Tag: elemental solutions

HPH282 : How to share knowledge, test and debunk! – with Nick Grant

Nick Grant shares his thoughts on the lessons learned from 30 years of the AECB (Association of Environment Conscious Building).

Interview with Nick Grant

Nick Grant from Elemental Solutions is a Passivhaus consultant and also Technical Director of the Passivhaus Trust. He’s been on the podcast a couple of times before talking about value engineering and integrated design.

Nick has had a long involvement with the AECB (Association of Environment Conscious Building) and at the conference last year, celebrating 30 years of the AECB, Nick and Alan Clarke gave a presentation about lessons that have been learned during that time, and Ben was keen to explore this further.

The AECB has an openness of critical thought

Nick highlights that the AECB has a strong ethos of accepting when you’re wrong, realising mistakes that are made and learning from each other’s mistakes. That’s not to say it’s an easy thing to do, particularly when you’ve spent years becoming an expert in something and then admitting that’s perhaps not the best way of doing it.

“So, some of these things, it’s better to know than not know because you could carry on for the rest of your life to your grave doing things that turn out to not be worthwhile.”

Becoming aware of all the negatives and then getting rid of them, leaves you with the bits you want, which turns it into a positive.

Passivhaus works!

Nick explains that when he built his own house, he’d heard of Passivhaus bu there wasn’t enough information in English to know much more, other than it was about thermal bridges and airtightness. His own house was designed intuitively without any energy modelling, because with the walls over a foot thick and a foot thickness of loft insulation, there didn’t seem much point. It was only later when they modelled it that they realised it wasn’t great, primarily because of the form factor.

Nick’s self build project

Sheila makes the engineered DIY rafters (to save a bit of cash)

Nick and Sheila’s house

House interior

The term ‘thermal bridges’ wasn’t in the Building Regs, and while they knew what it meant, they didn’t realise that around a third of the heat could be escaping through them if they weren’t dealt with. It’s only now, having done the analysis on hundreds of buildings, that they have a learnt intuition.

Nick attended the first Passivhaus conference, back in 2007, partly to debunk it, and partly out of curiosity. But having been to the talks and seeing some of the buildings, he realised that it actually worked and was very impressed with what he saw.

Whereas before there would be arguments about thermal mass and all sorts of discussions that were points of opinion, now Passivhaus is a simple model that can be used to give the answers.

It’s important to use critical thinking and questioning

This is something that Nick says the AECB has been particularly good at, and should be a fundamental part of learning.

Not everyone does this however. Particularly among some designers there can be a resistance to it, because of not wanting to have constraints that will mean their visual design won’t work.

He would rather embodied carbon be kept separate from the Passivhaus Standard

In the early days of the AECB, Nick says where there tended to be more emphasis on using natural materials, then the performance aspect had to be abandoned and the building justified in other ways, such as lower embodied energy.

Nick says this doesn’t have to be the case and just because you might be talking about one aspect, it doesn’t mean the others have to be ignored.

“I think the problem is when you pursue one and it causes a problem for the others or it excludes the others. So, if the energy performance requires things that are ugly or polluting or something like that, then that’s a problem. But that’s not what I’d want to do. So, it’s a compromise.”

In terms of whether Passivhaus should go down the route of incorporating more about embodied carbon, Nick doesn’t believe that it necessarily should. He would rather it be kept separate from the standard, otherwise there can potentially end up being trade-offs that happen in other green building standards, like where there’s lower embodied energy there can sometimes be higher operational use.

The problem with embodied energy is complex

There are conflicting views, with a good example being timber.

“Depending on how you do the accounting, some people see timber as a negative thing and that leads to the idea that the more you put in the building, because you’re locking up carbon, even to the point where the building is not emitting carbon until ten years into the future when the operational has overtaken the embodied.
We think that’s nonsense. Most of our buildings do use timber but we don’t see that as negative. It’s still every time you cut down a tree and turn it into a building, carbon is emitted. I’m not an expert but I’m assuming there’s less emitted than if we use steel or masonry and so on. That’s why we like to use timber. But we don’t see it as negative.”

