Carbon Negative Houses AND Electric Car Club | FULLY CHARGED Homes

hi there just a quick note if you're interested to find out more about the latest developments in home energy systems solar panels low energy heating air conditioning and many other tech breakthroughs and developments it's really worth checking out some previous episodes we've done like the one on zero homes or moonstone house or solar roof tiles heat batteries and much much more but this is a quick heads up to announce our brand new home series coming very soon on the fully charged channel it's been planned for ages and we're really pumped and stoked to release it so stay subscribed and if you haven't subscribed why not do it now it costs nothing click that little subscription link never going to say that again links to all the older episodes are in the description beneath this video and now let's get on with the show [Music] hello and welcome to another episode of the fully charged show coming to you today from a building site outside oxford in the southern part of the united kingdom now we're delighted to be here because we're just seeing some houses being built building going on all around us but these are very special houses these aren't just carbon neutral houses these are carbon negative houses they actually take out more carbon from the atmosphere than is produced building them this is an incredible step forward and these are really special houses so this is a lovely housing estate in oxfordshire that there is a carbon negative house and this is fully charged [Music] so james we're in the back garden of a beautiful house with lovely woodland right there and it's all gorgeous but i can hear a bit of building noise going on in the background i mean this we're on a building site effectively but this is they really look different these houses there's so much development around here yeah in this area and all over the country but your houses do stand out which is why we've come to see you today so can you tell us what it is about springfield meadows that is different well first and foremost we think this is the most sustainable site in the country at the moment certainly private development right um we've got a number of features that that sort of set us apart from the rest um so we're working with a charity called buy regional who have a framework called one planet living and that's a ten point framework based around health and happiness and and living it encompasses things like carbon uh equality transport links that kind of thing so they're really woven into the fabric of the site um and we develop the site based on those frameworks so we use pvs on the roof um most people know them as solar panels we've got triple glazed windows and a beyond build system which makes the house incredibly thermally efficient and they're actually built to the passive house standard so these are actually better than passive houses and we have uh an mvhr system in them which is a mechanical ventilation with heat recovery wow so it makes them a really comfortable um house to live in because the air you get fresh air pumped in um it goes through a heat exchange the stale air in the house gets pumped out um and the air is filtered so people with allergies are reporting back that that um their hay fever is significantly blunted because of the way the houses are built so ian these i mean i'm just really blown away by what i've seen here today so far they just look like beautiful houses anyway regardless of all the other technology but there's some bits i don't fully understand about the the building process so the term zero embodied carbon can you explain that for the for the lay person well first of all embodied carbon is all the carbon emissions that come from things like quarrying materials firing them transporting them so most building materials are responsible for co2 emissions but there's a class of building materials that come from plants like wood and hemp and wood fiber and things that actually reverse that they they absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and they turn it into cellulose and and that means they're locking up carbon right so when we decide what we're building with we try to balance those two things out so that you've got at least as much carbon locked up in the bio based materials as you have emitted from the high energy materials and that's how you can achieve zero right and and actually we now know we can go better than zero and then the things like the insulation then so the walls are are they kind of generally a timber frame construction originally when you first start putting them up yes it's what's called a closed panel timber frame so it's 300 millimeters or 12 inches thick and it's all filled with hemp and lime right and it's wood fiber yes yeah 300 is quite big and so the materials that you're using in that insulation they're not kind of petrochemical based fibers or something they're they're no they're all they're all natural right so they lock up carbon they're renewable they're fast growing but they're also not bad for the environment in any way all the occupants well then so when you've got clay tiles i've never even thought about this at all but you know with the buildings with clay tiles that's clay that's mine that's dug up then fired so that's used energy to make them and then transported here so that has a carbon so that's one of the high energy materials that we offset by using the bio-based materials i mean they are they are beautiful i mean these ones are kind of quite high-end homes here but is there a variety of styles of houses that you're building there are so we've got 33 or 9 out of the 25 units are affordable right there's a combination of shared ownership and social housing um and the rest of the sites are private homes so some of them are custom built so people get to choose their own layouts floor plans choose their fittings of features bathrooms etc and the last few we're building out and selling it towards the end of the month so i'm from bioregional we're an environmental charity and i lead an international programme called one planet living and that's a program of real environmental superstars one planet living it's a vision for a world where everybody can live happy healthy lives within our fair share of the earth's resources and what we're the way we're living at the moment if everyone lived like the average european we'd actually need three planets to keep us going so one planet living's got 10 principles they're dead simple and they go from zero carbon through zero waste and sustainable food sustainable water right through to equity and the most important of all which is health and happiness and this is what global leaders in one planet living are doing is they've found a way of living which is within the one planet and yet it's actually a better way to live you've got you've got more amenities you've got you're in a more comfortable home everybody here's got really lovely indoor air quality good daylighting it's just it's just a better way to live and yet they're using a fraction of the resources [Music] but then what i love is that you're building the energy the you know the latest technology in terms of energy generation into the building it's it's you know where the solar panels are it's set into it's not like stuck on top of tiles like like retrofitting them yeah one of the advantages you've got when you build something from scratch is that you can design it and the panels sit in line with the roof um so it's called integrated pvs but also it's more cost effective because you haven't got to buy the tiles that go under those right because the the panel itself is the waterproofing at that point the heating system is i'm fascinated by because it's not what i would what i understand as heat pumps in that sense it's it's built into the building for a start you don't have a big box outside that's humming these houses are being sold as custom build so um so the clients have got some input and we've got one or two clients here who have insisted on heat pumps right um but but generally you don't need it and and we would advise not to have it because these are built to the passive house standards so the heat requirement is just so low it doesn't justify the cost of a heat pump right so that heat pump produces too much it produces too much it needs