Wood Vs Other Construction Materials

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http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/07/more-proof-that-wood-is-the-greenest-building-material.php?campaign=weekly_nl

Every time you see a wood building, it’s a storehouse of carbon from the forest. When you see steel or concrete, you’re seeing the emissions of carbon dioxide that had to go into the atmosphere for those structures to go up.

Chatting to one developer company, yes wood doesn’t have any thermal mass, but when you are heating (or cooling) the building, you don’t need to also heat (or cool) the physical ‘thermal mass’ structure either.

German, Swedish & UK "kit house construction"

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Taken from http://www.the-self-build-guide.co.uk/self-build-kit-houses.html:

German and Swedish companies often spring to mind when you think of kit house construction and if you are a fan of Grand Designs then you will be familiar with the uber cool Huf Haus and it’s impressive construction process. Many UK companies offer kit solutions and expansion in this area is set to continue.

There are numerous suppliers offering self build kit houses. The following are some of the better known but there are plenty of others worth considering:

Potton– The UK’s leading supplier of timber framed packages.
– Their Lighthouse design project looks cool !

Huf Haus– High quality German post and beam system with extensive glazing.

Benfield ATT– UK based timber frame kit company and innovators in timber construction.

Cloud Nine– UK company producing prefabricated, stylish timber framed eco homes.

Fleming Homes– Producing “one off” timber frame kit houses in the UK for 25 years.

Baufritz– German manufacturer creating individually designed, ecologically friendly homes.
– More info on them at www.top100.org.uk/timber_frame_eco_homes.html
 – BUT they have a start price of £450,000.

Scandia-Hus– Supplier of Swedish energy saving timber framed homes.

WeberHaus– German self build timber frame specialist.

Skye Homes (from the Isle of Skye) look to have nice timber frame houses, that should be built to deal with coastal and sea exposed sites.

www.builditgreen.co.uk – Green orientated company that can provide elements to full turnkey solution, where high end is £1,500 to £2000 per sq m. Experienced with timber frame and SIPs. Built a house in Falmouth.

eco-fab.co.uk are based just outside Bodmin. Their claim is that they are “The most high performance sustainable pre-fab building system availiable in the UK”. Prefabricated buildings that use straw-bale and wood filled modular panels in a glulam post and beam frame. They also use sheeps’s wool and recylced products in the buildings. House prices go from £1,400 to £2,000 psm depending on size, site constraints and location.

Some Key Questions when chatting to these and other suppliers:

  • Price per sq ft or per sq m. ?
    – It seems that the big ticket items of stairs, heating system, bathrooms mean that there is an optimal size of 3,000 to 3,500 sq ft (275 to 325 sq m) above which houses go into a 2nd league re extra features and so a growing price per sq ft.
  • What is the maximum room span ?
    – For Baufritz this was about 5m with wood, after which need to put a steel joist in.
  • Coastal cliff top exposure.
    – Need to go for high grade marine steel etc.

How Much ?

Simon was at a civil engineers / surveyors evening event, and was sat next to a quantity surveyor from a company specialising in “eco homes / builds”. His key comment was that:

Cost comes down to determining clients standard of finish.

End Decision

I had a look at quite a few buildings in construction and complete.
I compared lots of prices and evolved my own design ideas.

In the end I’ve chosen Bodmin (Cornwall) based ARCO2 architects and Eco-Fab builders because of not only price, which is great, but they match my aspirations for an eco house, that is not only energy efficient once up and running, but it considers and where possible uses low energy, low carbon (“carbon neutral”) materials.

When I visited a Hanse House in construction, I was put off by the level of polystyrene, foam guns etc. in the materials. They have a great reputation for the end product energy efficiency, but I’m not comfortable with their decisions on construction materials.

Construction (embodied) Energy Vs Operational Energy

BBC Article: Self-build: Should people build their own homes?

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An interesting article on the BBC Website:

The government wants to double the number of people building their own homes. But is it wise to encourage the population to take up DIY housebuilding?
Housing Minister Grant Shapps will later this week launch an action plan to double the number of self-build homes within a decade.
…. the truth is that most self builders hire an architect and do a bit of decorating themselves.”
But overall, self-build saves money, supporters argue. The average new build home costs £189,940 compared to a self-build cost of £84,000 if you do the work yourself or £146,000 if you employ tradesmen to do it for you.

Is PassivHaus worth it ?

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An interesting article on the cost benefit of PassivHaus, that seems to conclude that PassivHaus is a fantastic standard to look at, to work towards, but that going the whole way on all points, and getting PassivHaus certified does not currently make economic sense (and possibly environmental ?) given the benefit of those last steps.

This sounds very much like the 80:20 rule where it takes most of the effort to get the last 20% of the gain.

http://www.homebuilding.co.uk/feature/passivhaus-analysis

….. better thermal performance and it will cost less to run, but it is likely to be in the region of £5 to £10 per month. Whether that is enough to justify the extra investment is the issue.

Triple glazed windows PLUS minimised environmental impact during manufacture!

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Ecoplus3 is our new flagship range of handcrafted windows and doors, for beautiful, sustainable homes. Made in our workshops in West Yorkshire, Ecoplus3 comes with triple glazing as standard* and systematically addresses the environmental issues relating to window manufacture. Ecoplus3 is the third evolution of our Ecoplus range since its launch in 1995, taking its thermal performance to a new level.

