Examples
This section covers a selection of domestic scale eco buildings in the UK (see the menue on the left)
There is nothing quite like seeing what others have done and people who have nearly completed or just completed their own house may be willing to let you look round. They may even have an open day. However it can be quite difficult to get at the facts sometimes. Given that you may only have a short time during a visit, it pays to work out what are the really relevant questions to investigate. It is only too easy to stand in a nicely finished house feeling very impressed by it all and forget to ask the sharp questions.
If there is any information available that you can get hold of before a visit then go through it with a check list (such as you can derive from this web site) and see what is worth asking about. It is surprising how often self builders will be over optimistic about their achievements and this only begins to show up a couple of years after they have moved in when energy use is a bit higher than they forecast and snags have started to show up with building materials and techniques. Very few projects publish the “warts n’ all” which is a shame because that is often where most is to be learnt.
If you can get on a properly guided trip around a building then it may have the advantage of printed information being available and other people on the trip may come up with interesting questions you may not have thought of. An excellent example of this is the Hockerton Housing project where they take small groups round for about £10. There is a slide show, printed information, a tour round and chat over tea with people who live there. They also do more advanced educational projects.
Open House events
There are various towns and organisations which run events based on the ‘Open House’ format in London where you can look around buildings as part of a tour.
Ecos in the South West
Houses at the Findhorn Foundation
Please note that eco building standards are improving rapidly at the moment. Many of the examples shown will be a few years old and although excellent in their time may now be getting a bit out of date. Particularly in the case of fan testing, it will have been carried out on only a few of them as it has only recently been included in the building regulations so many of the examples may be very well insulated but not particularly air tight.
Not all the examples in this section are self build but they all have aspects which may be interesting to the green self builder.
Maybe you want to live in some sort of social grouping which is not catered for in normal housing developments. This might be to do with a whole number of things such as -
- Co-housing
- Artists’ collective
- Sharing childcare or home education
- Elderly people living together
- Sexual orientation
- Cultural or ethnic groups
- Common interest groups
- Permaculture land settlement
- Religious community
- Eco community
Some of these types of groups have open days and the Diggers and Dreamers web site has useful information
