Tag: solar shading

HPH279 : A beginner’s guide to building terminology – with Lee Fordham from Architype
Lee Fordham from Architype simplifies some of the terminology you might come across if you’re thinking about doing a sustainable self build.

Interview with Lee Fordham

Shortly after qualifying as an architect in 2004, Lee spent time travelling and working for architecture practices in New Zealand and Australia. When he returned to the UK he decided to pursue his passion for sustainable design and started working at Architype, one of the UK’s leading sustainable architects, where he is now an Associate Director.

A beginner’s guide to terminology

For those that are just setting out in their self build journey there can be an overwhelming array of technical terminology used that can be baffling to anyone outside of the industry. Lee takes us through some of the common terms that you might come across in a sustainable self build.

Passivhaus / Passive House

Passivhaus (Passive House in the United States) is a building standard that was developed in Germany around 30 years ago. Using physics, the aim is to reduce the performance gap between how the building is designed to perform, and how it actually performs.

The aim is to make the building more comfortable for the occupants and reduce how much energy the building uses, which is done with a better quality of build.

Liz and Mike Hill’s Passivhaus – designed by Architype

The experts will use the Passivhaus Planning Package (which you’ll hear referred to as PHPP), which essentially is a very complicated spreadsheet of data that allows them to design a building that will meet the Passivhaus criteria. The contractor will use that information to construct the building, and a certifier will guarantee the work and certify it if it meets the required standard.

Passivhaus plaque

MVHR

You’ll commonly hear a Mechanical Ventilation Heat Recovery system referred to as an MVHR. They’re most likely to be used in Passivhaus buildings, but not exclusively. It is a ventilation system which extracts the used air from inside a building. It takes the heat from that air and mixes it with fresh air which is being brought into the building from outside, to provide every room with fresh, pre-warmed air.

The air is filtered coming into the building, and different filters can be used according to whatever is in the external air in that area.

A key benefit over natural ventilation is the element of control over any given space, ie removing moisture from bathrooms etc.

An MVHR for a domestic dwelling is roughly the size of a combi-boiler and will need to be incorporated into the building’s design.

MVHR unit at Landsdowne Drive Passivhaus – Green Building Store

Foundations / Footings

These will usually be designed by a structural engineer and are what sit under the building to evenly transfer the weight of the building to the earth. The type you use might be dependent on what your ground conditions are like, but some examples are pile foundations, deep strip foundations and raft foundations.

U-value

A complicated one to explain, but essentially it’s a way of measuring how thermally conductive a component or a series of components (like a piece of glass, wall or roof) is. It is the rate at which heat travels through. The lower the U-value, the better it is.

The aim is to have fairly consistent U-values across all the components in a building. Having just one element that isn’t consistent could act as a magnet for moisture and potentially damage the structure. This can partly be achieved by better insulation, triple-glazed windows etc.

The U-values form part of the data that feeds into the PHPP system.

Airtightness

At a very basic level, this is about eliminating drafts in a building. It’s relatively easy to achieve but needs to be thought about at the design stage. At Architype they denote the airtightness layer on their detailed drawings using a red line, which shows the contractors where to take particular care in the construction so as not to damage it.

To meet building regulations, when the building is finished an air test will be carried out. The building has a giant fan attached to it and is either positively pressured, ie blowing air in, or negatively pressured, ie extracting air. The rate at which the air leaks gives you your air test result. It is a measure in pascals of the pressure of an internal area. Building regs require you to get a result of 10 or less.

The method in a Passivhaus building is slightly different. This takes an average reading from the building being both positively and negatively pressured, to give an n50 value which is how many volumes of air changes there are in an hour. The Passivhaus requirement is that it should be less than 0.6, so significantly better than building regulations.

Build system / construction method

This is a way of describing what method you are going to use to construct your building. Examples include timber frame, masonry, brick and block, insulated concrete formwork (ICF), pre-cast concrete, in-situ concrete, and cross-laminated timber.

Pre-fabrication

Pre-fabrication is where components, or indeed whole buildings, are made off-site. This could be from wall panels, to timber frames, to bathrooms that are fully plumbed and tiled, to entire houses.

