.

This debate is particularly relevant to the Code for Sustainable Homes because it seems happy to accept some forms of offsetting but not others. This is difficult territory.

• The CSH accepts that it’s not possible to have a house generate all its electricity all the time, so it is permissible to trade any surplus you generate on sunny or windy days with the National Grid. Like it or not, that’s an offset.

• But the CSH also recognises that is impractical for every Code Level 6 house to be expected to generate renewable power, so the offset is extended to include community power schemes, such as CHP and district heating. So we have moved a level further out: they now accept offsite offsetting.

• How far off site can this renewable power plant be situated? It seems churlish to impose a maximum distance, so they have to accept that it could be many miles away. But how far? How about out in the North Sea?

By now, you can see that we are straying into very difficult territory. The CSH zero carbon definition is adamant that it won’t allow schemes simply to sign up for a renewable electricity tariff, because anyone can do that anytime. Somehow they want to be able to ensure that the renewable power generated for the scheme is unique and is additional to any other source, but this is much easier said than done. How do you enforce an individual home owner, let alone an entire housing scheme, to finance, say, an off shore windfarm? Especially in a country where we are all free to switch power suppliers at the click of a mouse. The government’s definition of zero carbon hinges on this conundrum and I don’t think anyone is going to be able to come up with a compelling definition, because the rules they dream up will look arbitrary and nonsensical.

The problem is of course that once you accept one bit of the offsetting model as being legitimate, then logically it’s all legitimate. After all carbon molecules don’t much care what happens to them and as far as CO2 reduction is concerned, a carbon molecule sequestered in an Indian mango forest is just as good as one saved from being burned in a power station because you have PV on your roof.

I don’t have a lot of sympathy for the government here. After all, it was they who dreamed up this silly target of the zero carbon home, something that is impossible to exist without embracing the concept of carbon offsetting. They now want to pick and choose which offsetting bits they like and which they don’t. I will rather enjoy watching them wriggle on their own hook.

Damned difficult, this carbon offsetting.

Michelle Kaufmann

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Brinkley) — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 07:06:00 +0000

Check out this video link if you want to know more about California’s answer to Bill Dunster.

Wood burning stoves: solution or problem?

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Brinkley) — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 11:07:00 +0000

My attention has been caught by a fascinating thread over on the green building forum. It concerns the problems that one contributor, Justin, has been having with his neighbours complaining about the smoke from his wood burning stove. Or, as Justin likes to call them, “rich lard arses with no concept of sustainability, who run their car engines on cold mornings for minutes on end polluting my front garden as I get on my bicycle.”

Cue a general bashing of Daily Mail-reading Mondeo man? Not quite. Paul in Montreal, who contributes knowledgably on a number of subjects on this forum, describes the problems they have been having in Canada. “Wood burning has increased in popularity over the past decade to such an extent that we get smog in winter. This is due to the particulates from wood fires — even EPA low emission fireplaces emit significantly more hydrocarbons and particulates than, say, a gas fire.”

And an environmental health officer going by the handle of Rustychain commented about complaints about wood burners. “If there is a large shift in the number of people burning wood, clean stoves or not, we can expect air quality problems.”

This caused Justin to reconsider some of his earlier diatribe. “One irony is that back in the days when I owned an old house in a more rural village, and ran a hugely inefficient open wood fire, there was so much heat in the flue that the exhaust gas mostly shot straight up into the air and nobody knew about it. This delightful little stove with its two stage combustion and dancing flame burning off the soot as I watch just has less oomph left at the top of the stack. On reflection, it is probably causing more local pollution than the hugely inefficient open fires burning 5 times as much fuel.”

The most recent contribution was from John11668 who suggested that Justin should get a Flue Gas Analysis carried out. “This could give you some ammunition to defend your case to your neighbours but I suspect that it is more likely to demonstrate to you that your appliance is a poisonous nuisance in a built up area. Sold fuel stoves are not really suitable for a dormitory suburb, even if you can see the open countryside from your upstairs window.”

Energy saving advice

noreply@blogger.com (Ovolo Books) — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 07:28:00 +0000

Dear Mr Brinkley. Thankyou for filling out our home energy check questionnaire: an important step towards using less energy to heat, light and power your home. Using the information you’ve provided, we’ve come up with a practical look at the energy you use and can save at home.

About a month previously I had responded to a questionnaire that had arrived, unsolicited, by mail from the Energy Savings Trust. It asked me lots of questions about my house and suggested that if I send it back to them they will supply me with a mini energy audit. Only I don’t think they called it that.

