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  • HPH321 : How do you make an existing home energy efficient? – with Paul Ciniglio

    HPH321 : How do you make an existing home energy efficient? – with Paul Ciniglio

    With price hikes being caused by the volatile energy sector, Paul Ciniglio from the National Energy Foundation explains what we can be doing to our homes to reduce our energy consumption and be better protected from rising bills.

    Interview with Paul Ciniglio

    Paul Ciniglio is refurbishment lead at the National Energy Foundation, where he spends much of his time being involved with their SuperHomes network. With a background in building surveying, he has over 30 years experience of working in the built environment sector, with a particular focus on sustainable development.

    Renewable energy plays a key part in the UK energy mix

    On some days England is able to produce over half its electricity needs from offshore wind turbines. As renewables are intermittent, however, an energy mix is necessary to keep the lights on. At a domestic level we could be making even more of a contribution with solar PV panels and heat pumps.

    Energy bill rebates would be better spent on improving energy efficiency

    Paul says that the UK government’s plans to issue rebates to households for their energy bills isn’t sustainable in the long term. The only way to bring our bills down to reasonable levels is to use that same money to improve the energy efficiency of our homes and cut out the waste. In order for us to achieve net zero carbon we are going to need to aspire to Passivhaus type approaches and super-insulating homes.

    NEF is an independent charity

    A common problem for people wanting to undertake a home retrofit is knowing where to start and who to trust. As an independent voice, NEF is able to bring that level of trust and support to those embarking on a retrofit.

    Start with a whole house retrofit plan

    NEF can arrange a whole house retrofit plan and this is carried out in accordance with the British Standard BS40104. It entails a survey of your property by a retrofit coordinator, who will then produce an options appraisal as to everything you could do to improve the energy efficiency of your home. It will show the benefits, so the predicted running costs and reduction in household emissions, as well as the estimated cost savings for each retrofit measure.

    There are also risks involved in taking on a retrofit project but these will be flagged up in the retrofit plan at the start, so they can be managed.

    By looking at the whole house view, it is possible to make decisions on what can be done now and what can be done in the future.

    Fabric performance should be the first consideration

    When using a whole house holistic view there is an energy design hierarchy, and the place to start is with the fabric performance of the home.

    • Cut out the heat losses through the fabric of the building, so the doors, windows, insulation in the roof, walls and floors
    • If making the house very airtight, it’s important to factor in the ventilation to prevent damp and poor indoor air quality
    • Look at efficient heating systems – it is likely that we will move towards electrification in the UK which really implies heat pumps
    • Then consider other renewables, such as solar pv to generate clean electricity

    By using a phased plan such as this it means that work is carried out in a logical order, and also that you don’t unwittingly do something that prevents you from adding another measure in your plan later on.

    The risks need to be managed

    This is to ensure that retrofit maintains a good name, is worth doing, and is not going to cause lots of problems.

    With the retrofit plan, each home is assigned a risk pathway, A, B or C (A being the lowest risk, and C perhaps being a historic building).

    A suitable ventilation strategy is absolutely key, as condensation and damp can lead to mould issues. When insulating it’s important to consider moisture, so that it doesn’t get trapped in the fabric of the building and cause bigger problems.

    To get rid of condensation you need three things:

    • insulation
    • heating
    • ventilation

    Without those you are likely to get black mould forming.

    NEF run a best practice retrofit network

    This paid membership is operated by SuperHomes, and gives you access to events and seminars around retrofit issues. You can also then be assigned a retrofit coordinator, who will be someone that is an accredited professional that has achieved a diploma through the Retrofit Academy. These typically are architects, surveyors, and energy managers who have all been through this training.

    The SuperHomes initiative also has a rating scheme, which is a benchmark for retrofit achievement.

    A lot of retrofit can be done with residents in situ

    Sometimes retrofit can be done on a room-by-room basis if it’s carefully managed, but it can be very disruptive. Generally it’s only for the deepest, most challenging projects that residents might need to temporarily move out, although all projects can be carried out more efficiently and easily without the residents living there.

    At House Planning Help, we have followed a deep retrofit in Oxford. Get access to our in-depth video case study in The Hub

    Look out for TrustMark and MCS certification

    Paul explains that there is a massive skills shortage to deliver the amount of retrofit that is needed. Traditional builders are already busy and the energy efficiency market needs to be made more appealing to them so they can upsell skills.

    The government’s TrustMark scheme shows that contractors have been vetted, with the idea being to put the public’s faith in the contracting sector. And if you’re having a heat pump or solar PV installed, then make sure your contractor is accredited to the Microgeneration Certification Scheme (MCS).

    Paul is re-retrofitting his own SuperHome!

    Paul lives in a 1989 mid-terrace cottage, which he retrofitted and became a SuperHome back in 2009. He upgraded the insulation, including putting it in cavity walls where builders were supposed to have put it when it was first built, but hadn’t. He also upgraded the loft insulation, installed an air source heat pump, solar pv, solar thermal, and new windows.

