The UK has some of the poorest housing stock in the EU, and some of the most stringent net zero housing policies, how do we solve this paradox?
We have an aging housing stock ripe for retrofit, we also have a well-developed new housing sector with ever increasing targets for energy performance.
During this lecture Richard will discuss some of the findings of his work over the past 12 years working at Energy House Labs, both on retrofitting homes and new-build housing.
Good evening ladies and gentlemen and welcome to everybody online uh my name is Professor will Swan I’m the director of energy house labs and welcome to the uh professorial inaugural lecture for Professor Richard fitton um I’ve worked with Richard for over a decade now
And when he joined us um we had a nent buildings and energy uh Research Unit commercial unit um and he joined us at the start really with energy house one or the sord energy house as it was at the time and over the last decade it’s
Grown to be one of the biggest most high-profile um units that we have we’ve gone from um you know being the this new kid on the Block to dealing with some of the bigger universities dealing with large companies industry some of people who are with us today um and that rapid
Growth because I think 10 years to build a huge Research Unit that we have you know from one lab to five Labs is a testament to to Richard’s commitment um that is driven by hard work knowledge application and I think it’s not just about the research it’s about Richard’s
Generosity to um young researchers about sharing his knowledge about making a difference so the charity that we established the friends of energy house Labs all of these things kind of show um what Richard is all about and then it’s about making a difference um so I won’t
Go on too much longer because Richie’s got 61 slides um but um it’s a real pleasure you know for me um Richard’s been you know working hand in hand for such a long time um and it’s my great pleasure to introduce Professor Richard Finn [Applause] so that’s working Mike excellent can we
Get rid of this slide now been wanting to get rid of this slide for the past five minutes there we go so um thanks will so uh for those who I don’t know which is probably a few in the room rather than a majority uh my name’s Richard uh and I’m
The technical director of energy house Labs uh and I have been uh for the past well over a decade as Wills just pointed out so I was asked to try and suggest some ways that we can get to Net Zero in our building stock in the UK um so hopefully you’ll find it
Interesting we got some time for questions at the end um so if you if you think of anything along the way then um there’ll be plenty of opportunity to answer those question questions when we get around to it so so this is this is the how we’re
Going to approach it so I’m going to tell you a little bit about me I’m going to tell you about some of the my time at the University what we do where we work the existing homes and retrofit side of things that we do the future home side
Of things which we do uh quick Roundup and then any questions at the end so this is who I am uh I I studied at at Technical College in Alm when I was a mere young boy then I graduated uh my bachelor in building surveilling over at
Sheffield in 2001 uh I spent 10 years uh in the building surveying industry uh working various different places from the ministry of Defense the local Authority uh and finally uh working with training and development of courses um I joined the um the University of sford as a technical consultant way back in 2011
When I had hair and it was black and uh and everything was great so that’s a little bit about who I am this this Buton thing is not excellent is it have we got a different is it me I’m going to use this so old school so um this this is my very
Brief uh history at the University of Salford um I I started um 2011 I was made the manager uh the technical manager of the energy house in 2013 uh I made the lectureship in 2015 then I did my PhD uh part-time and I got back 2016
Then I was offered a readership in 2019 and then finally I was off of my professor role 2022 seems like a long time ago now um so this is this is how I first started at the University s i i first I went on a tour with where’s he
John Steve waterworth is somewhere he’s there you look exactly the same Steve um I I I was at the um Trafford as the energy manager over Trafford Council and I went on a Toral around the energy house then I was showing my boss the the the advert for it when I got back
Noticed there was a job vacancy went in Steve interviewed me and the rest is history as I say uh I started working when we first opened the ener house um there was much press and much interest and Steve waterworth was running around with umbrellas and it was raining on him
And everyone was excited um but there was some problems in the chamber and and it wasn’t working to Optimal should we say uh so between ourselves and Nigel who was there and Steve we kind of got it all running and get it to to where it
Is now which is a worldclass facility um but you know we had to do some work on it so some people inside the university were weren’t happy with what I was doing and what energy house wasn’t do was doing and I used to get Nice Notes stuck
On my door by very very very senior academics every morning uh for about six or seven months so I used to throw them in the bin and have some standup arguments with academics about what we were doing and why it was the right thing to do and after a year it went
Away and when the cooling Works were all complete uh I started my role around this time uh myself and will there was only me Will and and the g Maul when we first started uh we set up the applied buildings engine research group and then will became my boss and
That’s generally what he does he just stands and looks up at things and gets things done so why why do we do all this so it’s it’s probably quite obvious to to many in the room why we do it climate change is happening um the Earth surface temperature is gaining temperature well
Gaining heat very quickly and it’s up about 1.1% since a pre-industrial area uh and we’ve had the seven warmest years um between 2015 and 2021 um and this happens most across our land rather than across the sea and it’s also more than twice as fast in the
Arctic so we’ve got severe problems all across the go and the UK isn’t isolated from this um about 10 of our warmest years in the UK have happened since 2003 uh 2022 was our hottest year on record um with the first average year round um temperature of 10 degrees or
