Eco refurbishments - chalk and cheese

Earlier this week I went on a fascinating trip to Islington to see two developments that were like chalk and cheese. The first was an eco refurbishment of a small ground floor flat in a Victorian conversion done by United House who do a lot of the Decent Homes work in Islington and Camden. It was a brave stab at creating low energy home, to be applauded because nobody asked them to do it or paid tem. But it was also a typical British low energy building – no route map, a fascination with gadgets and lots of trial and error.

They had installed a mechanical ventilation with heat recovery system that was far too big for the two-roomed flat and a micro-CHP boiler which gave off a constant noisy hum like the generator it was. These two boxes took up a good chunk of the tiny kitchen. The micro-CHP uses natural gas to create electricity when there’s demand for central heating or hot water. It also has a normal condensing boiler built in as a back-up. At £6,300 it’s an expensive bit of kit that would take about 50 years to pay back.

Meanwhile the front windows had been double glazed and the exposed walls had had a new super-thin solid wall insulation fitted. All good. But the rear windows were still single pane so heat was going straight out like water down a drain.

At the other end of the same road I’d been invited to see a Passivhaus development under construction (see photo above) so I took the United House folks and Islington’s Executive Member for Environment, Cllr Greg Foxsmith, with me. We were given a tour of the five Passivhaus homes that are being built to be so well insulated and airtight that they have no need for central heating. The hot water is to be provided by ground source heat pumps.

Of course this was not a refurbishment of a Victorian house, it was a new build, but still it was an interesting contrast because the Passivhaus standard gives such a clear route map – both for new build and refurbishment.