    “My comfort has gone up and I’ve got my own energy security protecting me to a certain extent with these price increases.”

    At the time there were some things he wasn’t able to do, so now he’s taking on a further retrofit, including putting in ground floor insulation. He has also stripped out the solar hot water panels. They worked okay for the first seven years, then only intermittently until eventually being decommissioned. A preferred option now is solar pv that diverts the solar electric into an immersion cylinder to provide the hot water.

    The reason Paul’s solar thermal didn’t work very well he says was because it was too efficient for the size of cylinder he had. By 10am it would be up to temperature and if water wasn’t being drawn off or he was away on holiday, it would stagnate and get really hot, causing damage to the valves.

    The Energy Performance Certificate isn’t up to scratch

    In the wake of the energy crisis, it seems natural that when people are looking for a new home they will be asking how much it costs to run, and this is something the EPC isn’t very good at. NEF is doing some research working with a team of chartered valuation surveyors to carry out property valuations pre and post retrofit. It makes sense that a more energy-efficient home should command a higher price, and Paul says there is emerging evidence that this does seem to be the case.

    Once a SuperHomes retrofit has been completed, they install monitoring equipment for 12 months to gather and evaluate data about household emissions to see how well the property is performing. It’s on that basis that they certify the SuperHome and what level it has achieved. The metrics they use for this are the space heating demands (which are a proxy for the fabric performance and tell you how well insulated your home is), temperature (including checking for overheating in the summer and making sure it doesn’t get too cold in the winter) and humidity and indoor air quality levels.

    Know where you’re going to “get the biggest bang for your buck”

    Having a whole house retrofit plan will mean that you know what improvements are going to make the biggest difference and save you the most amount of money. It’s important to note however that you don’t always get a payback with every retrofit measure, just as you wouldn’t with a new kitchen, car or conservatory.

    Insulation is the most cost-effective way to retrofit, and is simple for lofts and cavity walls. It’s much more of a challenge for the 7 million homes which have solid walls.

    But where funds are limited, Paul explains there are government grants to help private homeowners insulate their homes. There was a local authority delivery grant program administered through regional energy hubs that can help households with incomes of less than £30,000. There is also a new Energy Company Obligation (ECO4) which is another source of funding. Sometimes there are local grants available too.

    Find out more

    Visit the SuperHomes website

    Follow National Energy Foundation on Twitter

    Check out the Tape Notes podcast

    Transcript

    Download a transcript of the interview with Paul Ciniglio

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  • HPH317 : Getting ambitious with sustainability – with Kit Knowles from Ecospheric

    HPH317 : Getting ambitious with sustainability – with Kit Knowles from Ecospheric

    Kit Knowles from Ecospheric explains why he is driven to keep pushing further in pursuit of sustainability in building projects.

    Kit Knowles (Rick McCullagh)

    Interview with Kit Knowles

    Despite his university education and early working life being in the field of chemical engineering, Kit quickly realised that this wasn’t for him. So, around 14 years ago, he committed instead to renovating and decarbonising a newly acquired 1909 arts and craft dwelling while he considered the direction in which to move his career forward.

    The SuperHomes network and trade shows provided information and inspiration

    Kit took an external wall insulation approach to his property and came up with a detail using three layers of Spacetherm with a PIR backing board. This would keep the profile relatively slim and maintain the aesthetic of the facade.

    The Thorns (Colin Poole)

    In order to fully research his proposed methods, he gathered information from attending trade shows and visiting homeowners of SuperHomes. SuperHomes is run by the National Energy Foundation, and is a charity that permits homeowners to join the network if they are able to reduce their home carbon usage by 60% or more. They are then able to open up their homes to share their methods for other people to reapply the solutions to their own properties. Kit credits SuperHomes with putting him in touch with a network of people where he could find out what others were doing, what they weren’t doing, and how he could push it further.

    Getting hands-on in the project working alongside his team of builders meant that Kit had a great insight into specification details and why they were often flawed when it came to installation, thus leading to a performance gap.

    The Thorns (Colin Poole)

    He started his business off the back of his own renovation project

    When Kit opened his own home as part of the SuperHomes network, he realised there were a large number of problems that he had solved, that other people hadn’t. So when he had five or six people asking for his help in explaining how he had done it, he decided to establish his own consultancy, although it did take him another few years to master the dark art of timber and damp!

    The Thorns (Colin Poole)

    After several years of chasing larger and larger projects, Kit came to two uncomfortable points of realisation:

    1. The full decarbonisation of the planet was never going to be impacted by what he was doing, given the scale on which he was doing it.
    2. That those that were doing the most carbon damage were those that were the biggest consumers.