MAKAR production facility

You can even go to the factories and choose your handles, paint finishes, floor finishes etc. When they reach the site they are connected together. The advantages of building the elements off-site is it can be quicker, they’re not subject to delays or damage from the weather, and often it can result in better quality and working better when brought to site.

Huf Haus

Zero carbon

Lee says that this is a difficult one to explain as there are many different interpretations of what it means.

Generally it refers to off-setting the energy use in a building. So the better your building is, ie a Passivhaus, the less carbon you have to off-set because you’re not using as much energy.

Looking deeper into it, some people will be referring to zero carbon in use, which is the energy that is used starting from the point of when it’s been built, through to its end of life.

But there’s also embodied or sequestered carbon, which takes into account everything to do with the design and construction of the building, together with the in-use energy and sometimes through to the demolition. This is more complicated to account for, although there are tools which can help explain for instance, how much energy is used in getting a tree from Germany to the UK to use in a timber frame.

Custom build

Whereas self build has many decisions for you to make, whether or not you’re doing it in the purest sense of building it yourself, or whether you’re commissioning someone to carry that out for you, custom build can take some of those decisions away from you. There will be an offering from the custom build company, but with options for you to customise it. That could be in terms of the style of the house, the layout or the finishes. It might not be as individual as you would get with a self build, but it can take away a lot of the headaches!

Potton Homes design

Solar shading / brise soleil

Effectively the same thing, brise soleil or solar shading would be used on the south facing side of a building to limit the sun coming in during the summer months when you don’t want the building to overheat, but allowing it to come in during the winter when the heat is required. Generally it would be a horizontal component that sits over the south facing glazing, whether that be a roof overhang, external canopy or series of louvres.

External louvres – Charlie Luxton Design

Wimbish Passivhaus Scheme – Parsons & Whittley

Ditchingham Passivhaus Scheme – Parsons & Whittley

On an east or west elevation you would usually have a vertical component, and that’s just to do with the angle of the sun at certain times of day and certain times of year. Windows on the east and west elevation can be harder for dealing with glare and overheating issues.

Lee says the ideal situation is to have the building facing south where the solar gains can be controlled more easily.

Design team

The core members of a design team are likely to include: an architect, structural engineer, civil engineer, mechanical and electrical (M&E) engineer, and possibly a project manager.

Beyond that, depending on your site and your level of involvement and interests, you might also have: landscape architect, ecologist, arboriculturist, quantity surveyor, Passivhaus designer etc.

Renewables

Renewables refers to technology that generates energy. This could be photovoltaics, wind turbines, hydro power etc.

Air source and ground source heat pumps

An air source heat pump takes energy from the temperature in the air. Any air above zero degrees has energy in it and this can be taken and transferred into heat or hot water for your house. Similar in size to a washing machine, they’re put on the outside of a building.

The ground source heat pump works in much the same way but will take the energy from the ground. They have pipes which can either be spread horizontally in the ground which will require a lot of space, or as a vertical spread of pipes, which need less space but are a lot more expensive.

Plans, elevations, sections and details

These are examples of the different types of design drawings, created by Parsons and Whittley for Ben Adam-Smith’s house:

Plan – This is an aerial view, looking down onto the building. You can have different plans to show each floor of the building, but they can show the roof, doors, walls and windows, together with the internal layout.

Elevation – An elevation is a drawing of what the outsides of the building look like from where you’re standing. A south elevation for example would be the side of the building that is facing towards the south.

Section – This is like slicing down through a building to show what’s inside. It will show the components of the walls, floors, roof etc.

Details – By taking a section drawing and zooming in you will create a detail. They can be various scales, such as 1:2 or 1:10, and are an in-depth analysis and instruction for the contractor showing how to construct that part of the building. It would show them where the airtightness line is, where the insulation is, and how wide cavities would need to be.

Soft landings and performance monitoring

A soft landing is about making sure that once the building has been constructed, that the operator of that building knows how to use it. Obviously if you’ve built it yourself then this wouldn’t be necessary, but if you’ve largely commissioned other people to complete the project then you should have someone tell you how it all works.