A timber frame construction using i-beams

Off-setting alone isn’t enough

When it comes to off-setting, Nick says there aren’t enough trees that can be planted to do all the things that we need for building, flying, running vehicles, heating homes, making electricity etc.

“We’ve got to do off-setting in the sense that we’ve got to plant loads of trees and we’ve got to do all that stuff. But we can’t do that instead. We can’t say, ‘I’ll fly to America and plant a tree and that’s fine.’ We’ve got to do the not flying to America and the planting of trees and the not using energy. There’s not enough off-setting possible.”

Existing building stock is a problem

Nick says that most of his work is new buildings, partly because it frustrates him that the new buildings of today are being done so badly and are the retrofits of the future. But a bigger challenge is what should be done with all the existing building stock, and this is something that he doesn’t have the answer to.

One thought is to retrofit them all to Passivhaus standard, but that seems incredibly difficult, particularly with listed buildings. In some cases where they’re in a state of disrepair, adding in extra insulation or triple glazed windows is a no-brainer, but a lot of retrofit isn’t like that. Many are perfectly good buildings that are going to cost nearly as much to retrofit as a new building would cost.

Designing buildings for the future gives a false sense of security

Nick says that designing buildings that can adapt to higher temperatures or flooding in the future can be a dangerous thing as it gives a false sense of security that we can survive this. We need to be designing for the hot summers and extreme weather that we get now.

With so much change happening so quickly, such as a rise in fascism and better awareness of climate issues, Nick says it’s hard to predict even one year ahead.

“But that’s what keeps us going I suppose, thinking that at least we’re doing the right thing. On one level, incredibly pessimistic; absolutely can’t see any way this is going to end well. But at the same time, what else do you do?”

Photo credit Bill Butcher

The AECB has had a big impact

Nick explains that although the AECB is a small organisation, it has had a big impact, with most of the best performing buildings having had AECB members involved.

In contrast, he says things like the World Green Building Council seemed to be made up just of people who had paid to have membership, with no Passivhaus buildings, and none that the AECB would consider to be exemplary.

“Within our little group, it feels like things are moving forward. But if you step out of the bubble then it feels like it’s unknown what we’re doing.”

Image credit Lancaster Co Housing and Eco-Arc

Find out more

Learn more about the AECB

Visit the website of Elemental Solutions

Follow Nick Grant on Twitter

Transcript

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March 18, 2020
HPH276 : A case study of Hope View Passivhaus – with Tracey and Roman Iwanczuk

Tracey and Roman Iwanczuk explain how they managed to build a Passivhaus on a sloping site in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

Interview with Tracey and Roman Iwanczuk

Having lived in the US for 20 years and at the point where they were preparing to build a house there, Tracey and Roman made the decision to move back to the UK. Being unable to find a house or building plot that ticked all their boxes, they decided to embark on what initially seemed like a fairly improbable chance of getting planning permission to build a property on their six acre field overlooking the Malvern Hills Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

It was a leap of faith

Initial meetings with a planning consultant and a local architect offered little in the way of optimism for ever getting planning permission on the site. But they persevered and found another architect who offered a more encouraging 50/50 chance.

Being a greenfield site they used the Paragraph 55 application process for a house of exceptional design and quality that could enhance the area. As Tracey explains, being a greenfield site isn’t always the best use of a piece of land, and their steeply sloping site wasn’t practical for agricultural use.

“It was a matter of coming up with a way of saying let’s do something that is a benefit for our environment, our area, and maybe even the people who live around here that makes sense.”

The scheme they came up with was to return three acres of the land to natural woodland by creating an orchard of local species trees.

They also put in a flood prevention strategy for the neighbours below, who’s properties had experienced flooding from run-off from the field previously.

The house nestles into the hillside

The house was designed to have a minimal visual impact and be future-proof for any long term needs.

The design came about from a series of 15ft² boxes joined together in a single-storey. The principle rooms are south facing and benefit from the floor to ceiling glazing to maximise the beautiful views, with the other rooms being at the rear.