    Clients can dilute the environmental ambitions

    Coming in late to a project is problematic because many decisions have already been made and there is little desire to start over. On one particular mansion he was not able to have any impact on the design of the house and his only option was to look to renewables for efficient energy generation.

    He had however managed to keep everything on a single-phase power supply rather than a three-phase… until at the last minute the client decided they wanted to heat the stair treads, which could only be done with direct electric, resulting in tipping the whole system over!

    Aesthetics matter

    From that point, Kit focused on how to develop more meaningful decarbonisation projects, and key to this were his interactions with Kevin Anderson from the Tyndall Centre. His advice was based on the iPhone effect of creating something that people didn’t know they wanted or needed, and then when they had it, couldn’t do without it. The only way to do that was to have full control over these builds and treat them as demonstration projects.

    And so the development arm of his business began, kicking off with Zetland Road. It was everything they had learned up to that point, put into a single project to see how far they could go. Despite not chasing Passivhaus certification, they ended up with Passivhaus Plus, together with eight world firsts.

    Zetland Road before renovation
    Zetland Road after renovation (Rick McCullagh)

    “Here, we were trying to get the combination of the technology with the look and feel. If it’s a bland Germanic box, it wasn’t going to revolutionise anything. It had to be old, it had to feel authentic and original. And it also needed really to be pretty sexy.”

    Rear lounge construction
    Dining/Living space (Rick McCullagh)
    MVHR ducting in chimney void
    Rear facade construction
    Zetland Road completed rear (Rick McCullagh)
    Zetland Road kitchen/diner (Dug Wilders)
    Zetland Road master bedroom (Rick McCullagh)

    By hitting the largest sectors they could make the biggest carbon impact

    With the construction industry being the largest contributer, at 40% of the country’s carbon emissions, Kit wanted to narrow down further into where the biggest carbon reductions could be made. With existing buildings being 80% of that amount, they could keep breaking that down further to select the projects where they could make the most impact. Of particular interest to him were the around half a million or so Grade II listed buildings.

    Kit uses a three level approach:

    1. Passive design techniques (ie orientation, glazing ratios etc). Thinking about how to use something differently, and using a quality roadmap to get as much for free as possible, such as free energies, or conservation of energy.
    2. Fabric. The idea that you can improve on airtightness and insulation levels throughout the building.
    3. Efficient or renewable energy. With the priority being numbers 1 and 2, hopefully there is little need for this.

    Lymm Hall is giving him the chance to trial new approaches

    Kit considers himself an opportunist, so when the chance came to purchase the Grade II listed, moated, 1570 country house of Lymm Hall, he and his family relished the chance to take the project on. It also came with a paddock that had planning permission for five detached new builds.

    Lymm Hall (Lymm Photographic Society)

    Their initial modelling estimated the energy usage would be around 470 kilowatt hours per square metre to heat to 20C all year round!

    It doesn’t cost anything to think how something could be done differently

    Trying to reduce that as far as possible has led to some fascinating innovations, such as developing a method where you can co-pressure test just one room (using the Pulse method) which means you don’t have to test the whole building. This means they can tackle different rooms in different ways and compare directly what their performance is like. For example, some floors they’ll be able to use underfloor insulation, whereas others are decorative floors that are protected under the listing so can’t use that approach. This should give them the ability to treat the areas in different ways and have a scientific method of comparison.

    “For the first time, we’ll actually have granularity over which components of upgrading a building made the most significant difference, because up until now, as a consultant, I can say, well, if you combine all these things together as a holistic approach, you will go from x to y in terms of performance, but what I can’t say is specifically out of those 10 things we do to your building, which is the first and the second and third most effective. It’s very, very difficult to get that granularity which this will offer.”

    Lymm Hall (Lymm Photographic Society)

    Achieving Passivhaus Premium on multiple dwellings will be a world first

    Alongside the main Lymm Hall project, they are also building their five detached houses in the paddock using modern methods of construction without any petrochemicals or concrete, with the ambition of achieving the Passivhaus Premium standard. There aren’t currently any Passivhaus Premiums in the UK, and to achieve five on the one site would be the first time that has been done anywhere globally.

    Another project is a series of barns that they are converting for ecotourism and making completely off-grid for water, electricity and waste.

    They are also working on an old sorting office in Levenshulme where they are trying to create the world’s first zero waste, zero energy food hall. It will have multiple kitchens, restaurants, brewery, roastery and zero waste deli.

    Kit is very aware that agriculture is also one of the largest contributers of carbon emissions, and is working alongside clients to do a lot of work around food and energy. This is around agroforestry in the main, looking at building products and food production, and also large scale energy production from estate lands.

    Find out more

    Visit the website of Ecospheric

    Follow Ecospheric on Twitter

    Transcript

    Download a transcript of the interview with Kit Knowles

    Please connect with us

    Subscribe, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts

    Rate and review the podcast on Stitcher

    Like our Facebook page

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