There seem to be a lot of conflicting trends in the built environment at the moment. On the one hand, you can hardly move without hearing about the credit crunch and falling house sales. On the other hand there is exciting talk about refurbishment to improve energy efficiency, incorporating Passive House standard into the Code for Sustainable Homes and embedding sustainability into just about everything.

We thought we would take a bit of a step back for this issue of our newsletter and give a bit of a wider perspective. We hope you are interested to know more about what is going on in Europe, so that you might be able to apply new approaches in the UK. As ever, we would encourage you to give us feedback and let us know what you would like to hear more about in future.

Getting to know BuildDesk better

In the UK, we think BuildDesk is mainly known for its work in software and training. Looking at our web site traffic, it seems our U-value calculation software is of particular interest, with a large proportion of our web site users heading straight for the U-value page. This is gratifying but we hope people are thinking more widely about the energy efficiency of buildings. To us, the building envelope and services are very important but it is also important to consider alignment on site and location.

The trouble is, as you move away from concentrating on the details of the building envelope, you quickly come across things that are outside your direct control. You can have a brilliant building that appears to be sustainable but if the infrastructure for services and transport are poor then it won’t be possible to live or work in the building sustainably. 

So for a building to be sustainable, it has to fit within sustainable surroundings. We have designed our consultancy to help deliver a sustainable built environment. We think that energy efficiency and sustainability need to be delivered through national and local policies in government and business. These policies need to drive practical improvements for large scale developments and for individual buildings.

We have delivered consultancy in other European countries for some years but have only recently started to offer such services in the UK. The other articles in this newsletter give examples of some of our European projects that we hope will interest you.

Moving to carbon neutrality in Dutch towns

The Netherlands are particularly susceptible to some of the predicted effects from climate change. It probably comes as no surprise that many towns there are keen to reduce their impact on climate change. BuildDesk has been working with three municipalities to help them become carbon neutral as soon as it is realistically possible.

The process first involves understanding energy supply and use to work out when a town would become carbon neutral if current trends continued. Once that is established, we worked out scenarios for achieving carbon neutrality earlier. Under the fastest scenario, the municipalities can reach carbon neutrality in about half the time that they would following current trends.

Even under the best scenarios it will take many years to achieve carbon neutrality. To ensure it is achieved requires putting together mechanisms that will endure and benefit the community through many changes in government and personnel. A important part of the solution was the establishment of local ownership of the energy supply, with profits being used to improve energy efficiency.

Click here if you would like more information on this subject.

Refurbishment – guess who got there first?

Give up? ...it was the Germans!

Gordon Brown has recently announced measures for energy efficiency improvements to existing buildings that will greatly extend the work done so far. However, the German government already have a very successful refurbishment scheme in place that includes extensive grants and technical support.

One of our team in Germany has renovated his own house to improve it from an energy efficiency rating of I to A.   This involved greatly improving the insulation, changing the hearing system and installing a mechanical ventilation system. The energy required for heating each year was reduced from 193 kWh/m2 to 38 kWh/m2  More details of this can be found here.

The Germans have also developed the Passiv Haus standard that produces buildings with very low energy use. BuildDesk has been very active in the Passiv Haus movement in Germany and Austria.

In Austria, a member of the team helped to design and build his own Passiv Haus. He has lived in it for two years and hasn’t yet bothered to put in the wood chip boiler that he had originally planned as he doesn’t need it for either heating or hot water.

Although originally produced for houses, Passiv Haus is now being applied to other buildings. We are working on retrofitting a school to passive house standard in Linz in Austria.

Some people are concerned that living in a Passiv Haus will mean they have to make compromises in the way they live. In Austria, we have carried out post-occupancy market research with people living in passive houses and the results suggest such concerns are largely unfounded.

One of our team from Austria is due to speak about Passiv Haus in January in London. If you are interested in attending or would like to know more about our work on Passiv Haus, please send an email to martin.gibson@builddesk.co.uk.

Social refurbishment

It may come as a surprise to people in the UK to learn that social housing makes up a large proportion of the market in the Netherlands. As with housing everywhere, the energy efficiency of many of the properties is quite poor. To help overcome this, BuildDesk has developed a system that allows housing associations to use Energy Performance Certificates to help plan upgrades. 

The system is based on good data collection, analysis and management. Surveyors determine the EPC rating for each unit in a building and collect data on the type of construction. This is entered into a database which includes the ability to calculate the cost of refurbishing each unit to higher EPC ratings.

The system is proving very popular, with over 800,000 units now entered and rated. Once in the system, it is easy to produce a new EPC when refurbishment has been completed. If you would like more information on this, please email martin.gibson@builddesk.co.uk.

…back in the UK

We don’t want you to forget some of the important services that we can offer specifically for the UK market. We produce software that helps design energy efficient buildings and produces EPCs.

We work closely with BRE to offer training that is accepted for their accreditation systems for On Construction Domestic Energy Assessors (OCDEA) and Commercial Energy Assessors. Our training pages give further details.

In addition, we undertake SBEM calculations directly. We can also offer a service to lodge EPCs for users of our software who don’t want to become accredited assessors. If you would like to know more, please email us at info@builddesk.co.uk.

We look forward to hearing from you.

  The BuildDesk Team