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Flues are pipes or ducts which carry waste gasses away from a building to the air outside. This can be caused by two possible mechanisms the exhaust gasses are hot and rise naturally up the flue by convection (as with a wood burning stove or conventional gas fire) the gasses are expelled mechanically by a [...] October 2009 On the Hill of Bandodle, Aberdeenshire, stands a beautiful timber frame house designed by architect Genevieve Jones for her family. Incorporating high levels of insulation (in the form of 350mm of shoddy obtained from Elgin woolen mill) and mainly locally sourced materials, Larch, Douglas fir and Caithness slate, the house also has [...] A very interesting terrace of three houses, on a curved road junction, has recently been completed in this Somerset village. Some of the main features of the design are: Very high insulation levels provided by insulating concrete forms (ICF) with added exterior face insulation Structural insulated panel (SIP) roofs Eco-slab ground floors and upper [...] Self build eco houses in the Field of Dreams, Findhorn Foundation Over the last decade or so the green building movement in the UK has gone from being fringe to mainstream. Architects, builders and suppliers are falling over each other to declare their green credentials Self builders have something of a tradition of trying [...]
Earth Heart is a community of 22 people in 8 homes based on a large converted farm in Derbyshire set up in 1998 around home education. Although not initially concerned with eco-build, they have embraced the concept thoroughly during their upgrading of an old farm house and several outbuildings into dwellings. There [...] High thermal mass is generally seen as a useful quality in a building because it can be utilised to trap and save any spare heat which might turn up. It can also do the same for coolth during hot weather. This quality is utilised in passive solar design, including the Passivhaus design standard. However [...] It is quite possible to entirely heat a building year round using solar energy providing you have a very large, very well insulated interseasonal heat store, most likely of water. An early example of this was the main office at the Centre for Alternative Technology at Machynlleth in Wales. A photo (fourth down in [...] January 2011 Energy use in our society is almost always associated with pollution and habitat destruction so all types of energy use are worth looking at: While a house is being built reducing embodied energy of the building materials reducing associated ‘building site’ energy During its lifetime high levels of insulation good air tightness [...] ‘Energy use’ is usually associated with how much energy is used to construct a new building. However, this is only part of the story. Most buildings get altered and repaired and redecorated a considerable number of times during their lifetime and taken to an extreme, some houses are constantly having ‘makeovers’. This can vastly increase [...] October 2009 The Findhorn Foundation near Fores in the North East of Scotland has a couple of interesting areas of eco-housing and a whole approach to living lightly on the earth including 750kW of electrical energy from 4 wind turbines recently installed for Findhorn Wind Park Ltd which is the trading arm of Findhorn Foundation. [...] CHP, or co-generation as it is also known is a technology which has threatened to emerge and change our lives several times but as yet without success (except in a few trial situations). The idea is that you have some kind of generator in your house which produces electricity. Given that most generators are [...] Heat pumps (both 'ground source' and 'air source') are being heavily sold at present. GSHPs work a bit like fridges and freezers by shifting heat from one place to another. With houses they extract heat from the ground which tends to have a constant temperature of about 10°C, increase its temperature a bit (to 30 [...] Boilers are available for burning straw for domestic heating and constitute an almost carbon neutral source of heat as the carbon is recycled annually. Various sizes of bales can be used and are usually batch loaded by tractor. There is nearly always a hot water storage accumulator employed to store the heat. Some of them [...] It is difficult to make any sort of case for using oil or LPG (Liquefied petroleum gas) as a heating fuel. If you are not on mains gas then probably the best green option is to go for wood burning (logs, pellets or chip) or possibly straw bale if you have sufficient storage space and [...]
snap by Stig Nygaard Of the fossil fuels, natural gas is considerably better than either oil or coal. This is because natural gas, CH4, is partly hydrogen which burns to form water rather than carbon dioxide. It produces about 70% of the CO2 compared with oil. However it is still a major polluter and [...] Crystal balling From an environmental point of view, electric heating of both space and water is quite tricky to get to grips with and depends partly on your point of view of the likely or desirable future energy generation mix in the UK. Wasteful and inefficient On the one hand there is the argument [...] How clean is wood burning? Arguably one of the greenest methods for heating a rural house in the UK (including domestic hot water) is a combination of solar thermal collectors (for summer) and wood pellet or chip (for winter). Logs come a close second if they are dry and burn cleanly. They are also [...] January 2010 Building Regulations deal with whether the building is built properly and is safe and energy efficient etc. more+/-» They are not to be confused with Planning Consent (which is to do with the size, location and appearance of a house). The building inspectors are either employed by the local council [...]
Not to be confused with solar panels or Passivhaus (although these may both be associated with passive solar design), passive solar basically means collecting the sun's energy with the minimum use of gadgets – simply allowing the sun to get into the house and trap it there. Almost all houses do gain heat from [...] |
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