Footprint

Guest blogger Margaret Reynolds of A C Architects Cambridge Ltd

This is my third EcoBuild. Much as I enjoy wandering around the exhibits collecting free scale rulers, I have really always gone for the seminars. In 2007 it was heat pumps and photovoltaics. By 2009 it was Code for Sustainable Homes, EPCs and wireless monitoring. This year I targeted the Performance Matters seminar session on Tuesday morning and was well rewarded by the first session on Driving Performance Improvements, ably chaired by Mat Colmer of the Energy Saving Trust.

If, like previous bloggers, you found EcoBuild overwhelming, take note. It seems, from this Driving Performance seminar, that an objective database is being established to assess sustainable building materials and methods. It should become the proof of the EcoBuild pudding. This database is being assembled, amazingly, through the collaboration of universities, developers, a Community Interest Company (Good Homes Alliance) and the government. Examples presented were residential and new-build, but non-residential and refurbishment are to be covered as well and the data will be accessible to all parties in the construction industry. This joined-up thinking can only be good news for an industry that, as one speaker said, is “notoriously poor” at evaluating its own products.

So why all this enthusiasm for performance monitoring? Surely it’s obsessive and geeky, all those oscillating diurnal graphs with units like kWh/m2, Co2 tonnes pa and ach @ 50 Pa. Well, in my opinion, UK design is seriously likely to be enveloped by proven techniques like PassivHaus where such energy and cost analysis is enshrined in a large database dating back to 1996. However do they achieve houses consuming only 15 kW/m2/year when we are lucky to hit 39?? If we are not convinced that we need to mortgage ourselves to install triple glazing, or suffocate our buildings with external render and air-tightness – or even if we are – we must become conversant with the levels and values of monitoring procedures, because these are the only terms by which alternative proposals can be defended.

We are no longer fulfilling design prescriptions to be approved in advance by Building Control. Quantifiable energy performance AFTER construction is the way new and refurbished schemes will be, are already being, judged and justified, if we are to have a hope of slowing climate change. To prove acceptable performance, and to enhance it in your next project, you must get your mind around monitoring and testing results. Mastering design and construction constrained under these terms will, I believe, eventually liberate creative people to find ingenious and elegant design solutions. Anything else is fiddling while Rome burns. The green movement desperately needs the whole-hearted support of good designers.

The Driving Performance session was indeed a heartening demonstration of joined-up thinking. The Energy Saving Trust (independent, funded both by government and private sector) set the scene with Mat Colmer emphasizing that the need is not just for meter readings, but for whole-house data on indoor air quality, environmental conditions, smart metering including individual circuit flow-metering, as well as post-occupancy evaluation.

Second speaker Jane Lomas, described a joint effort by the government Homes and Communities Agency, Barratt Development PLC and Oxford Brookes University – it’s almost like there’s a national emergency or a war on. HCA’s “Carbon Challenge” is 195 Code 6 homes – including affordable – around the grade II Listed Hanham Hall in Bristol. Monitoring is being funded at four stages: design specification, site operations, completion and post-occupancy, using the Building User Survey system, with cost information to come in due course.

Then it was Leeds Metropolitan University (David Johnson) teaming with the Joseph Rowntree Housing Trust to carry out building fabric testing, termed “co-heating.” These highly accurate results sometimes yielded huge differences, in the region of 104% (for a semi) and 75% (terraced), between predicted and measured performance. At some £20,000 a pop, this kind of testing was only carried out on 7 or 8 cases this year, but it is clearly zero-ing in on problems with design, with prediction tools and with construction methods and workmanship.

Next up were developers BioRegional Quintain (Nick James), joining forces with University College London, as part of the wider monitoring programme set up by the Good Homes Alliance. They are testing 4 sites, including 122 homes at One Brighton, of which 50% are flats, constructed to both EcoHomes and BREEAM “excellent” standards

Finally, Kerry Mashford went to bat for the Technology Strategy Board and its 3-year government umbrella programme which covers all this, along with intelligent transport, low-carbon vehicles, and assisted living. Intriguingly in 2010 this also includes a sizeable budget for Energy Efficient Whitehall, enabling the government to practice what it preaches and show us how easily this is achieved. TSB is endeavouring to create incentives to monitor performance and to raise the bar for industry. The Technology Strategy Board is setting up the research base protocols by region and by house types so that anonymised data can – and this is critical – be compared in the same terms and made available to the construction industry.

After a fast-paced hour and a half, I managed to see David Blunkett in the Arena and pick up a number of free pens and coasters on the stands. And I also came back to hear good seminars on solar shading and solid wall solutions, along with a somewhat anachronistic one on BFRC window rating. However, none came close to the “performance” of Driving Performance Improvements for state-of-the art speakers and information.

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