I was interested to know what they would say because our house is arguably an interesting case. Built in 1992, it was certainly someway in advance of building regulations at the time. In particular, it incorporated underfloor insulation (not mandatory until 2002) and low-e double glazing (back when low-e was cutting edge). The walls had a little extra insulation and the oil-fired boiler heating system was reasonably well designed and included zone control, as well as thermostatic and time switching. It’s a well-built house and it probably rated as a Best Practice for 1992 sort of house, but certainly not an eco house.

The question that I was interested to see answered was what the EST would suggest that I did to upgrade the house. In fact, they have only made one suggestion. That is that we upgrade the boiler to a condensing boiler for a saving of £85 a year. Or, in terms of CO2, 0.6 tonnes.

Funnily enough, we did consider installing a condensing boiler when we built the house. Back then, there was only one oil-fired condenser on the market, made by Geminox, a French manufacturer. Our green-tinged plumber, Norman Cox, was keen for us to fit one, but in the end I took the decision that it wasn’t worth paying the extra £1,000 or so required to fit — cash was tight back in 1992 and I had heard one or two stories about the early Geminoxes which didn’t inspire confidence.

We ended up with a Boulter Camray (now part of the Worcester Bosch group) which has been chugging away these past 15 years. It gets an annual service (cost around £60 plus parts) and it occasionally breaks down. The last time this happened, I enquired from Shelford Heating about replacing the boiler with a condenser but was told that not only would we have to bear the cost of a new boiler, but that the oil tank would have to move because the position we placed it in in 1992 (right next to the house wall) is now regarded as a fire hazard (Part J of the building regs having been “upgraded”). Not only would that double the expense but there is no obvious place in the steeply sloping garden to place a new oil tank. It would in fact represent a major piece of civil engineering. So a replacement boiler would probably end up costing us around £8,000. Hmm. Should have fitted the Geminox 15 years ago, shouldn’t I.

Anyway, I am slowly but surely getting around to the point of this post. The Energy Saving Trust gave us a C rating, based on what I told them. This is sort of similar to the rating we would be getting from an energy performance certificate. I have no quibbles with that: it was what I expected. But the point is that they only made the one suggestion for improvement, which was to replace the old boiler with something more efficient. The saving was actually pretty minimal. Either with or without a condensing boiler, our not very old house still uses a fuck of a lot of oil. Around 2500lts each year (that’s just over a tank full). That converts to just over 25,000kWh, which converts to 7 tonnes CO2 per annum. The Energy Savings Trust estimation is pretty accurate on the size of our oil bill (just about £1,000 with oil at 36p/lt) but grossly underestimates our CO2 footprint: they suggest just 4.1 tonnes of CO2 per annum. I reckon it is over 7 tonnes. Why should that be? Do they use different conversion factors to me? I’m on 0.265kg CO2/kWh, which is the “industry standard.”

So my poser for the day is what should happen to houses like ours? If it was built to Passivhaus standards, or Code Level 4, and was still heated using an oil-fired boiler, it would be burning about a third or even a quarter of this quantity of oil, releasing maybe just 1.5 tonnes of CO2 a year to get space heating and hot water. So, although our house is probably more energy efficient than 90% of the UK housing stock, it still performs miserably in terms of what could be done. But there appears to be no upgrade path apart from fitting a condensing boiler, which really only makes a marginal difference.

I don’t have an answer to this, but it does highlight the enormity of the problem. What exactly do you do to a house that already has cavities full of insulation and has 200mm of the stuff in the loft, but still eats energy like it’s going out of fashion?

Smoke alarms: Two or Four?

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Brinkley) — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 14:03:00 +0000

When Part B of the England & Wales building regs concerning fire protection changed in April 2007, most of the attention, as far as domestic work was concerned, went on the fact that the requirement for self-closing fire doors had been relaxed. This was good news for builders and householders because self-closers have always been very unpopular and have frequently only been fitted to please the building inspector, and have been removed once the job was finalled.

But of course, it’s never quite that simple. The reason the boffins felt relaxed enough to drop a requirement was because of the undoubted success that compulsory smoke alarms have had in preventing deaths and injuries from fire. I have heard it said that their introduction, in 1992, into the building regs has proved to be the single most effective preventative measure ever devised, and that smoke detection has rendered other safety measures largely redundant.

But there’s smoke detection and smoke detection and the latest Part B slipped in a clause about including more smoke detection in new households. Or did it? Up until now, Part B was easily met by installing detectors in the common areas (hallways, stairwells), one per floor. This is the basic standard, known in the trade as LD3. But Part B, 2007 version, suggests that smoke detection should now be carried out in accordance with the relevant British Standard, BS5839 (Part 6). Now this BS standard is calling for the superior standard LD2, which calls for detectors in high risk fire areas, principally kitchens and living rooms, as well as the common areas. If it’s to be LD2, then each two storey house would require four detectors: if it’s LD3, then just the two that we have been fitting since 1992.

