Tokar Street Eco House

Visited Portsmouth City Councils 'eco home' this week in Tokar Street, Southsea.
The house is a pre 1900 'two up two down' terrace house, typical in much of Portsmouth and built when insulation was non-existent.

Before a new tenant moved into the property the council decided to upgrade the property to modern eco standards. For various periods this week the council have a few officers in the house and are welcoming visitors to have a look around.

I took the opportunity to take a peek.
My brother shared a similar house when he was a student and there isn't a lot of room in those terraced homes. Without any modern extentions, you have two rooms on the ground floor and two up, with a tiny staircase between the two. Many have bathrooms and kitchens on the ground floor in extentions to the rear.
This house fitted that pattern, with core new eco additions: (information from a sheet handed out at the home):

Wall Insulation - thick 70mm internal wall insulation on all external walls.
Floor Insulation - 180mm of insulation held in place by netting between joists and 125mm insulation on concrete floors.
Loft Insulation - 300mm insulation between floor joists, 70mm fitted to roof joists
Windows - A rated.
Photovoltaic Solar panels - produces about 1776kwh per year.
Condensing Boiler - about 91% efficient.
Heat recovery ventilation - heat exchanger prevents warm air escaping and prevents cold air getting in, whilst providing ventilation.

Southampton University will be monitoring the house when a new family move in and the energy saving results will be compared with other similar homes in the street that have not been modified.

This of course is a project about doing what you can with an existing build that is over 100 years old. But if you were starting from scratch you wouldn't design new buildings like this. Sooooo.... why on Earth are we building fake Victorian/Georgian homes at the Berewood estate?

Unwanted extremism in Waterlooville

It seems as the average age of Waterloovilles population increases, we are being exposed to unwanted political extremism. It's probably not age that is the source of the problem, but 'conservative' values do tend to creep in as one gets older. Oh, the good old days when we had a massive navy and our borders were the British Isles coast line... and we had umpteen wars with Europe!

Extremist political activists appear to be attempting to spread fear and rumours about Muslims, travellers and the EU. I got a junk mail leaflet through the door from a group associated with UKIP and the Tax Payers Alliance, spouting the usual garbage about the EU and zenophobic ideas.

Both UKIP and The Tax Payers Alliance have a record of denying climate change (or attack the essential policies that are required to mitigate it) as an alternative they tend to support the philosophy of climate magic, enlisting soothsayers for advise instead of qualified scientists.

Amusingly the Tax Payers Alliance claim to be non-partisan, but it appears to have strong links with the EU referendum campaign. Surely wanting withdrawal from the EU is partisan, so who are they kidding??

In any case who is paying for all this campaigning?
Why not spend it on insulating pensioners homes and helping cut their fuel bills?
Or maybe they should get jobs in the EU. They are free to travel to the continent and start a business there like anyone else.

How behavioral science can help save energy

Really interesting TED talk video presented by Alex Laskey.
A proven way of reducing your energy bill is to know what your neighbour pays:

Waterlooville Music Festival kicks off

The 2013 Waterlooville Music Festival kicked off today with numerous bands dotted around town. Couldn't have asked for better weather! I have no idea who the bands were that I took photos of but the music was good.

This years programme includes:

Lady and The Tramps
The Band of TheHampshire Constabulary
Portsmouth Philharmonia
The Choir Company
Kopanang
Three Peny Bit
Portsmouth Shanty Men
and Don Lloyd and The Meridian Wind Band

That's Entertainment!

Brass Band

Duo

Nigel Lawsons anti-science links revealed

DeSmogs John Mashey yesterday posted details of email communications between various climate skeptic activists. The information was revealed via a US Freedom Of Information request. The data retrieved lists the many contacts Lawson has with anti-climate science organisations and people.

Unsurprisingly the number of scientists in the list (even scientists that have no expertise in climate!) are negligible. Yet Nigel Lawson and his political GWPF group often write on the subject as if they actually know something about it.

The list mainly consists of pseudo-scientists commonly known as economists and one or two scientists well known for their skeptic views (Singer and Lindzen).

Coincidently the list has been published the day before the Coalition government has announced their anti-wind farm plans. It is becoming clearer on a weekly and monthly basis that Coalition government politicians are playing games with climate change policy. David Cameron in particular has been painting a false picture about this governments views about climate change.