More details at http://www.greenbuildingstore.co.uk/page–ecoplus-natural-timber-windows-doors.html

Low Carbon Living Experiment Ends. Did The Lindell Family Achieve a One Tonne Life?

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An interesting article on this great project to try and live at 1 tonne per person.

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/06/low-carbon-living-experiment-ends-one-tonne-life-results.php?campaign=daily_nl

It seems the “rucksack” (or baggage) of CO2 from the construction of where we live and what we use is what stopped them getting to the target 1 tonne:

Their “rucksack” of 900 kilograms stopped them from reaching the one tonne target. This “rucksack” consists of the CO² emissions that take place when various products are manufactured, such as the house, solar panels, car, furniture and clothes. However, they demonstrated that it is possible to get very close to one tonne, however it does involve a change in lifestyle and the information to make the right changes.

So, you can massively reduce your CO2 impact !

– Transport emissions dropped more than 90%
– CO2 emissions produced in the home were halved
– Food carbon emissions were reduced 84% by going vegan
– Manufacturing of house and goods prevents a ‘One Tonne Life’

The family used to live at “a regular high of 7.3 tonnes”. The new systems and way of living comfortably got to comfortably reach a constant low of 2.5 tonnes. Then “through a strict diet of using one less room in the house, no TV, no shopping and only eating vegan food they managed to reduce their footprint to 1.5 tonnes per person.”

 

 

Solar Panel Guide – Pay, free or try then buy ?

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The Money Saving Expert team have written a new updated guide to “Free Solar Panels”.

Full details at http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/utilities/free-solar-panels.

They give 3 main routes:

  • Buy panels for £8,000-£14,000. If you have cash, on top of electricity savings the Govt’s feed-in tariff scheme could pay back double your spend. Eg, a £12,000 system could net £25,750 over 25 years (see How To Buy Solar Panels).
  • Free panels, but you don’t keep ‘feed-in’ tariff. If you’re in England, Wales or, in a few cases, Scotland, some companies fit panels for free, but they then keep the big-money feed-in gain. You just keep the £70 electricity saving, though prices are predicted to rise massively over 20 years, so the saving could jump.
  • Try free then buy. An interesting new option from E.on.
    You get free panels, but it lets you buy ’em out, you can do it at a reasonable price to gain the feed-in tariff.

Solar Panels :: Roof angle and feed in tarrifs

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From http://www.lowenergyhouse.com/eco-home.html:

The roof is orientated south at 36 degrees from the horizontal to   allow maximum solar gain for the solar collectors positioned on it.

From http://www.feedintariffs.co.uk/solar-pv.html:

Technology Type
Scale of Technology
01/04/11
Tariff (Years)
Solar PV 0 to 4 kW (New-Build) 37.8p 25
Solar PV 0 to 4 kW (Retro-fit) 43.3p 25
Solar PV 4 kW to 10 kW 37.8p 25
Solar PV 10 kW to 100 kW 32.9p 25
Solar PV 100 kW to 5 MW 30.7p 25
Solar PV Stand Alone System 30.7p 25

Parish Council meeting regarding the proposed housing development off Tregundy Lane

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The council meeting was well attended with 30 to 50 people there. They seemed to mostly be against the proposed development. (Nobody from the public spoke up for the development.)

The key concerns presented by the public seemed to be:

  1. Not all of the required animal surveys had been undertaken so an environmental impact assessment could not as yet be properly carried out.
    • Insufficient bat surveys
    • The current surveys excluded required protected mammal surveys.
  2. Their had been agro chemical spraying of the proposed development site, where the individual(s) doing the spraying warned those surrounding residents he knew (several were in the audience) to close windows and doors, to stay indoors, to not go onto the land for at least 2 weeks. This was presented as a deliberate move by the owner of the land to cull the current bio diversity.

The key issues raised by the councillors seemed to be:

  1. The highways report was not conclusive with regards to access being sufficient, so this needs further investigation. This related not only to the immediate site access up from Tregundy Lane, but also those roads that lead up to the proposed road into the development (Tregundy Lane up from Tywarnhayle Road, Cliff Road and Droskyn Way).
  2. They were concerned by the public point that not all wildlife surveys had been completed as apparently required.
  3. There is a fundamental need for affordable housing in Perranporth. With 200 to 250 people on the local affordable housing register, the village MUST allow expansion which includes affordable housing. Of the 3 developments the village has on the way, this is the first to come to the table, but it is not the development preferred by the parish council (they are currently biased to the Lisky Hill site). To keep the village young, affordable housing needs to be within reach of the current youth. There seemed to be discussion that the proposal affordable housing was going to be £67,000 for 1 bedroom units and £134,000 for 3 bedroom units.

So the council voted to neither approve or disapprove of the development, but say they wanted further investigation and information on the access and wildlife surveys.

Two other points of note were that the developer was not going to be who everybody thought it was going to be. I had heard, more than once, that Norwegian Properties were to be the developer, so it’s presumably not them?

Secondly that the land is currently owned by Ian Moore.