Over 10 degrees so and we also getting more extreme events like flooding wildfires and rising sea levels across the planet so it’s quite obvious why we’re looking at the things that affect climate change change so buildings are are responsible for a lot of the issues we have around climate
Change and about 40% of the global energy related carbon emissions are from buildings about a third of them 28% from from energy needed to heat cool and power and 11% for the actual materials that go into the buildings so what we need to look at is how we reduce these
Emissions to to slow the climate change down uh and more more like as well for the work we do is realize the fact that climate change is happening do something about it but also understand how the buildings are going to perform when this climate change happens as we can
Obviously see that it will do uh and then add on top of that the cost of living crisis and it makes these issues more and more relevant as we’ve seen certainly in the last maybe three or four years so the UK as as as it stands now has the worst performing housing stock
In the UK about 80% of the homes that are going to exist in 2050 we’ve already built so it’s too late really to think that the new build sector is going to fix all our problems um the UK has been insulating Lofts and paying for this uh
Since the 1970s and yet about a third you know 31% of our homes 8 million of them still don’t have easy to fix Loft insulation so people just don’t take up these measures sometimes even if you give it them free again about 30% of cavities you know can be filled but they
Aren’t so 3.8 million homes that are still left that are past as easy to treat there’s no reason why these buildings can’t be treated uh the the worst of our our properties are the solid wall properties which we represent in energy house so that that lets us
Look that there a very serious problem with solid wall because these are the homes that have had basically nothing done to them about 9% of them have been treated uh so we about 7.7 million left to go out in the UK which is a a massive number and speaking of massive numbers
If we if we are to get where we need to get by 2050 for our Net Zero targets then we need to do some retrofit to 27 million homes so 900,000 homes per year 2,466 homes per day um and the slower we take the longer it’s going to take and
The worse the problems are going to be so how do we do it so we have kind of four strands to what we do in our research group we tend to look very much at the decarbonization side of things so that’s reducing the energy that buildings need to to run them to heat
Cool Paran white them and then we look at embodied energy so how much energy goes into a building at the start of it during its operational time and then at the end of it as well how does that carbon cycle work adaptation so like I said we need to look at increasing
Temperatures across the globe more extreme weather and the biodiversity side of things how do we kind of engage with all those things and make sure our buildings can work for the future energy transition so we we are going to move the way that we heat and power our homes
So we’re going to go electrification we think on on the heating side of things same the transport District heating will become more common and hydrogen well I think the the jur is still out on our hydrogen but we’ll wait and see digitization is the final piece not in
The puzzle which basically means that we have a lot more data flowing from houses now so we have our Smart Meters we have Smart thermostats and heating controls things like this how can that have an effect on what we do but more to the point how can we make life easier for
People to save energy and then a layered over the top of all that is the data services that we can use to do that stuff with so what how does energy house Labs kind of fit in with that there’s a lot of people who were really focused on
Energy savings measures and it’s got a lot of stakeholders this industry so you got the landlords they need to know what what’s happening for their Investments the tenants you got the people who actually invest in the energy saving measures you got the policy makers who we meet fairly regular now um You got
The product manufacturers who are developing these things you got the homeowners and and you got the house builders as well so we like to think the energy house lab sits in the middle of those things alongside how we validate and how we measure the performance of of Energy savings um
Products so this is the kind of this is the what we do so we have energy house which is our first project we have thermal measurement laboratory which is all around how we measure the thermal performance of materials and how that can be improved we have the Smart Homes
And smart meters lab so that looks at the data side of things and how we can acquire data and make best use of it from smart meters and other infrastructure in homes and and the last we have energy house to which is all around new build and looking at more of a global
Marketplace and and I think last but not least we we’ll touch on it uh we’re really proud of of the charity friends of energy house or friends of energy house Labs I think it’s called now not friends of energy House 2 so what what
We do there is we we work with a lot of people who are really interested in things we do and they also have corporate sustain ability and things that they look at in terms of how they can engage with Charities and how they can engage with helping people for for
The betterment of their lives so we we this is all focused around the Northwest so we look at uh diversification of Workforce educational Outreach and supporting students and local community initiatives so that’s all based within the Northwest uh and up to now we’ve raised about 300,000 for that charity
And it’s only be going two years so we’ve done we’ve done fairly well of that and he sponsored PhD students undergrads and other postgrad work as well so we we kind of happy with that project it’s good so with this is kind of where we started energy
House um we needed to to do something and this was before my time but the the difficulty Still Remains the Same we have the climate change act which brought about all the things that we talk about in ter terms of Net Zero and things like this we have like I said
Earlier this problem with existing homes we have the problem of how we assess if something is a good solution or a bad solution in retrofit we needed somewhere we can do repeatable experiments we need a high quality high quality data and we needed the ability to change the house
So if you go to the house energy house any time you’ll see that it’s been hacked to Pieces it’s been at the moment it’s been insulated externally it’s had the flaws out it’s had the everything you can do to that building has been done we needed somewhere to as as a as a