This week Osborne stated something like 'cut now, or worse will come'. The statement was correct but it was applied to the wrong quantity. We need to 'cut Carbon now, or worse will come'  and the 'worse' will be economic and climate breakdown.

You can not seperate local views from national ones when it comes to climate change. If politicians oppose wind farms, then they support flooding, lower crop yields, higher insurance costs etc.

http://www.desmogblog.com/foia-facts-5-finds-friends-gwpf

Update 16/06/13: Charities Commission is investigating GWPF for abuse of it's charity status.
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/lord-lawsons-climatechange-think-tank-risks-being-dismantled-after-complaint-it-persistently-misled-public-8659314.html

Ed Davey today attacks the press

Ed Davey today is attacking the press for their continuing misrepresentation of climate science for political purposes.

The draft of his talk has been sent to the media and the highlight is probably this paragraph:

"This is destructive and loudly clamouring scepticism born of vested interest, nimbyism, publicity seeking contraversialism or sheer blinkered, dogmatic, political bloody-mindedness..."

Yes indeed our national press are not interested in presenting news and facts, but instead are just mouth pieces of an extreme element of politics and business. Some of the more vocal supporters of the movement against our future and green prosperity are based in the US or on a wrecked privately owned Channel island.

The 'political bloody-mindedness' comment is very appropriate, since many of these press people and politicians are married to political ideology. They are not interested in a changing world and a future that is not theirs, but ours.

The damage being done is ignored in order to exploit short term goals that they believe is important in order to sustain their own power base. Political party activists go about blogging and commenting to keep the creeking political system going so that they can keep their position in society.

The political 'bloody-mindedness' is also rife across Hampshire, with councils deliberately blocking renewable energy projects and power hungry councillors getting themselves into multiple positions of responsibility, deliberately blocking solar farms and instead pushing through or promoting carbon intensive projects.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22745578
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/06/03/ed-davey-climate-change-secretary_n_3377023.html?1370254179&utm_hp_ref=uk

Ed Davey's speech:
https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/edward-davey-speech-climate-change-acting-on-the-science

Berewood toy town takes shape

The Grainger/Bloor toy town is starting to take shape close to Waterlooville.

This alien project has been designed by  Architects in Winchester who base their designs on the fossil fuel burning past, the properties have fake chimneys and tiny windows.

The marketing hype states that the homes are inspired by small Hampshire towns.

What the marketing propaganda doesn't say is that in order to find one of these idealistic small Hampshire towns, you will have to take a trip in a time machine to visit Jane Austen in the 18th century.

Once upon a time Waterlooville looked like one of these towns from the past, that is until post war Britain needed to build thousands of houses in the area. The result is that the character of Waterlooville happens to be in the1950s, 1960s and later, not in the 18th century.

We do need to preserve buildings like Swiss Cottage, but we don't need fake historic buildings.

Swiss Cottage (1876)
more window real estate than
the 2013 Berewood homes

So Waterlooville has a toy/fantasy town being built on valuable farmland on the edges of the existing town and is disrespectful to the majority of the architecture in the area. When were Georgian buildings ever built using modern timber frame techniques?

But the fantasy nature of the buildings is just a part of the problem.

We need to reduce energy use and that means designing homes that capture as much energy from the environment as possible without the need for energy inputs from fossil fuels and grid connected renewable energy.

Yes we do need the grid and the large scale renewable energy projects to feed it. But low carbon life isn't about consumption for consumptions sake. The 'client' side of the system (homes and businesses) must be as efficient as possible, providing some energy from domestic renewable energy systems. The way forward is the use of elements of Passive solar design, a realist approach to property design that uses the natural energy around us to do as much of the work for us as possible.

It's time that the architectural and political ideology that is firmly rooted in the past, remains in the past, because the ageing pensioners that support it are not our future.


Some useful links:
http://www.selfbuild-central.co.uk/green-design-overview/saving-energy/energy-harvesting/passive-solar-design/
http://www.yougen.co.uk/blog-entry/2119/Heat+your+home+with+passive+solar+energy/
http://www.superhomes.org.uk/resources/passive-solar-design/
http://passivesolar.sustainablesources.com/
http://www.passivhaus.org.uk/
http://www.passivhaustrust.org.uk/