You’d think it would be an open and shut case. BS5839 calls for LD2, so LD2 it must be. But the wording of Clause 1.3 in Part B1 is deliciously ambiguous. It says in accordance with BS 5839-6:2004 to at least a Grade D category LD3 standard, despite the fact that the BS specifically calls for LD2!

So what is happening on the ground. How are the NHBC and the local authority building inspectors interpreting this conundrum? Two detectors or four? It seems that the NHBC supports the move to LD2, but isn’t enforcing it. And most local authorities are following suit, though the odd inspector is insisting on the higher LD2 standard. In other words, it’s a mess.

Incidentally, there are basically three different kinds of detector. The cheapest one is the ionisation type which gets fitted into the great bulk of stairwells and hallways: it picks up small (non-visible) smoke particles and is prone to springing false alarms if situated right next to the kitchen door. In kitchens, you really need to avoid smoke detectors altogether and fit a heat detector, whereas in living rooms, especially those with an open fire or a stove, you are probably best off with an optical detector. So a typical LD2 installation would involve using all three types of detector.

Detectors generally are very responsive and this is one of their main failings — too many false alarms, causing householders to disable them in Basil Fawlty-style fits of anger. They are probably good for ten or fifteen years and then ought to be replaced if they are to continue serving their purpose. Most manufacturers have models which can be slid out of their housing without even turning off the mains, so it should be possible to replace a unit without having to rewire.

Thanks to Neil Perdell, Technical Services Manager of Aico for his help in piecing together this article.

My hot tip for property investors

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Brinkley) — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 09:38:00 +0000

Here’s an interesting little graph, which I gleaned from the Oct 07 edition of Housebuilder magazine. It shows the extraordinary transformation in the supply of new homes in Britain over the past decade. In 1998, nearly half of all new homes were detached. Today, the figure is just 20%. In contrast, flats have gone from around 18% of the total to just under 50%. Effectively, the positions of detached houses and flats have swapped over, whilst terraced houses and semis have stayed much as they were, at least in terms of proportions of overall mix.

Now there are well-known reasons for this turnaround. 1998 marked the start of the brownfield land building campaign and the move towards densification. Or put another way, it marked the beginning of the end of developers being able to buy green fields and plonk estates of detached houses on them at very low densities.

Nevertheless, I am still struck by this graph. The turnaround really is quite dramatic. And it does make you wonder whether this emphasis on building flats is sustainable (in the economic sense). It would seem that, all other things being equal (i.e. pre 1998), housebuilders would be knocking out masses more detached houses than they are, but the constraints of the planning policies have more or less put a stop to this. Presumably the underlying demand for detached homes is as large as ever: given the choice, most people would probably rather bring up a family in a detached house with a garden rather than a flat. And most young flat dwellers would probably envisage themselves moving into a detached house if and when they start families. That looks as though it’s going to become an increasingly difficult aspiration to meet. So if this new housing mix remains in place — or even becomes more pronounced over the coming years — then expect to see the relative value of detached houses increase, and flats to decrease.

How’s that for a bit of financial forecasting? Revisit this blog in 2017 and see if my prediction works out.

Can a bathroom makeover be eco-friendly?

noreply@blogger.com (Tim Pullen) — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 10:59:00 +0000

I was recently asked to write an article on “How to Give Your Bathroom an Eco-Makeover”. My first reaction was to blanche. How can anything as superficial as a “makeover” be eco-friendly? The eco-cause, green building, sustainability, these are important issues that cannot be taken so lightly as to be associated with a quick lick of organic paint and some recycled batik cushions.

But then I paused and thought a moment. I have for a long time believed in the maxim that change is a process, not an event. I also believe that we have to change the way we build houses and live in them. If for no other reason than that there is no good reason to go on the way we are. Maybe its is a generation thing (maybe I am just mean), but I abhor waste and the way we build houses is massively wasteful. They waste materials, many of which are from finite resources, they waste energy, again mostly from a finite resource, and most importantly they waste money. And they produce waste, and lots of it.

The Government is forcing the change with the Ecohomes standard, The Code for Sustainable Homes and significant stiffening of the Building Regulations. Mark Brinkley has written at length in this blog about the anomalies in these new codes and how they are more or less ineffective. Most of which I agree with. But he makes my point for me. These new standards are making the necessary change an event – zero carbon by 2016 – without winning the hearts and minds necessary to make it happen. They certainly haven’t won Mark Brinkley’s heart or mind, and as I travel around speaking on sustainability I find he is not alone.

I am about to make a presentation to a group of building control officers on the Ecohomes standard. The reason? Their boss had caught another of my presentations and had not realised what the standard entailed or how building control officers would be involved. Again, the change has been dumped on them without any attempt to justify its aims or to win them over to the cause – or, it seems, even to provide them with basic training as to what the standards contain. What will happen is that the building control officers, upon whom the self-builder or developer will depend, will be poorly informed and resentful. As a consequence they will, at best, be unhelpful and maybe even obstructive.

