The house that costs £60 a year to heat

drc

Thought this article might be interesting for people on this forum;

From the Telegraph;

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/greenproperty/7073321/Green-property-the-house-that-costs-60-a-year-to-heat.html

Mike Hillard has a banana tree growing in his conservatory. It’s about 18ft high and this summer he hopes it will provide him with enough fruit for a supersize Banoffi pie, a few fritters and a couple of milk shakes.
But the tree is there for swanky reasons as much as for sustenance.
This is because Mike has built and now lives in Britain’s most energy-efficient home. It costs less than £60 a year to heat his Cotswold stone and timber house. The boiler is stinging him for a laughable £8 a week (but only while it is this cold), while his annual water bill is less than a tenner.
And when I visited him to see if all this was so much eco-guff — and it was 18F (-8C) outside and dropping – his house, while not exactly warm as toast, was as enjoyably temperate as a tepid crumpet. Furthermore, in the grand conservatory, which he calls a solar room, was his banana tree giving a silent yah boo sucks to the coldest winter since the woolly mammoth bestrode the Surrey Hills. The plant, which he says is also there to take in the carbon dioxide and emit the oxygen, is living proof that the house is, despite the peanuts Mike pays for utilities, as continuously balmy as a tropical hacienda.
Mike Hillard is a man on a mission. He is a former naval engineer with a fierce intelligence and a passion for the environment. He writes papers on global warming; has chums at the University of East Anglia’s climate research unit; and talks knowledgably about last year’s Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change in much the same way as the rest of us talk about, well, the weather.
“We can’t carry on consuming the way we do today with the massive and growing world population, and global warming,” says the urbane eco-warrior. He is so passionate about a sustainable environment that he earns his living turning fallen timber — mostly wood that has been felled due to poor health – into rare and relatively inexpensive flooring. “Food shortages will come first, then fuel. If we could manage on less we could be happier on a more local level, with communities growing food and working together,” he says.
So three years ago Mike decided to put his money where his mouth is to construct the lowest-energy house ever built on an idyllic site overlooking the old Gloucestershire wool town of Stroud.
''My objectives were to have the lowest practical energy cost, be water independent by using the rain supply and to be normal, not wacky,’’ says Mike, whose spartan-looking three-storey house that he calls Tranquility is as representative as any Cotswold ''newbuild’’, albeit one that houses a banana tree.
''We thought about where all the energy is conventionally lost in a domestic house; where it can be gained, how it can be stored and how the consumption of mains water could be minimised.’’
Mike claims that all houses lose heat in only two ways, through the structure and ventilation. And that they only gain heat in three ways: with the help of a boiler, through the heat loss from humans and animals, and from the sun. So he built his £400,000 home with very well insulated walls made from lightweight concrete blocks and a big cavity filled with fibre, a roof that was made absolutely airtight and double-glazed windows that were tightly sealed (surprisingly the house is not in the slightest bit claustrophobic).
Attached to the house is the huge heat-holding solar room with its dense concrete floor that works like a massive storage heater, and powers the radiators and underfloor heating in the main house.
The solar panels on the roof, along with his numerous additional systems, keep the domestic water hot for most of the year and mean the boiler doesn’t normally fire between early March and mid-November, and not often through the winter. Beneath the solar room is a 16,400-litre rainwater tank, with another 8,000-litre tank under the kitchen. When full, they provide a seven-month supply of water.
The result of this caring about consumption is that Mike now claims annual utility costs (heat, electricity and water), even in this cold winter, of less than £100 a year.
''What I wanted was to find solutions that could be adopted by mass-market builders and the general population,’’ he says. ''I wanted to build a house that demonstrated that low-energy living doesn’t have to compromise the way we live.’’ Tranquility is living proof of that theory. There are, for example, several computers (and one in a broom cupboard on the first floor that is the nerve centre of the house, monitoring and tracking the energy used).
There are televisions in the bedrooms, ensuite hot tubs, a sauna, a state-of the-art cooker and, naturally, beautiful wooden floors in every room. ''I wanted to build a house that appeals to everybody and not just the environmentally aware,’’ Mike says. ''There is no point building a single ultra-low energy house as, on its own, it cannot make a difference to the global problem. The planet won’t notice Tranquility but it will notice if we all start building like it.’’
Mind you, there is a downside to this utopian housing project – it could do immense damage to Britain’s banana trade.

Joyful

Wow. Not only do I like the concept I would also like his Utility bills.

Cardew

The article states '£400,000 home'. It would be interesting to know how much extra the 'eco' construction added to the price of his property over conventional construction methods.

I would be surprised if less than £100,000 extra and probably more. - Invest/borrow that £100k and get/pay £5,000 annually.

We really can get carried away with the cost of Utility bills. The average household spends £1,200pa on gas and electricity - and new conventional houses spend less.

Many people lose that sum in annual depreciation on their car without blinking an eye.

Anyway bananas ain't that expensive anyway!

JennyR68

I don't think the money saved on utility bills is the point though Cardew, the main point I got out if it was his concern about global warming and the future of this planet. He's fortunate to have the money to enable him to live by his convictions.

Cardew

Yes agreed, but the article and indeed the post concentrates on the cost saving aspects.

In any case it often makes no sense environmentally to use products that use huge amounts of energy and resorces in their manufacture.

It is like the argument for and against cars like the Toyota Prius.

Also, as Martin states in his introduction to this 'Green forum' this section is about money saving and being environmentally friendly.