Playground for Energy Efficiency measures really so we look at everything across energy house um we look at boilers we look at thermal paints we look at insulation the air quality icon there is not perfect I I have to say um but but we look at all the different
Things that we can do from the high cost measures from the full retrofits right the way through to curtains and ventil and all the other kind of side issues that we talk about and EVS as well and I think when you know me or Dave or will do kind of tours around the
Facility and people ask what we’ve tested we can pretty much answer yes now to to every measure that people mention so that which is pretty pretty impressive so here we see the energy house so is a Victorian Terrace in in a large environmental chamber and what we’re doing there we we’ve externally
Insulated the building uh but we do far more in-depth uh studies than this so this is the guys at the back here from maner house did this work so this is uh dayve farmer Grant and Bill so these were basically looking at very deep retrofit it’s called The
Deep project and you know don’t worry about the numbers and the graphs and stuff like that the fact is you will see that there’s some very high costs right the way up to 32k for kind of full retrofits but there’s some jumps in this and what we see all the time is that
These big jumps happen when we start to externally insulate the building and then there’s some things we can do to tidy up along the top but if you look at these costs they’re high so we start off ground floor insulation which is our kind of big jumping Point 5,000 6,000
Then we’re right the way up to 32k so I’m not going to labor the point of the graph but the fact is that to do retro fit right Tech takes some significant investment and to do the research right make sure that we get these investment figures right right as well we can tell
People really safely hopefully what what will happen to their homes so again the same project here from from Dave’s team we’re looking at where does a a gas central heating system kind of start to be slightly better or slightly worse than than an airs Source heat pump and basically the
Point where an airs Source heat pump becomes a good thing to do for that building where the the costs are just about the same as when we do the whole house approach where we kind of look at the full the full picture here so it it’s studies like that that policy
Makers can take and say right this is actually when things work and that’s what they want to see and it comes back to that validation piece of drisking retrofit deep retrofit is hard it’s expensive it’s disruptive and it’s underfunded um and and and I think
That’s what deep told us is the fact to do it right costs a lot but it does Save A Lot at the end and and it’s all about how we invest in properties so when we see solutions that are really difficult then we also start to think about things that aren’t difficult and
We start to think of some of the ways we can save energy that are low cost so last winter uh we were funded by Nester who a big charity in the UK and that was driven by a literature View and some data collection that that we did down
Energy house one with Dave’s team and we looked across the lowcost Energy savings measures and then cage architectural research kind of took our findings and our literature reviews and built a profile of the UK and this these are some of the facts and Figures it’s a bit small to read on
The screen but the point of this slide is that we generate a lot of data and there’s a lot of good savings if you went past any of the bus stops throughout the UK uh these were the measures and the messages that were being put out by government okay
Straight from our data through our literature search as well so that’s good so again lowc cost measures we we start to think about things that like window films that can cost 8 pound if you do your whole house and and the rooms that that you kind of
Tend to heat the most we can be talking about you know 3% saving off off your energy bill these are things that have never been researched before because they were seen as too cheap too cost effective no one was really interested but when the when the prices are going
So high then people quickly become interested in them um CT which Professor Swan daily teases me about so I I I spent spent a lot of time researching curtains in my past and uh the point is everyone that comes to the energy house says I’m much enies this curtain
Sa that’s what they want to actually find out nothing else so they’re really people are really interested in the low cost stuff and if you look at curtains in a typical scenario it’s it’s £10 pound a year they’re not massive Sal saing but we can benefit from it 48% of
The homes that that the on looked at said we can benefit from putting those kind of things more importantly is this again this this was done by Dave’s team over energy house one we looked at Combi Boer fall temperature and this this was actually featured on billboards on bus
Stops National campaigns on the radio and TV as as the key government energy saving measure and this is about if you turn down your boiler to a slightly less um set point on on the heating flow temperature it basically makes the boiler condense more it becomes more
Efficient and then it starts to work in the way it should when a boil is installed they usually set about 75° the Heat and engineer walks away uh if if we can set them from 75 down to 60 then we’re talking about 8% saving off your
Gas bill 97 pound a year okay and that figure will just go up every time the price cap goes up as well so you know things like this that research had never been done before so Dave’s team provided the fundamental research to the government messaging for the entire
Winter season uh and and people thought it had been done before and then you look into the data and it’s just a madeup number so that’s what we’re good at we’re good at providing the the evidence and and finding out why actually things can save so these aren’t
Small numbers you know my measly curtain research uh would save 142 million a year um the window films if every house that we thought could do it did it that’s a billion a year boil a turn down another billion a year of of energy that could be in people’s pockets rather than
Heating the rest of the the outside world so you know when we’re talking about the cost of living crisis they’re not necessarily people aren’t interested in doing full massive retrofits and building new houses they’re interested in this stuff and this is what makes the difference so when we do see these Quick Fix