Performance monitoring can take place throughout the build process but in particular Lee refers to monitoring once the building is complete. This uses sensors to check on things like the internal temperature, humidity and CO₂ levels, to make sure the building is performing as it was designed to do.

Tender

The way you tender will depend on what kind of contract you will have, but essentially a tender is a set of information that is put out to someone for a response. They will price up the aspects on the tender and return it with their figure and requested documentation. It can be a tender for a design team or for a contractor. The returned tender documents are then scored and weighted according to whatever your priorities might be. For some that might be 80% of the marks will be based on how competitive the price is, but for others they might weight it more heavily in favour of quality and not necessarily who is the cheapest.

A key thing is to make sure the information and drawings you are sending out are as comprehensive as possible. That way it can be priced accurately for what you will be needing. Without that detail they will be adding an element of price risk to their response which will invariably make it much more expensive.

Window parts
- Sill – The ledge at the bottom of the frame.
- Head – The top of a window where it meets the wall. It can be internal or external.
- Jamb – The side of the window
- Reveal – The part next to the jamb. Can be internal (usually plasterboard) or external (usually timber or brick). If the reveals are set very deep into the thickness of a wall they can provide some shading to the window
- Mullions and transoms – Found on traditional Victorian style windows, the mullions are the vertical bar in the middle of the window, and the transoms are the horizontal bar.
Roof parts
- Trusses – The pieces, usually made of wood, that actually make the roof structure
- Joists – A horizontal structural element that supports the floor and/or ceiling
- Eaves – The part of the roof that overhangs the wall. Usually if it’s a sloping roof it would be the part which overhangs the gutter
- Soffits – Underneath the eaves, the soffits are the horizontal section that you can see
- Ridge – The point right at the top of the roof, usually where two pitches come together
- Verge – The part at the side of the house. Usually there would be a bargeboard or piece of wood that goes down the side
- Parapet – Usually a piece of wall that protrudes up above a flat roof
Roof trusses

Roof joists

Find out more

Visit the website of Architype

Follow Architype on Twitter

Transcript

Download a transcript of the interview with Lee Fordham.

The Hub

If you’re new to self build and looking for more information, then be sure to check out The Hub. It’s full of great resources, video diaries and support from a community of like-minded self-builders.

Please connect with me

Subscribe, rate and review the podcast in iTunes

Rate and review the podcast on Stitcher

Like our Facebook page

Follow us on Twitter
February 26, 2020
HPH263 :A step-by-step EnerPHit retrofit of a mid-terrace home – with Harry Paticas from Arboreal Architecture

Harry Paticas of Arboreal Architecture explains why care and hard work have been so important to the retrofit of his 1978 mid-terrace townhouse.

© Agnese Sanvito

Interview with Harry Paticas

Harry has a background in art and maths, which he then followed with a degree in architecture. He says the turning point in his twelve years in practice as Arboreal Architecture was taking the Passivhaus training course and suddenly being able to understand how buildings perform.

Together with his interest in building performance and the natural world, he also has a passion for retrofit, and is currently getting towards the halfway point of a phased retrofit of his own house, a project which was overall winner at the inaugural ASBP Awards 2019.

“When you put passion in, you get something out”

The house was purchased in 2016 with the aim of doing a retrofit project. Although they had intended on finding something a bit cheaper so they would have more money to spend on the works, this house cost rather more than they had budgeted for which is the reason they are not currently as far along as they had hoped.

It is a south facing, slightly staggered mid-terrace property. It is a combination of a solid brick and block front wall that is tile clad, while the back wall is brick both sides with a cavity.

© Agnese Sanvito

It has been an intensive couple of years working on the house, with every Sunday taken up by long hours of DIY. It has been a massive learning journey which Harry says has also been of benefit professionally.

Not only has the DIY element of the project been hugely rewarding, but it works in parallel with his professional role where he can now speak even more confidently and knowledgeably to clients. This could be about how the MVHR functions, how often you need to change the filters, how the pipes connect etc. Likewise, it aids with speaking to builders and helping them do a better job, which gains more respect from them in turn.

