Our students come from an amazing variety of backgrounds bringing a diverse range of experiences, which contribute enormously to the whole learning experience. Each week 'Student Stories' will feature one of our amazing students and explore the work they do and their reasons for studying at the Graduate School for the Environment. Marianne Heaslip is a student on the  MSc Architecture Advanced Environmental and Energy Studies at CAT.

She also works for URBED in Manchester. URBED have assisted in the transformation of ten existing houses in Yorkshire into low-carbon homes of the future. This work is part of the Technology Strategy Boardʼs ʻRetrofit for the Futureʼ competition, which funded 87 pilot projects across the country. The aim is to test strategies to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from existing housing by 80% by 2050.

Six homes have been refurbished in Rotherham and four in Wakefield, with URBED acting as designers and sustainability consultants. The Rotherham scheme has the largest number of homes completed using a single ʻRetrofit for the Futureʼ project grant and the cost per house across both projects was a relatively modest £25,000-£35,000. Bramalls Construction were contractors for clients Rotherham 2010 and Wakefield District Housing.

Marianne said  “We’re especially proud of this project since we believe we got close to a solution which could be replicated on a large scale – one of the aims of the competition. We managed to complete 4 houses in one case, and 6 in the other, for the same money that many other projects were spending on a single house. We were also working with tenants in situ, rather than an unoccupied house – which as carbon reduction measures are rolled out nationwide is likely to be the more usual situation .”

The construction process raised a series of challenges in the supply chain. The innovative nature of the  project meant that some products were not readily available in the UK, though links to suppliers and subcontractors have now been formed which should assist the smooth running of future projects. Not all subcontractors were familiar with the technologies involved, with the positive outcome that some have now undergone training and are now accredited under the Microgeneration Certification Scheme (MCS).

All ten houses are now super-insulated and air-tight. This should dramatically improve the thermal performance of the existing building fabric, reducing heating energy demand and carbon dioxide emissions. The external wall insulation on eight of the houses is an innovative woodfibre board, flexible enough to cope with the poor state of the existing wall finish. New triple glazed windows and high performance doors were installed, except in three of the houses which had existing windows less than
two years old. In this case just the glazing was replaced with a high performance unit. Each of the ten houses is fitted with a different heating and ventilation system. These were chosen with the existing residents in mind, but also allow for the different technologies to be tested alongside each other ʻin the fieldʼ. Technologies used include solar thermal panels, solar photovoltaic panels, wood burning stoves, high efficiency gas boilers, passive stack ventilation, mechanical ventilation with heat
recovery (MVHR).

URBED developed the design proposals for each house in consultation with the tenants, taking into account their tolerance for different levels of disruption. Some of the tenants were able to stay in residence during the construction work, thanks largely to innovative approaches to floor insulation in half of the houses.

Several of the tenants are also involved in continued monitoring, which looks at the userʼs experience of living in a low carbon refurbishment through written and video diaries and in depth interviews. This is with the aim of informing and improving the process for residents. So far this has emphasised the need for high quality induction and after-care.  The environmental performance of all ten houses will be monitored for the next two years by the Energy Saving Trust. This will tell us how much energy each house is using, and therefore the amount of carbon dioxide emissions being produced. This will be compared with predictions from the design stage.

URBED will be keeping a close eye on the results of all of this monitoring work, so that we can learn what works best for future projects. URBEDʼs involvement in this project, at the design, construction and ʻaftercareʼ stages, informed our recent report for the Sustainable Housing Action Partnership (SHAP) and Homes and Communities Agency (HCA). This presents a model for community-scale delivery of whole house retrofit – the ʻCommunity Green Dealʼ.

For more information: www.urbed.coop

If you are a student at CAT and would like to let the world know what you are doing please contact Kim in the media department This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it