Solutions we see things that don’t work as well and I take particular pride in my job of finding things that don’t work uh is is what I enjoy most um we find that people offer Saving Solutions that are so good that they can’t be true so
If something’s too good to be true it’s not true thermal paints are an example of this and they’re of often advertised with huge savings figures uh and some of the figures that we saw adverti didn’t appear to be very realistic so we took some of the samples
And bear in mind some of these samples claim to use vacuums and nanospheres and all the other technological buzzwords that we like to hear that you know I’m no expert in vacuums but I know that you can’t hold a vacuum in something that’s shattered to pieces like this and when
You look at something very closely under a microscope you kind of start to figure out how these things are being portrayed as working but when you look at them closely they can’t work now this is a big graph with it’s not very clear text
But I only want you to look at one thing and the one thing is that bar against that bar these are all thermal paints with the exception of this one which is just simple lining paper on a wall and this is good old fashion poyene backed
Wallpaper which we used in the 70s to fight condensation and mold growth so don’t even worry about the numbers just worry about the size of those okay the next one so that tells you that these are the savings being offered by thermal paint That’s the saving being offered by
Something as simple as a thin Slither of poyene again don’t worry about the numbers worry about this end column this is how long it takes for those to pay back the worst one was over a thousand years and the best one which was still good old fashioned friend EPs and line
Of paper was 50 years okay bearing in mind these take over ,000 to install so you know the best saving that we found was 3% okay so when we get the newspaper and magazine adverts that say 25% that’s what what led us to kind of take this thing quite seriously because
There’s a huge difference in in cost savings and Energy savings between something that works and something that works as it’s advertised so EPS was was far the best um now what I would caveat this with is thermal paints do have their place so reflective paints and things like this
If you use them in heating dominated sorry heat dominated climates where you’ve got very uh High rates of solar radiation on the outside of the building they will reflect and they will help save some air conditioning loads and also they will help the things like mold growth some of these paints will stop
Mold and condensation on your walls but they will not save the 25% energy which the advertisers is doing so that’s why we kind of had to do we’ve got to do the things that save and we’ve got to do the things that don’t save as well so that’s our kind of retrofit side
Of thing we we do stacks we continue to do stacks and and Dave’s facility is full up as long as he could ever use that facility there’ll always be someone waiting to use energy house W and it still Remains the only one in the world
Um so we we we over the moon with the energy house W Zed house was our kind of first foray into into new build we not we’re not really done a great deal on new build we knew we had to do something so barretts came to us and they said uh we’re going
To build the house of the future would you like to have it on your campus um and we said yes um and and they built their house of the future on campus it was fairly straightforward we found a piece of land they built it and we had
People liveing it and we we measured the performance of it and we gave them some feedback on it was was it perfect no we found some issues um what did it lead to them doing something better hopefully uh and the next thing that they did with us
Was they built then a house in energy house to so Zed house was a kind of good a good um jumping in point for us for for for the new Bill sector um so speaking of which that’s kind of when we figured out like it was around that
Time where we we’ve probably already figured out that we needed to to kind of do something a bit different than energy house one um energy house one probably always be our best friend it was certainly where I started but it had this this kind of fixed asset which is
Really difficult to change so when we built it it was difficult to take it down and build something else will be difficult but also we wanted to keep it it’s not something that we particularly want to change um the profile was very much aimed towards the UK and Northern
Europe so minus 12 and plus 30° C had waiting times of of more than a year so we kind of you know went to kind of push that thing on other university other universities that the asme and will to design facilities for them we didn’t particular
Want to do that um and we wanted to retain the the leadership uh in this area so we wanted to kind of maintain our standing of of hopefully being the best at what we do so this is what we started off with so this was my handwriting and sketch
For those who recognize it uh it’s uh this was kind of super energy house too uh it had three houses in it it was more or less a full Street um we had trees and all sorts I think when we got into the details um and that’s where we started 2015 was
Kind of where where that kind of pencil hit the page 2016 we we got the concept so this was again all singing all dancing it had you know different pant rooms in different sections and it had more than enough space to do anything we want then we we moved on and this was
Our kind of next feasibility stage so be in mind two years have gone by here nothing moves quickly in a university um and it was looking pretty much like we wanted it to look then we value engineered the the oval circuit from the from the
Outside uh but and this is what we ended up with which we we’re happy with um so it went through many different iteration iterations before we got to this this kind of 2018 final stage and one of the main obvious points there was what could we
Afford so this is basically what what we what we could afford at the end of it and this this led myself and will to go to the government to go to Europe to go to the university to to gain 16 million pounds worth of funding for this building which uh obviously will LED
That and it was quite a difficult task for him uh but we did it uh and then we needed to build it which is where it was handed back to me so we took down one of the most beautiful pieces of architecture on the campus uh unfortunately and we replaced