Despite the glazing, the temperature of the house remains relatively even. The rear wall is built into the hillside so has a lot of surface area that is removed from the equation.

Being built into the hillside to a large extent determined what build system they could use. In order to get the required structural strength they used concrete, and felt less guilty with the knowledge that the orchard they were creating would be off-setting the carbon.

A “long, skinny Passivhaus”

Roman describes the shape of the house as providing its own unique challenges, of which air leakage was probably the biggest. The concrete block walls at the rear get no sunlight, whereas the pre-fabricated concrete plank roof gets a lot of light and a lot of heat. So with different thermal expansion rates between the roof and the walls they used a Passivhaus window tape as a barrier for the airflow and to provide enough flexibility to accommodate any thermal expansion.

A ground source heat supply provides hot water

Excavated soil was used to create a level area in front of the house where they could lay pipes for the ground source heat supply. They chose this over an air source system as it is such a peaceful location that they felt it would be less noisy.

About 80% of the supply is used for hot water, with very little actually being needed for heating. Tracey points out that it does use a lot of energy to run a ground source heat pump and they really notice the difference in their electricity bills in the winter when they’re running it to heat the hot water.

When it’s sunny they don’t need to use the ground source heat pump as they export excess solar power to an immersion tank for the hot water supply.

There is a 30 panel solar array

The array gives almost nine kilowatts of generation capability. There are two first generation Tesla Powerwalls which that feeds, that can store around 14 kilowatts. They don’t have the means of exporting power from the batteries, but what they can do is “time shift” the excess energy generated during a sunny day for it to be used to run the house at night.

With advancements in technology, the battery system is one thing that Roman is considering changing. When they were installed the only batteries that were readily available were these kind that sit on the DC side of the system. They are almost directly connected to the solar panels, which means that the system is designed to completely switch off the electricity in the event of a power cut. This is because there could be a danger of feeding the power back onto the grid and electrocuting anyone working on it, but it does mean they can’t access any of the energy sitting in those batteries during that period.

The more modern Tesla system works on the AC side. If there were to be a power cut it would isolate the house but still allow the batteries to generate AC voltage.

“If there is a power outage, then your house effectively becomes an island of electricity and you can use whatever power is in the batteries.”

To upgrade to this system will mean a bit of disruption in having to change the location for the batteries, but Roman thinks that it will be worth doing. There is also a second hand market for the Tesla batteries so they can be re-used by someone else.

The plant room

They have high praise for their team

Tracey and Roman consider themselves to have been very lucky in how smoothly the project generally went. The only real issue they had was with the window supply, which has taken around three years to fully resolve, but they do say to the company’s credit they have stuck with it to get a resolution.

Tracey praises their architect who had never done a Passivhaus before:

“He was more than happy to park his architect ego, listen to the Passivhaus consultant and do the right thing to achieve a Passivhaus. He was happy to learn all of this stuff and take it on board.”

They selected a contractor who had also worked with the architect before, and this helped with maintaining good working relationships between them all. Tracey also praises their integrity and says they were very respectful in how they communicated with her.

Think about your window to wall seals!

One area that could have challenged the successful outcome of the project, was the seals between the windows and walls. Despite their Passivhaus Consultant, Nick Grant, flagging up how important it was to get right, it had been forgotten about in amongst all the other decisions that had to be made. It wasn’t until a week and a half before people were due to do the render that they realised they hadn’t thought about the window to wall seals at all. It was pure luck that they were put in touch with someone who had some spare pieces from their own self build that they could use.

“If that had not been done, it would be a nightmare right now. We’d be dealing with silicone, silicone in windows all the time, just doing all of that stuff that would make life miserable. I can’t say enough to anybody who’s looking at doing a self-build; think about that very, very early on because we only fixed it by accident. It was a very, very lucky accident.”

Roman warns that when you have a window company dealing with the windows, and a builder dealing with the building envelope, things like how those windows will join with the building envelope can become overlooked.