The strategy involves four phases

The first phase involved work being carried out before they moved in. They had sold a property and were renting so that they could get any of the dangerous, dusty and cold work out of the way while living in their rental accommodation. This included asbestos removal from ceilings, airtightness works to the ceiling on the top floor, putting in and taping vapour block boards to each other and to the walls, adding insulation to the loft, making the house secure and weathertight and installing three triple glazed windows.

Generally the plan has been to work from the top of the house down to the bottom. Following the loft works and triple glazing to the front elevation they added insulation to the walls of those rooms. By this time they were living in the house and noticeably felt the thermal shift during the winter weekend when they added the cork insulation to the walls.

A key part of the strategy was maintaining good quality ventilation before the MVHR unit was even installed. With the existing leaky double glazing they knew it wouldn’t be a problem, but when they were replaced with the triple glazing they specified night vents. These allow the handle to be put to 45 degrees off the vertical which gives a 3mm opening in the window at the top. This meant they could maintain decent air quality as an interim measure without the need for installing trickle vents.

By doing lots of monitoring of particulate matter, nitrous oxide, carbon dioxide, temperature and moisture content, they could use the information to decide whether night vents should be open or not.

Harry is currently finishing off bits of airtightness work and interior decorating of phase two before working on the next big phase which will be working out where the living space is going to be. The plans they submitted to the Passivhaus Institute had it on the first floor, but they’re now thinking of having it on the ground floor.

© Agnese Sanvito

According to their EnerPHit retrofit plan, the next phase is to temporarily insulate the garage door. This will instantly reduce heat loss through the whole of the living room floor, the ground floor hallway and a back wall of the garage. In order to do that they will need to block the door and create a new entrance into the garage.

Along with insulating the porch and insulation to the bathroom, these will form phase three, with phase four being the ground floor front and back insulation, and insulation to the floor.

Cork has been used for internal insulation

Harry was always going to use an insulation material that was from renewable sources. He also wanted something that wouldn’t off-gas but be neutral in terms of air quality.

His work with Jane Anderson on embodied and sequestered energy in a range of insulation materials has shown that cork actually has lower embodied energy than wood fibre, and is very good on both counts.

It hasn’t performed as well as hoped in the heat

While internal temperatures have reached 27 degrees, it hasn’t overheated in the Passivhaus terms of over 20 degrees for 10% of the year. With the new windows they are getting 20% less sun through, but with the cork they’re not getting much effect from decrement delay. They have a medium thermal mass and the top floor doesn’t cool down very quickly because of the blockwork walls and brick party walls.

Currently being made are three bright yellow sails which can be attached to the front of the house and shade 100% of the top two windows and over 50% of the large living room window. They will provide a low carbon, low tech solution to shading and reducing overheating, and which can be packed away in a bag in the loft when not needed for the rest of the year. They will also be able to judge their effectiveness scientifically as they have installed sensors on the inside and outside of various rooms of both theirs, and their neighbour’s house for comparison.

It’s also about respecting materials that are already in the building

The process they have adopted has been to try not to replace something if it actually works quite well.

“So there’s a little bit more of a lean towards embodied carbon, rather than very demanding interior design aesthetics.”

This has led to what Harry calls some ‘fun moments’ and to a little bit of variation, which they’re accepting of and saying that’s what this is about, rather than trying to put his architectural stamp on everything and making it as perfect as possible.

It has been an education for his son

With Harry’s son soon turning eight, he was keen for him to be involved and remember the experience as much as possible, with a deep understanding of what it is they were doing and why.

With only a little encouragement at first, his son has been producing a series of A3 posters with images, annotations and diagrams, about cork, airtightness, a thermographic survey, insulation and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery.

© Agnese Sanvito

His teacher engaged with the process and has encouraged him to display them in school and do presentations about them to his class.

A direct result of the school presentations is that Harry is starting a charity or community interest company which will be about retrofitting schools. He will be delivering thermal performance workshops to school children and doing research with them where they look at the fabric of their classrooms and the school and coming up with a retrofit masterplan.