That with a car park so that allowed us to build energy House 2 so what you’re looking at here is is the foundations for energy House 2 and don’t worry it will get more exciting but the fact here is that just underneath the building there’s there’s a couple of million pounds worth of
Building work just to to support the environmental Chambers so it was quite an impressive kind of civil engineering project before it even got out of the ground and certainly totally unique for it for it for it time the next huge portion of work on this building was was
The H flank the bit that makes it hot and the bit that makes it cold and there was you know a good between a third and a half of the money was spent just on the H which for a building project is unheard of it was all in the Machinery
So all the expensive stuff is hidden away that’s up in the plant room and the foundations no one will ever see again but but I assure you it’s all there so then we came to finish it and then we came to test it we didn’t have any
Houses so we had to pter cabins in there fill them full of heaters and then to fill it full of snow and everything else and get the get the the rigs all running without there be any houses in there so this is kind of where we went from so we
I’m going to talk over this video so energy house what was obviously a key asset it does everything it’s meant to do it does the wind it does the rain it does the snow it does everything that that that we need that building to possibly do but we can we could see ways
That we could improve what we did did and we could see ways to make it a lot more flexible so this is the building for those who haven’t seen it this is just as it was being finished so it is a big kind of black box that’s that’s as
Simple as it is uh there’s no windows the Kaz that would be sold again and it would interrup the cad in and the continuity the thermal side of things it would just be quite difficult so it’s a bit of a an odd place to work these are
The chamers and as we go through now we’ll start to see kind of what it looks like in terms of scale so where where we went from from having this empty building then we had an open competition to the house builders to come in and suggest buildings that they wanted to
Build and because it was a European project that had to be done all fair and square so basically what we have is we have a house built by barretts and we have a house uh with sanaban and we have a house built by bway next door to it so
I’m just going to skim through so these are a couple of our rain rigs that we used to rain on the building these are our empty chambers here so this they’re no longer empty I wish they were um these this is the H viik upstairs and downstairs which kind of keeps it all
Working and all running uh again that’s difficult equipment to keep running all the time but it does a very good job and it’s as efficient as it could possibly be as well there’s no point building a building for Energy Research that isn’t kind of energy efficient uh well I’m
Sure of energy manager will disagree with that um so there we go so just to prove that they are real houses which we often have to do because everyone thinks that they’re kind of dolls houses or make believe houses these are real houses butt with real foundations in
Soil that’s protected from the outside world so this is a house being built by B Bel Pardon Me by bway on the right and sanaban Barett on the left and you’ll see they had to share the same scaffolders the same Timber Erectors the same health and safety principal
Coordinator this was a mammoth task and they shared that if this was out in the real world there will be a huge barwi fence right down the middle they they do not share and they don’t share their findings in the real world they don’t share anything and certainly wouldn’t
Share a chamber but what they agreed to do which was really impressive was to was to do exactly that they agreed to share the chamber share the contractors share the the ground workers and all the other they also agreed to share all their research publicly so we’ve just
Put out a report talk about in a second which says some of the issues with the buildings and we found some problems we found that work it’s good in some areas less than good in the other areas but they they’ve been very open with their research and they’ve shared it with each
Other as well which is really really unusual uh for house builders but it goes to tell you that when we’re looking at the future of housing then the risk is too big for them not to work together and not to get it right so they also
Agreed to do things like not put the same heating systems in and not put the same ventilation systems in so they’ve got a good kind of overlap of the findings that they get at the end of it so we were really impressed that they that they kind of did
That this is how it looks now so we got we have the we did some work well we we started some work with Volkswagen on the EV side of things we’ve got the bellway in the bar house there in the background this is what it looks like with snow
Which is what everyone wants to see but it’s really really difficult to do it takes a long time um but in essence we we kind of that the project this click is is is a bit bigger than than just those two houses that that takes up one chamber of our two
Chambers what we’ve got next door is very much at the moment very much kind of R&D a center if you like where people can just pitch up build what they want and then we’ll probably take them down in short periods of time whereas I think the housing and the
Other chamber will probably be with us for for maybe four five six years so this is this is a products called Matt zero on the left so what Matt zero is is a good example of the kind of range of things we do this is a un issue tent
That that the refugees get okay so the average time that someone would spend in that tent is 12 years uh and a family between four and five would live in that uh so it’s heated with either a kerosene stove or a fire outside that they bring inside at night to keep warm which
Obviously is really dangerous it leav to a lot of fires lot Suffocation and and we can all see that it’s a desperate situation to be in so what Matt zero is is a series of um solar panels it goes outside the tent it feeds into a small
Battery inside which they can use for for Wi-Fi and they can use to charge their phones and they can use the lights but also it’s a it’s a heated mat an infrared heated mat that they can lie on and sleep and keep warm keep healthy and keep safe as well more importantly so
