Behind the green door

 

We all know that we have to reduce our carbon footprint, but how is this going to impact on new home design? MICHELLE MANNING-WAREHAM spoke to an ecohome expert to find out.

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Alex Minshull, is a Bristol City Council Environmental Quality and Sustainable City Team Manager. As part of his job, he provides “educational awareness raising services to the people in Bristol, and that ranges from the demonstration Ecohome through to exhibitions and information stands.”

Open Monday to Friday and some weekends, the Ecohome serves to show exactly how an ecobuild is done. In 1995, Bristol City Council decided to build the house as a way to show how sustainable buildings can be constructed and furnished. After a competition to find a suitable architect, the final appointment was given to Bristol-based firm Bruges Tozer, who designed a thoroughly low impact home that uses as little energy as possible.

Based at the CREATE Centre, the home’s achievements are possible for domestic new builds. Key features include a south-facing roof and conservatory; heavy insulation; use of natural, recycled and locally sourced materials; energy and water-saving appliances used throughout.

Minshull elaborated: “There are three ways in which to make entirely eco-friendly new builds. The first way is to minimise heat loss through making the building air tight, so you haven’t got drafts. The second is through insulation from building fabric, so you aren’t losing the heat you’re generating. And then the final way is to have really efficient energy systems within it - we’re talking about energy efficient heating systems and lighting.”

Government style

Minshull described how the “new code for sustainable homes that the government has just produced” will impact every new build home over the next eight years. Known as the BREEAM Code, it aims to protect the environment by providing guidance on the construction of high performance homes built with sustainability in mind.

“It will require by 2016,” he explained, “that all homes’ regulated emissions (the emissions that are associated with a house when you buy it brand new,) the lighting, heating and fixtures, are carbon neutral (but not the TV and radio that you might have when you move in).

“It is going to require significant changes in the way we design new buildings and you’re beginning to see that feeding in some of the new designs coming through, like some of the eco towns being built around the country as part of a government initiative - one of those is in Bristol and you’ll see that the visual design is quite different from the ordinary volume houses built today.”

What you use and how you use it

Building homes that adhere to government principles, as well as being kind to the environment, require thought into the materials used and the design of the build itself. Other considerations such as energy efficient methods and appliances are very important as well, but if there isn’t any insulation, energy will escape meaning that you will be emitting more carbon and performing more wasteful practises despite your best intentions.

Minshull explains how materials can do half the work in conserving energy in new builds. He said: “If you are looking at things like insulation materials, it’s most important to get high performing materials because over the lifetime of a building, if you imagine 200 years later, everything will have had a small reduction in their performance [retaining energy], accumulatively leading to very high differences over the entire lifecycle of the building.

Sometimes the materials that take the most energy to make are the best eco-efficient materials available. Minshull says: “The other area is to make sure where possible you minimise the harm done in producing them, so different materials have different levels of ‘embodied energy’ or pollution in their production. For example, cement is one of those materials that use a lot of energy in its production but it also, in certain uses, performs very well in buildings, so it is something to be quite careful about. The performance you get is worth the embodied energy in it developing it. But in the wrong usage or if it is used too liberally, you can actually get a rather high embodied energy count in your house and in the construction of it.”

And last but not least, new builds must be constructed with materials conducive with human health. “So the third then is making sure we use materials that are very healthy for the occupant of the house – so broadly speaking that means minimising the extent of which the materials will give off gases that may affect the general population or partly sensitive individuals like young children or people with allergies or breathing difficulties,” he added.

More than meets the eye

According to a recent survey conducted by the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment and the World Wildlife Fund, 87 per cent of homebuyers in the UK want to know if their home is kind to the environment and 84 per cent would pay for an environmentally friendly home.

Nowadays, an eco friendly home is one that is situated in a way that best presents the home for its optimum exposure to and away from the weather and how it can best perform in line with the environment - often it is as simple as which direction it faces. Minshull says: “The kinds of changes that we’re seeing are much greater attention to the orientation of buildings. Buildings on the south side of the street and the north side of the street will look different as they’re trying to present the south sides in a certain way and the north sides in a certain way to attain the most solar gain and to protect it from over heating.”

Considerations will always involve the building itself being energy efficient, but the current demands from the government and the general public is also revolutionising construction practises. “There is a much greater demand for build quality being air tight – getting an air tight building is important if you’re going to achieve zero carbon emissions.

“You can’t afford heat to leak out of a building and that requires a really good rigorous build quality on site – and so one of the things that’s encouraging is more use of prefabricated buildings (sectional buildings) because in the factory you can seal all your joints much more efficiently than on a wet and windy, cold March day on a building site exposed to all the elements.”

Things are a changing and new builds must keep to these new practises if the UK is to reach its carbon targets as outlined in its Kyoto agreements. Minshull concluded: “I think the government has chartered a programme of improvements over the next eight years to achieve great improvements in energy efficiency and carbon pollution. I think that will achieve a great deal and the construction industry has already risen to that challenge.”

Universities have kept their ears to the ground since the eco word has spread. Now, degrees in the built environment are leading graduates to be prepared for bright, green futures.

One university that has taken an eco education to a whole new level is the University of Nottingham, which has a new green mini-campus called The School of the Built Environment. There you can study architecture, building technology, urban planning and sustainable energy technology.

And, with the construction industry booming in the UK, graduates have the chance to find employment in many areas that need a green touch, such as in urban regeneration, adaptive re-use and energy transformation of existing building stock and architecture.

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