A HEPA filter would be a worthwhile investment

The one oversight that Roman feels they made was the issue of airflow in the house. The MVHR draws in outside air but, being in a rural spot, this can include the smell of burning horse manure! The basic filters are there to get rid of particulate matter, but they don’t deal with smells. He recommends the inclusion of a HEPA filter, which he doesn’t think is something he can now retrofit because of lack of space. He considers the £500-£1,000 for a HEPA filter would be money well spent, even more so in an urban environment with emissions from exhausts.

ASBP Healthy Buildings Conference and Expo 2020

This is taking place in London on 27th February, and will be addressing the subject of healthy buildings in a climate emergency. Check out the website for the full programme and booking tickets online.

Find out more

Visit the website of Warren Benbow Architects

Follow Nick Grant on Twitter

Transcript

Download a transcript of the interview with Roman and Tracey Iwanczuk.

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February 5, 2020
HPH138 : Why an integrated design approach works well for self build – with Charles Grylls and Nick Grant
Charles Grylls and Nick Grant explain what is meant by integrated design and how it can benefit a self build project.

Charles Grylls – Dempsey Decourcy Architects

Nick Grant – Elemental Solutions

Interview with Charles Grylls and Nick Grant

For the last 5 years, architect Charles Grylls has been working with a design team on Passivhaus projects in Herefordshire. The team includes Nick Grant (Passivhaus Consultant), Alan Clarke (Services Engineer), Allan Pearce (Structural Engineer), and Mike Whitfield (Contractor). Although they are independently employed they collaborate together on projects, which benefits the client but also develops their expertise and aids their understanding for the future.

Their first project working together was a Passivhaus in Garway, which has led on to subsequent builds.

Garway – Photo by George Mikurcik

As Nick explains, traditionally it tends to be that the architect draws something, the engineer has to try and make it work, and the builder has to try and build it. A collaborative approach from the outset enables non-hierarchical input and advice, working together, to make the project a success.

Working relationships and connections were already in place

Charles knew Nick and Mike from working with them when he was an employed by Architype. Mike and Allan Pearce had both been involved when Nick had built his house, so there had already been working relationships in place for 15 years or so.

Nick said: “We’re a bunch of friends. I know it’s often not the best thing to work with your friends, it can be a recipe for disaster, but we get on well and we respect each other.”

It did take a few weeks of working together as an integrated team to understand what each members’ role would be and what each would be bringing to the design team.

Nick stresses that although it’s an informal arrangement they have, it is based on trust and responsibility. The contractor particularly is seeing problems on site through the eyes of the rest of the team and has a responsibility to notify the others if they think something needs doing.

Charles Grylls and Mike Whitfield

There can be less risk using a negotiated tender process

In a traditional contract a client would work with an architect from concept through to a detailed design, which would then go to planning. Once planning has been achieved it might go out to tender, so already you’re a long way through the process before even speaking to a contractor or consultant about how to build it or how to solve energy problems.

Charles sees there being risks in terms of cost and quality control using builders through this process who don’t have Passivhaus experience. His experience of competitive tendering for a Passivhaus project is that they will either come in with a low price because they don’t understand what they’re going to have to build, or price it for risk and so overprice it. Using a negotiated tender process, which is still a traditional route to go down, can be less risky.

It’s about quality and people who care!

Nick says that you don’t necessarily need to find a builder or team members who have had Passivhaus experience, but they just need to care about what they’re doing. Often smaller builders will be at a disadvantage when it comes to tendering because they don’t have a department specifically geared to do that, but Nick says they’ll happily turn up, do the job and work for a fair price. By finding a small builder and speaking to previous clients, you could end up with a cheaper and better job.

Good, but not superfluous, communication is required

The team collaborate using shared folders online for consultants’ information so that everyone can cross-check, evaluate and provide an immediate response to information that goes out. The client can also be included in this way. They also make sure that people are only involved when they need to be, so their time is not being wasted.

Being a group of friends, some of the team’s communication takes place down the pub, chewing over challenges and working out solutions and better ways of doing things in the future!