That that was out of uh prod design at Lu University so that’s a really interesting project they just had their initial order I think for several thousand units to do a field trial so that we quite we quite glad to be a part of that project uh theril is is is a a
New type of energy saving measure which works on adjusting the heat flow over the top of a radiator and then creates an air curtain in front of a window it it it has to be measured really carefully and it’s really sensitive to kind of how it works so the only we
Place I think we could have tested that measure was in energy House 2 and that’s now down with the people who run the energy models for the UK uh to go into their accreditation scheme to see how much savings that will generate so it’s again it’s a good example of different
Things that we can do not just working with the big house builders but working with small smmes people working in charity projects and all the rest uh this is the our newest building this was a spin out of the graphine center down in Manchester and what this was is the that
Vector Holmes who are the guys here Liam and and Nathan they aimed to create the most cost effective home to build and to run in the UK so this is all about providing Mass housing uh for the social sector and and able to pay sector as
Well but the idea is that it’s built from this lightweight steel frame that you see there on the left everything can be moved by hand there’s no cranes there’s no Machinery needed to build it it’s all basically hand movable uh and the insulation as you would expect from
The graphine center is being reinforced with graphing content as well so it’s a that project to us is is really different and we we’re really looking forward to kind of seeing where those guys go with that project because it is a starkly different way to build a home
When you compare it to the ones that are in the neighboring chamber by the mass house builders so yeah it’s quite an exciting project for us that so what what did we find um don’t worry we’re on the final furong now we’re getting there there only 400
Slides left so we the future home standard will change the way that we build buildings uh sometime in 2025 yet to be agreed by government um the the main differences from how we build will be will be these differences there’ll be much less carbon 75% less carbon when
Compared to 2013 regs there’ll be zero carbon ready what what does that mean it means that they’re pretty good in terms of carbon but as the grid cleans up and we get more Renewables on it in several years they will become zeroc carbon so zero carbon ready is the phrase they use
Uh they they’ve got a very efficient fabric so they’re well insulated and they’ve got good levels of air tightness they will have lower running costs they will have solar PV probably batteries probably and EV charges will be very common place uh airs Source heat pumps will be what they use we predict and
There will be no gas 2025 no gas in new build um and we’re really lucky because they put out with with the future homes consultation just before Christmas the kind of building that they’re looking at which is kind of average building it’s called a National Building and our
Houses are very very similar to that notional building so we see that there’s plenty of mileage now in those houses as research projects they will be the houses of the future and they don’t look particularly different or special but that’s what we’ll be building so they
Are now now they were great but now they’re super relevant as well so we we we tested them and we tested them in in in in a a lot of detail and we we found some things that were good some things that were bad but we found ways we could improve them so
We looked at the the air tightness so that’s how much air leaks out of the building and how much heat they lose through through that kind of mechanism uh we looked at how efficient the building elements are retaining heat so the windows the walls the floors the
Ceilings um and they both performed well um past trials so with our um Partners over in leads that we’ve done a lot of work with they They carried out a lot of research on buildings out in the field on new builds so what you see here these
Blue lines are all of the buildings that the leads of published data on so we’ve got gaps there so this is the gap between how they performed and how they were designed so in terms of heat loss so some buildings are Tak it 140% more energy to heat than they were designed
To right the way down to our samples here which are the two ones in Orange which are 8% and 4% so we’re we’re happy with those and and the house builders I think were happy as well um so they’re very kind of low performance Gap houses
So it shows that that we can build these houses and they’re not impossible to build and they can be built at scale as well because these are Mass house builders don’t forget these aren’t Grand designs or footballers homes these are something that that the the masses will
Live in so the bellway um the heat loss was 7.7% worse than the design which isn’t a great deal uh the air tightness of the home was quite a significantly amount worse than the design I’ll talk to you about why that might be in a second um
The Loft insulation was Disturbed we see this a lot in new build we see a lot of Trades get involved in the Loft they go up there to fit PV and batteries and lights and other things ventil systems and they get Disturbed a lot so we often find that the Loft insulation is
Performing less than optimally shall we say uh windows and doors performed as designed and generally the flors did as well but we found the floors very difficult to measure it’s safe to say um so overall they it performed well uh what we’ve done with the house builders
We’ve made them stick with these homes now so we’re not going to let them go back in and make improvements we’re going to make them s with it because then our next batch of tests will be looking at heating so we need to know what these realistic houses cost to heat
So we’re not going to allow any kind of going and fixing which the house builders have agreed to and they’re happy with um so we think the main issue is air tightness but bear in mind um bway puts six different heating systems in that building you would generally
Have one heating system so there’s a lot of holes where it wouldn’t normally be we probably put about I would say 3/4 of a kilometer of network cable in there and and all the sockets to go alongside it again that makes things a lot more leak than it should and you know there’s
A lot of service penetrations coming in and out of that building as well Loft insulation generally is less than perfect and disturbed by the trades and there was some issues around the ceiling of the the joints uh where the wall meets the uh the ceiling upstairs but