There have been particularly pleasing elements

Having never had them before, Harry particularly loves the triple glazed windows, which is an opinion shared by visitors to the house. They are inward opening with a central flying mullion which allows them to open up a whole elevation and achieve very rapid night time cooling.

© Agnese Sanvito

Another favourite feature is the MVHR unit. They still open windows when they want, but for general air quality which has been backed up with numerical evidence from their monitoring, it has been particularly pleasing.

© Agnese Sanvito

Harry says that working with and getting to know materials has also been lots of fun, particularly with the cork.

Find out more

Visit the website of Arboreal Architecture

Follow Harry Paticas on Twitter

Support Harry’s petition for zero rate VAT on deep retrofit

Transcript

Download a transcript of the interview with Harry Paticas

Please connect with me

Subscribe, rate and review the podcast in iTunes

Rate and review the podcast on Stitcher

Like our Facebook page

Follow us on Twitter

September 8, 2019
HPH255 : How do you specify high performance windows? – with Chris Herring

Chris Herring, Director at Green Building Store, explains why careful consideration should be given when specifying windows.

Interview with Chris Herring

With a father who was a keen environmentalist, Chris was raised with an awareness of ecological issues from a young age. A builder by trade he has been in the industry since the 1980s and is now a director at Green Building Store.

Windows aren’t just another building element, they’re a critical one

Chris emphasises how important it is to get the right windows on a building project. They matter to the feel of the house and how we feel in the house.

They have physical and architectural functions, they’re part of the fabric and the thermal performance, there are safety issues in that you need to be able to get out of them, they might have to protect against fire, and obviously let light in.

When it comes to specifying windows and bringing all that together, many of those functions can actually be in conflict with one another. Often it can be a case of finding the best compromise.

Manufacturers and suppliers should be part of the design process

With components and performance levels in buildings becoming more complex, Chris would like to see manufacturers and suppliers becoming more part of the team. They can bring their expertise at an earlier point and be more involved in helping to specify the right windows for the job.

Triple glazing as standard

Chris says that with a little more attention to detail and extra skill, a building can, and should, be made considerably better. With the thermal envelope key to the performance of the building, triple glazing should be standard in the UK climate to make it work.

“So, we need triple glazing because the Passivhaus Standard drives us there, and it drives us there because the building physics drives us there. The key to that is, in many ways, comfort, because we need every surface to be warm. Because then we don’t need to heat the building very much. As soon as you get a cold spot, you’re going to get mould, you’re going to get discomfort, you’ve got down-drafting, you’ve got all these problems. So, the system stops working. So, it’s the building as part of the system that drives us to triple glazing in this climate.”

Determine the energy balance

There is more energy loss from windows than any other part of the fabric of a building. Their thermal transmission will always be a weak point, but they do also bring solar heat into the building. That energy balance between the gain and the losses is what’s so significant with windows.

Being around 10-15% of the area of the building, they typically make up a disproportionate amount (roughly 30%) of the losses.

If you’re north facing you have no significant energy balance. It’s just a loss so the logic then would be to have small windows.

With a Passivhaus, it’s about looking at how to get the best balance between those window heat losses and gains, and typically they’re approximately in balance, so are neutral in their effect.

Understand their performance

Chris thinks it’s worth taking time to understand a little bit about these values so you can understand more about the performance, rather than just being led by someone else.

U-value: the heat loss through the piece of glass – measured as the heat loss per metre squared per degree kelvin difference between inside and outside. So, watts per metre squared K (W/m²K).

A measurement can also be taken for the heat loss through the window frame (usually worse than through the glass).

The Psi-value is the heat that is lost through the edge of the glass where it meets the frame. That is measured as a heat loss per metre perimeter of glass.

Those three factors, the frame value, the glass value and the Psi value, are added together to give the U-value of the total window.

Each window will have a different U-value so they are all modelled separately in PHPP.

G-value: this is the measurement of how much solar gain actually gets through the glass. The more panes and coatings there are, the more you restrict the amount of sun that can get through.