Charles stresses that as a client, starting off with a good brief, keeping on-site changes to a minimum, and ensuring that communication lines are kept open throughout are some of the most helpful things you can do. He suggests a flow diagram can be useful in showing members’ roles and responsibilities if it gets complex. Within this team it tends to work slightly differently from a traditional procurement where the architect is project manager and administers the contract, because Mike (the contractor) forms a contract direct with the client. Charles explains that this keeps things simple because everything has been worked out between the team beforehand so there are not usually too many changes.

Establish and be honest about your budget from the outset

Nick explains that sometimes when projects are drawn up and put out to tender, they come in way over budget and so then go through a “value engineering” process to strip out all the good bits to make it affordable. Far better is to establish a budget and be honest about what that is. There’s no point in being coy and saying your budget is lower than it is because the danger is the design may not then include the features that you might have desired but, according to your stated budget, couldn’t afford.

Having the builder involved early on is an advantage because they can give input from experience on how much things are likely to cost, so things are not added to the design that may later need to be removed because of budget constraints.

Reviewing the finished project benefits the team as well as the client

Going back and seeing how the building is performing can help the occupants establish whether it’s being used to its full potential and whether any adjustments can be made to increase comfort, etc.

As Nick says, the team are only likely to be offering this if they’re fairly confident there won’t be too many problems! If there are problems they want to know about them and learn from them, to avoid them from happening again.

Transcript

Download a transcript of the interview with Charles Grylls and Nick Grant

Find out more

Visit the website of Dempsey Decourcy Architects

Visit the website of Elemental Solutions

Follow Charles Grylls on Twitter

Follow Nick Grant on Twitter

The Hub update

We are currently looking for our next self build project to follow in The Hub. Ideally it would be a Passivhaus that is different from our first case study Long Barrow (e.g. not built with insulated concrete formwork) and again we would focus on the decision-making process from the design stage right through to construction.

If you think you have a project that may be suitable, then please do get in touch and tell us about it.

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July 20, 2016
HPH111 : How value engineering could benefit a house build – with Nick Grant from Elemental Solutions
Nick Grant of Elemental Solutions explains what is meant by value engineering and how it can be used in the house building process.

Interview with Nick Grant

Nick was a Trustee of the AECB and is Technical Director of the Passivhaus Trust. He is a sustainable building consultant with a background in engineering and, stemming from a childhood ‘make do and mend’ mentality, a lifelong passion for doing more with less.

Giving maximum value through engineering

As an engineer, one of the modules that most inspired Nick was one about value engineering.

Value is defined by Nick as being performance divided by cost. If you maximise performance, or reduce cost, it increases value.

Nick cites as an example the trend of smartphones having fewer buttons than ever before. An iPhone has been very value engineered in that “it manages to deliver a lot by doing very little and it takes a lot of effort to get to that”.

In engineering it’s an incredibly positive thing and what is strived for, however when Nick started working in the construction industry he discovered that people were using the term to mean cost-cutting in a negative sense:

“So I went from this thing being something I thought was inherently a great thing and a real challenge and exciting, and for me defined really good design, to this thing that people say “it’s been value engineered, they’ve ruined my project, they value engineered it.”

Value engineering has to happen at the beginning of a project

It needs to happen right at the start when the design is being developed. Decisions about the size, shape, orientation, etc all have an impact on the final value, cost and challenges that are going to arise. If the correct steps haven’t been taken at the beginning then it is likely that contracts in the tender will come back over budget, resulting in a cost-cutting exercise which will inevitably see the removal of features that you liked about the design.

Dempsey Decourcy Architects – Vowchurch

It should be integrated in the house building process

Nick feels that everything he does is value engineering, but that people can be reluctant to pay for something which leaves them feeling like they’re actually getting less. It may be that they’ve been told about something which they didn’t need to do, thus saving money, but they haven’t actually got anything tangible for it.

Typically in architecture it tends to be cost cutting and might be carried out by a Quantity Surveyor. Nick feels however that it should be completely integrated, with everyone on board and led by the lead designer. There should be encouragement, whether for the structural engineer, landscape architect, energy consultant etc, to find better, cheaper and easier ways of doing things.