All in all kind of a positive start so these are some of the the defects we see this is the lofting ation this is some of the the poor um ceiling around the ceiling to wall Junctions so the bar house um 3.9% worse than the design again very small air
Tightness was actually slightly better than the design 6.3% but we did find some problems in in the panels that this was built out of Timber Frame both houses were um where some of them hadn’t been manufactured quite as they would liked um and they were losing more heat than they should
But still you know these are small they’re big percentages but small numbers in terms of heat loss The Loft insulation was again Disturbed had an under performance about 26% but again the windows and doors were generally okay and the flaws were generally as good as we can measure them to be okay
And here’s some of the the problems again you got this Disturbed insulation here you’ve got the the kind of the heat loss towards the bottom of the wall there and that’s to do with we think with with air cycling through the back of the panels so not 100% perfect but a
Really good start and we gave the house builders and the product manufacturers some really good feedback to come and help improve these so for instance sanaban are going to come and build a small version of their house out of the same Timber frames and get all that system working exactly as it should
So again the main issues on on sanaban with these assembled wall panels assembled in a factory but they just didn’t kind of get it 100% right so we dismantled it we took it to pieces to find out what the problem was we took the wall apart we cut holes in it and
Eventually we found out what the problem was so again the air tightness of the building was was better than designed but they had two heating systems in rather than six so again probably less holes uh and we thought that the panelized structure that they’d use because everything was brought in
Pre-manufactured so that might have helped so how do we get to Net Zero that’s what we came here to find out I I’m not going to tell you really uh Charlie will be very disappointed um but I think what what we can safely say is that the existing stock is definitely the problem
You know the work across all of our Labs say that to make these significant improvements is is really difficult it’s really complex it’s far more complex than most people think it is and it’s really expensive uh but without this work that the UK just won’t hit these targets because the new build isn’t
Going to save us it’s got to be the retrofit that we need to look at simply adding heat pumps doesn’t work um the buildings need to be carefully assessed and retrofitted well in a manner that’s sympathetic not only to the building but to the occupant as well of that building
We can’t miss out the occupant in these things which often is the case there’s definitely no simple solution there’s no one size fits all it isn’t just going doing something one time to every type of building workmanship design and and and the appropriate measures are all absolutely critical um and retrofit can
Present many risks it can it can be a risk to the building Fabric and could be a risk to the building occupants if it all goes wrong but the biggest risk is is not doing it is just to ignore it and and we may frankly run out of time
Because if we saw the numbers right at the beginning where we had to do I forgot what the number was 2,000 a day there’s a lot to do and there’s not a lot of time to do it in um the new build we we is going okay
We from the from the studies that you’ve just seen that that’s compelling we’re getting it right um but we only build 200,000 houses a year at the moment um so it’s not enough to make an import sorry an impact onto this zero carbon um Target that we’ set ourselves the future
Home standard is a significant Improvement but some people might say does it go quite far enough um we can see that the fabric performance we are getting there with a mass with mass house builders they are good results they’re fantastic results I would say um
The data will be made public so all of this data is out there and anyone can access it the full data sets are out there um so hopefully that will mean that the likes of bway sanaban and Barrett are paying for this research obviously as we can see but a small
Builder you know who maybe builds five or 10 homes every year can’t afford to come and build houses and Chambers so hopefully they will benefit from the work that we’ve done um Heating and hot water is our next research piece and we think these are going to be the next big
Challenges fabric we we think is pretty much there but now the big thing is going to be around airs Source heat pumps infrared under FL against radiators and all different kind of questions that we can ask ourselves around that and then hot water is the final
Piece end is air quality how do these buildings actually work for the occupants so in essence um we we think that the house of the future will help the zeroc carbon kind of topic well but retrofit is the problem uh it’s underfunded it’s misunderstood and it’s not incentivized so that’s something
That we that we need to change and that’s it and thanks for listening um thanks Richard so uh we’ve got a chance to take a few questions we’ve got a couple of dialed in questions but um any questions from the audience before I take the uh ones that have been sent in uh
Yeah yeah well it’s it’s number one on my list uh is to is to um is to upgrade the the heat side of energy house too when we first started when will and I put those those sketches down in 2015 40 degrees was fine um but here we are now
We’re talking well over 40 degrees when we mention overheating we that’s 40 degrees air temperature we also put solar radiation on which can make it a lot more warm than that but no we we were asked a few weeks ago what what improvements what investment we might
Want to look at and that was number one on the list make it hotter and then you yeah so I didn’t put I I didn’t put my famous fact on the slides which was it covers so the the the climatic conditions that we see there cover 95%
Of the globally populated land mass um but that’s not to say that it covers the excess you know areas but that that is number one on our list I have to say yeah okay another question from the audience this gentleman here talk about the C benefit of Ace
Gas I was just if you done that looked at all like potentially increasing gas costs or if there is a switch to hydren CU that feels like that changes dramatically yeah we we we we didn’t kind of model out all those scenarios um Dave you can you say when the when the
