Dukes Meadow Show Homes

Had a look around the Dukes Meadow new home builds recently. The whole site has changed back to Taylor Wimpey again, the Bryant name being removed from the whole site.

From the outside you can see that most of the houses have solar heating panels on the roof, although I'm not sure the flats do. The solar panels look like the older flat plate type rather than the vacuum tube type commonly available now. Unfortunately the sales staff aren't particularly technically competent, so I didn't get very far with the details!

I had a look around the bigger show home, where there were various controllers installed to control the lighting, alarm, heating etc. But no smart meters!?
All that tech to use energy and none to help save it?
Not having smart meters, seems like a big mistake to me.

All the homes seemed to be fitted with modern condensing gas boilers to work in tandem with the solar panels. All newly fitted gas boilers these days have to be the condensing type and they are roughly 90% efficient.

There is a mixture of flats, two storey houses and three storey 'town houses', all of which have a SAP energy efficiency rating of 'B'. This is one down from the top rating of 'A'. So by today's standards they are probably quite good, but I doubt if they match Passiv Haus standards in energy efficiency. Certainly in a few years time, energy efficiency standards will be raised further. In fact they should be higher now, but developers are dragging their feet.

I hope the Grainger properties will be better, they aren't however going to show their revised designs and ideas until early next year.