I have experience of other quality management systems and what happens is that people do as little as possible to comply and spend all their time, and money, finding ways around each particular requirement. That already happens with Building Regs and always has. It is a fence we have to jump over and obviously we clear it by as little as possible. Very rarely, almost never, do you find any attempt to voluntarily exceed the standard. The same is set to apply to the Code and Ecohomes, although the opportunity still exists to “sell” the idea as something more than a minimum standard that we are dragged, kicking and screaming, to. We could be encouraged to take it on with enthusiasm; as a means of building better homes, less wasteful homes, homes that will last 100 years.

To take an example, I have a client who is converting a cob barn to what will be a lovely home. The problem he has is that building control has no knowledge of the thermal performance of a cob wall (for the uninitiated, cob is a mixture of clay and straw formed into walls 500mm to 700mm thick and rendered with lime. It is a building method some 400 years old that is still fairly common in the South West of England). Cob is know to provide a relatively constant internal temperature and consequently needs little energy to heat – the cob providing good thermal mass. What my client has to do is pay Plymouth University to test the cob walls and arrive at a U-value to convince building control that this 200 year old building is good to go. Not only that, but everyone, wanting to use cob has to do the same thing. You would think that building control would learn that cob over 500mm thick complies, but no. BRE has not tested it so it does not appear in the tables, and therefore has to be tested afresh every time.

The Code is about building sustainable homes and here is a family trying to do exactly that and being stymied at every turn.

There are anomalies in the standards, bits that are unworkable and requirements that appear to make no sense. But there is also a lot that is good in them. Measuring the amount of energy and water we use has to be a good start. Raising the standard of noise insulation and encouraging the use of brownfield sites also have to be good ideas, as does encouraging the use of materials from sustainable sources. But of course this great Government of ours is deaf to the pleas that the anomalies need to be addressed. Thereby condemning the Code to be no more than another pile of bureaucratic paperwork that has to be complied with.

If, like me, you believe that changing the way we build and power our houses is a good idea – because it is a good idea to leave something for our children’s children to build with – then embrace the Code. Work round the anomalies, step over the unworkable bits and move on. In essence it provides the basis for a new way of thinking about how to build, and in time, maybe, it will evolve into a useful document.

Have thought all these thoughts, I returned to the article with a fresh view. Change is a process and it has to start somewhere. A small change that is successful is more likely to lead to more change than a big change that fails. So giving your bathroom an eco-makeover is actually a great idea. It enables the homeowner to address all the key issues – energy, water and materials – in microcosm. The project is likely to be successful as it is doable, affordable and the changes wrought will be effective. It is to be hoped that the success will lead to further projects, more success and a realisation that the eco-cause is not exclusively for people with beards and open-toed sandals.

Drilling Down into the Code: Part 3

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Brinkley) — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 12:24:00 +0000

The Code for Sustainable Homes is a hotch potch. Whilst zero carbon and, to a much lesser extent, water use reduction have been discussed at length, if you were to build the most energy and water efficient house possible, you’d still only score 44% of the maximum available eco points. That would get you to Code Level 1. Code Level 6, the top level, requires a score of 90%.

So how would you go about garnering the other percentage points required to lever your house up from Code Level 1 to Level 6?

The answer is that you have to accumulate credits (of varying value) by undertaking all manner of other actions. Some are relatively easy:
• Provision for cycle storage — score 2.5%
• Provision of a home office — score 1.25%
• Provision of recycling bins and a compost bin — 4.75%
• Use EU approved insulation — 0.6%

Others are more taxing and potentially a lot more costly
• Build to Lifetime Homes standards — 4.75%
• Build to Secured by Design standards — 2.25%
• Improve on Part E sound regulations — 4.75%
• Use A+ rated materials from the Green Guide for Specification — 4.5%
• Build into the basement or the loftspace — 2.65%

You can only afford to lose 10% of the credits available if you want to qualify for Code Level 6. As there are likely to be some areas where your site cannot score at all, the likelihood is that designers will be forced to incorporate practically every feature mentioned in the Code. The elbow room for trade-off is remarkably limited.

This is where the Code gets into sticky ground. A lot of these features — there are 34 tests applied in all — are concerned with good design and best practice, but not necessarily to do with sustainability. For instance, having your builder signed up for the Considerate Contractors Scheme (worth 2.25%) is all very well but doesn’t really make much difference to climate change. So why is it being included in the Code?

And the requirement for A or A+ rated materials is effectively going to blacklist an awful lot of C rated materials. I am not sure the PVCu manufacturers have yet twigged this, but the Code has it in for them.