Example of VE interior detail – polished concrete floor / foundations

Example of VE interior detail – Kitchen cupboards made of shuttering ply and surplus stainless steel washers

Having constraints on a project can be a positive

Nick says that rather than having to make compromises if they’ve run out of time or budget, it should be the case that if the correct work has been put in during the process they should be able to come to something “where it kind of all works.”

Having constraints can in some ways make the job easier. There can be fewer choices needing to be made and subsequently less things that they can get wrong. It can free the designer to focus on other things as well.

“So the more constraints we have, I think as a designer I take that as, I like that. So if we’ve got a very small budget, limited palate of materials, I quite like the challenge of that.”

By establishing a budget early on you can immediately realise that there are things that might not need to be considered, such as the indoor swimming pool and fancy finishes!

Dempsey Decourcy Architects – Cae Duff

“So you’ve got to do the value engineering, you’ve got to find a better way of doing things, find more clever materials, but you’ve got to also set a budget and then work to that budget. Otherwise everything will just expand to meet it.”

You can do things cheaply, quickly or well: you can’t do all three!

Nick and his partner designed and built their own home, blowing their original £30,000 budget and spending £40,000! While they like to think they did it well and cheaply, it did take them a long time to complete. They took inspiration from Christopher Alexander’s book A Pattern Language, but by doing that they did end up with a house that has a very complex form (a form factor of around 5) and which was a lot more time consuming to build.

It’s not easy to do simple!

By working on repeat projects Nick has been able to invest the time into working out details that appear to be simple, but if they were that easy everyone would be doing them! The process can evolve very slowly but benefits are reaped by the experience gained, thus making things easier on the next projects.

Dempsey Decourcy Architects – Cae Duff

Give a great deal of thought about the number and function of windows being used

Nick is currently doing some work on overheating for the Passivhaus Trust. He explains that in our climate we tend to want to let the sunlight in and aren’t used to going out and putting the shutters down, whereas in warmer climes this is something people do automatically. It therefore shouldn’t be a surprise when we return home and find them overheating!

So firstly it’s important to have enough glass for views and letting daylight in, but without having too much.

Glazing is expensive so, coming back to value engineering, make the window do as much work for you as possible. Thinking of function, if there are windows that can’t easily be accessed and opened, then consider a fixed rather than openable one, which typically you could pay 30% less for.

Nick gives this example of his own window behind the kitchen sink which they can’t easily reach to open, and suggests that actually a fixed, single frame view would probably have been better.

Have a guess what percentage of glass there is to frame, and find out the answer in the podcast. The answer may surprise you!

Ensure also that if your windows are to open, that they open enough to get the airflows. Often they open in a restricted reveal which doesn’t allow enough air in. Evolving over many buildings, Nick has learned to step the reveals in a way that when the window is tilted it still allows good airflow. It’s this repetition, and going back to review previous jobs, that is critical to learning and making improvements next time.

Decide what matters and work to your budget

Deciding what matters and working to your budget is Nick’s key piece of advice.

“Everything isn’t possible. But again that shouldn’t mean there’s a compromise necessarily. What you end up with you shouldn’t be thinking oh I really miss the little Victorian fake windows, you should think oh thank God I didn’t do that!”

Find out more

Follow Nick Grant on Twitter

Find out more about Elemental Solutions

View Nick’s presentation: Value Engineering, What’s not to love?

Find out more about Charles Grylls and Dempsey Decourcy Architects

Transcript

Download a transcript of the interview with Nick Grant.

Inquiry into the Quality of New Build Housing in England

Towards the end of last year, Ben was part of a panel at the Inquiry into the Quality of New Build Housing in England, at the Houses of Parliament. Presenting to a handful of politicians and construction professionals, those contributing included:
- Phil Waller, who has previously worked for a major house builder. His opinion was that they could be doing much better, and he has set up a website to try and advise potential purchasers what they should be looking for if they’re intending to buy from a developer.
- Geoff Peter from Wingrove Law is a solicitor who represents owners of new builds who have ongoing issues with their homes.
We know what a lot of the issues are and a lot of good questions were being asked, but it just comes down to whether anything will actually get done.

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January 13, 2016