Deep report will be out um it’s longer than Iraq inquiry so the de late February yeah at February now yeah we’ve did some gaso so just for the benefit of the audience at home we talking about the difference between gas and electricity prices um and the work that uh we’re
Doing which will be uh for Des which will be released um late February early March I was reliably informed okay one more question from the audience um yeah you talked about the cost of the the energy house and everything else would computer Bing not have given you largely a good level of
Insight do the can I repeat the question Rich yeah so for the benefit of the audience at home could we just not have modeled it all um how dare you no uh no uh we we spend a lot of our time modeling uh we have models in the group um but we find
That a good use for that facility is to inform the models and and we find there there’s there’s a performance gut we and we never kind of know exactly what that’s going to be but what we what we I think what we excel at is providing
Really good data for models to use we’re not against models but we like to inform them and we use them a lot as well so yeah so could you do it with with just models probably not uh because some some of these measures just aren’t in the
Models yeah okay one quick question uh I think this has coming from fisty Hannah for radio four what is your number one energy saving tip for householders I’d be remiss if I didn’t say curtains but um no no um in terms of bang for your book I think controls a great one Loft
Insulation is is a great one um there is no one siiz fits all as we just said um but yeah I think controls are a good way of saving energy don’t heat the building parts that you’re not living in uh just one more from the audience Charlie
Baker quite sad said you finished on the fabric and and and in the work we’ve been doing with youran vet for the last two years it keeps coming up with our customers and we keep getting Kickback from The Usual Suspects they doing the installation but I’m not sure that
Debate is fixed yet it would be really lovely to have some guidance on when certain materials are better than others when it comes to things like resistance to defects um that some of the cheaper insulins are not so good at um overheating risk decrement delay um as
Well as carbon fprint performance in PR can we have some more on that please so for the benefit of the audience at home that was a question in eight parts um can we have some more information on fabric retrofit yeah so I I’ll refer you to to
David Farmer’s deep report that we just mentioned earlier but yeah we haven’t finished we’ve done the Baseline testing so we got to look at overheating yet we’ve got to look at um very exposed and um how would you put it um deep conditions so right down to minus 20
Right to plus 40 but yeah we there’s more to come but the the Baseline things to build the models you never happy Charlie that’s your problem kind of one one more from the audience this gentleman here um yeah you’ve chosen Timber frames um what’s the life expectancy of
These houses if you’re building all of these you know um so sorry let me just repeat the question for the audience at home um so the question is uh Timber frames what’s the life expectancy for those I didn’t finish the question oh sorry yeah so um youve chosen Timber
Frames and youve got the life expectancy and you’re talking about Net Zero if you repeatedly you know knocking down and rebuilding all these houses as in Canada you know Timber frames are really problemsome how do you deal with the repeated you know uh having to rebuild and the emissions that were saying that
We’re going to build with M um what’s the thinking behind the timber frames yeah so so the the question is really about the ReUse and circularity around Timber frames and if their life expectancy leads to more embodied emissions so there’s really important fact here we have no input whatsoever in
The design of those homes we are not designers we let the house builders build what they build the only way we can have impact is by testing buildings that are real that are going out there in 20,000 and 10,000 things like that there’s very little point in US telling the house
Build is something that they don’t want to build that that their Market will do that however we’ve got a PhD working on LCA uh we have a full research group working on LCA on a large innovate UK project with Manchester as well um and and Tindle as well so yeah that it’s not
Like that’s being ignored that’s been very well studied but we’re not here to tell the house builders what to build we build not related to cost of building now rather the longi could be the situation yeah but we we are there to to to test and evaluate the houses that
That are brought to us we can then we will then give them the LCA data of course but we we we’re not a designer team you know they will Design we will test okay uh one more from the uh questions um there are a number of young
People here tonight um is this going to idea to start a career in is it a good area to start a career in um yeah I think so um I I think I think it’s it’s important to look at the climate and how we’re doing it I think we me and world
One of our biggest challenge that we that we ever see is is recruitment getting people to come and work and do the things that that we do is really difficult you know we’re lucky to have the team we’ve got but to grow it is really really difficult okay time for
One more question from the audience this gentleman here hi so the research pretty much of focused on the the heating in the winter side of things is happening on the summer/ coolings for the so did the the question for the audience at home is do we do
Things in the in the summer so we do yeah for summer and overheating yeah so the house builders obviously as you would expect what when they see substantial periods of overheating as we saw last year in the year before that they are very very interested in that we
Will test overheating Solutions we will test overheating mitigation in those um buildings as well and they’ve also got some systems that they want to install so air to AAR they’re going to look at air to a cooling and they’re also going to look at putting cooling systems into
Their ventilation systems so yeah that they are definitely interested in that definitely okay um just thanks very much there’s some really good questions there really engaging questions thought questions um I’d like uh to thank Richard for delivering what I think is was a very interesting inaugural lecture
And I’d like to thank the audience on teams live for joining us this evening and we’ll say goodbye to them now