In a triple-glazed window it would likely be in the 50-60% range. In double-glazed it might be around 70%, and in single-glazed closer to 80-90%.

Lambda-values: this relates to thermal conductivity. It applies to every material and is actually the inherent quality of the material.

“Obviously, if we take a piece of aluminium or a piece of expanded polystyrene, they’ve got very different amounts of thermal conductivity, the amount that heat can get through per metre thickness of that material. So, a λ-value is given as the heat loss, which is given in watts, per metre thickness of the material per degree difference between the inside and the outside. So, that’s watts per metre K (W/mK). So, the metre is the thickness of the material.
It’s quite different from the U-value, which is about an area value, if you like; it’s per metre squared. And we’ll use that thermal conductivity to then calculate the U-value.”

PHPP calculates the U-value

Chris explains that PHPP has a standard calculation which takes the heat loss from the glass, the heat loss from the edge of the glass and the heat loss from the frame, and adds them together. It calculates the total heat loss and gives the U-value of the window.

PHPP also builds in the Psi-value for the installation, which is given as the heat loss per metre perimeter of the window. To get the installed value for the window, that heat loss is added to the total heat loss of the window. The calculation shows how important it is that the window is installed properly, and the implications for if it’s not. A triple-glazed window installed badly for example, could effectively end up with the performance of a double-glazed unit.

“So, that detailing is incredibly important and something people struggle with and architects struggle with.
Coming back to what the suppliers and manufacturers offer, I think this extra value of supporting people further, supporting architects, supporting clients, is actually critical. I think it will become more and more important for suppliers to add those extra values to supply. It’s not just a widget that’s somebody else’s problem how they fit it, the supplier should be going further down the chain and advising people how to fit it and helping them to get that detailing right.”

Understand risks of overheating

While PHPP gives an idea of overheating across the whole building, it doesn’t differentiate by room. Understanding some of the causes can be helpful. A full height window for example, while perhaps desired architecturally, won’t increase the light level a great deal because you’re only lighting quite a small area (it’s higher light that has more effect in terms of lighting the building). However, it will result in increased overheating because it’s still heating the floor up fairly close to the window, and that’s heating the room up.

Trying to get round that by using shading would need a much bigger overhang to fully shade the window, which is probably unlikely to be used. So in that case, although the overhang can be shading the top half of the window, the bottom half going down to the floor is not shaded and will result in overheating.

Something else to bear in mind is that a window above 800mm from the floor doesn’t require safety glazing, which can make considerable cost savings.

Timber-clad windows are recommended

Green Building Store made the decision some years ago that triple glazed would be the only window they would offer, but there are different types of cladding. They don’t engage very much in the conversation around uPVC windows because the evidence they’ve seen shows how environmentally damaging they are.

There are also questions around the environmental impact of aluminium clad windows. The energy use in smelting and even recycling aluminium is quite high.

“We’ve always tended to encourage people to go to non-aluminium clad windows because we think that the evidence seems to show that it lowers the environmental impact of the window. We have bowed to demand, if you like, and now offer aluminium clad as well.”

Timber windows do need painting every 10 years and adding up that expense will probably make it similar to the cost of aluminium cladding. But what most suppliers won’t tell you is that the aluminium cladding will fade over time and you will likely lose the appearance within 20 or 30 years.

“If people come to us and ask for aluminium clad, we’ll give them aluminium clad. If they want to discuss the issues then we’ll certainly discuss that with them. And we do outline some of that information on our website as well, so that people can think about those issues.”

Find out more

Visit the website of Green Building Store

Follow Green Building Store on Twitter

Transcript

Download a transcript of the interview with Chris-Herring.

Please connect with me

Subscribe, rate and review the podcast in iTunes

Rate and review the podcast on Stitcher

Like our Facebook page

Follow us on Twitter

June 19, 2019
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.

Please connect with me
- Subscribe, rate and review the podcast in iTunes
- Rate and review the podcast on Stitcher
- Like our Facebook page
- Follow us on Twitter
January 13, 2016