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With increasing levels of insulation, the total thickness of a wall becomes an issue in relation to land values, especially in densely built urban areas where space is restricted. The total footprint of the external walls of a house can easily be around 15 – 20% of the ground floor area and this becomes significant. [...] Fluespipe to conduct gas, typically ventilation air or boiler exhaust. see more on 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 fluepipe to conduct gas, typically ventilation air [...] 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 FoundationThe Findhorn Foundation is a large community near Inverness. There is a strong emphasis on sustainable building and living. 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 [...]
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 [...] Energy storage 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 reverse equivalent for coolth during hot weather. This quality is utilised in passive solar design, including the PassivhausSee [...] 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 energythe total amount of energy it takes to make a material (or a building). See more on embodied energy of [...] ‘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 [...] October 2009 The Findhorn FoundationThe Findhorn Foundation is a large community near Inverness. There is a strong emphasis on sustainable building and living. 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 [...] CHP Combined heat and power – where the heat which is produced when electricity is generated is used within a heating system rather than wasted. This can happen at different levels – within a single house, a housing development, a town etc. , or co-generation as it is also known is a technology which [...] 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 [...] 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 accumulatorusually a large water tank used to store [...] 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 CO2Carbon dioxide is a gas which is given off when carbon based [...] 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 [...] February 2013 See the government web site on Building Regulations 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 Consentthe legal basis for being allowed to do some form of development such as building a house. (not to [...] Not to be confused with solar panels or PassivhausSee more on the Passivhaus standard. The PassivHaus Institute has pioneered a standard for low energy buildings. It includes very low energy usage and ways of achieving this. The word is derived from the idea of buildings which are fundamentally low energy and passive solar heated [...] |
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