maintaining surface servicing it's got uh it's got a carbon footprint in its own right so the the ideal way here is that these houses have got just direct electric heating underfloor right and uh and then you've got lots of pv panels on the roof generating the energy right and then something that's simpler and some of the houses have are built with batteries in them not all of them but some of them do have batteries in them as well yes again it's um it's a client choice for for batteries so probably 30 40 of the houses here have got batteries right but then the other one is hot water so what how how have you done that on these houses there's a slightly different strategy to different size houses and different phases but the majority of them are just incredibly simple it's a hot water tank with immersions in and they're linked up to the pv panels that when it's generating extra electricity it just dumps that rather than put it in the grid it will dump it into the hot water and then the cooking as well because i was thinking oh well there's no gas on the site but then what about cooking but then all the cooking is electric as well cooking's electric so either induction hobs or halogen hobs [Music] [Music] right so james one of the things we say in the in the future in the fullness of time in the future it would be wonderful if people didn't own private cars and they used private they used electric cars as and when they need them and that that's like being like a theory for me but suddenly i come here and i could live in one of the houses here not own a car but then when i needed a car i could use one you've actually built that into the service absolutely so as part of the one planet living framework um transport's on there so we've got some very good bus links with the bus going every 15 minutes to oxford right uh or swindon at the end of the road but we've also got two uh fully electric cars um which we've leased from grid serve we've got the charging points from my energy here yeah and the residents on the scheme can hire them by the hour or by the day right so people don't need to own their own cars or suddenly if they've got two cars they can look at selling one because you've got this available and if you can book that up fairly easily and you can chart and that's the other thing because people always go well i've got nowhere to charge it well if you're supplying the place to charge it and the and the actual car itself exactly so we've got um we're gonna have two cars here and two charging points but all of the houses are wired up to have a charging point on their house as well and we would love residents to have their own electric car um but this is a fantastic interim so what is the actual arrangement then if you live in one of these houses on the estate and you want to use the car what do you what do you have is it just literally a one-off rental or can you so we've got two cars um anyone can rent the car you don't necessarily have to live on the scheme um but there's an online booking system you go in there you've clearly registered beforehand plug in when you want to use it and it's available and charged [Music] so the annual cost fuel cost then for living in one of these houses is going to be really noticeably lower than than than other similar size new houses yes we've got quite a range of house sizes here so the smallest are 60 square meter one bedroom flats right up to 280 square meter five bedroom houses so the the running costs vary depending on what size but you know for an average house it might be 50 pounds a month on average say you had exactly the same size house as this one with with a gas boiler just mains electricity no solar panels no nothing no heat pumps or heating systems like that how much is this a lot more than those houses or is it a roughly equivalent cost so price per square foot they're comparable to normal houses right um unfortunately we're not at the stage yet where we can charge a premium for these houses but you will have lower energy bills yeah as a result of how we build them yeah um so in a way very much like electric cars even if they cost a bit more to start with we all know running them is much much cheaper exactly and in terms of legislation around building in this country i mean are you encouraged to do what you're doing to make the changes you're doing to it really really good question because i think politically we're encouraged but in terms of legislation no right we're not the legislation allows you to build to a pretty mediocre standard yeah in air tightness terms here we're probably 25 times better than the building regulations there's one one thing i do because i'm slightly obsessed with sewage just because i do i put i put in all my own sewer pipes at my house but where are you on main street main sewage we are right yes yeah so that's yeah because i mean there is i i've seen one a much smaller housing development than this but they did use reed beds but they had the space to do it and that's kind of yep it's quite a big project it's on our agenda for for some projects we're looking at i wanted to ask you about what your plans are in the future then for future development yeah so green core has been going for seven years and we've built 50 houses we're doing 25 here at the moment and we've learned an awful lot during that time and and the knowledge we gained in working out how to do zero carbon and zero energy has actually shown us that we can do better than that we can lock up more carbon than we emit and we can generate more energy than we use so we've come up with this concept that we call climate positive so instead of just aiming for zero we want to be better than zero right and we're looking to do 500 climate positive houses over the next five years and that will have things like uh more electric car clubs on-site sewage treatment catalysts for things in the area like food generation there's one project we're looking at where we can put seven megawatts of pv alongside right and we can make the whole neighboring village zero energy as well as the houses that we're building so what is that what what do you have in future for the company that's building all this i mean what's your what are your future plans have you got other sites so we're we've got a couple of other sites lined up um we've got a 500 house plan over the next five years and plans to expand the company and really show everyone what can be done and how you can build these houses in volume in a sustainable way the problem we have is a lot of these big sites are uh landlocked by the big developers who are hanging on to them right so we're always trying to find local landowners local farmers and and people with plots of land to try and help us um so we can build these beautiful um eco it's so fantastic that you've done it and you've struggled through and you've done what you're doing and it does look i mean they are i'm very jealous of the people who are going to live here i think they are stunning houses yeah and it is a lovely edge of village location and i think one of the other things that we want to show really is that uh living in a low carbon way doesn't mean you've got to be rationed no it's actually a better quality of life the houses are more comfortable they're more healthy there'll be access to an electric car club therefore people won't have to have so many of their private vehicles yeah i think the car club will probably replace second cars and third cars yeah but people will probably still have their own first car thank you so much ian that's really good and i really want to congratulate you for for achieving this because i'm you know from doing a very small amount of building i know it's hard work and you've done an amazing job thank you it's hard work but it's good fun [Music] well i think that is an amazing thing to see this site and what they're doing at this this housing state i really want to come here in a few years time and see it when it's finished and it's all green and there's grass and gardens and things like that it's just a beautiful it's a beautiful setting i mean really lucky people who live here and these houses are stunning inside absolutely amazing that's all please do subscribe to fully charge to see more incredible housing developments that we're going to be seeing this year and more amazing projects like this we couldn't do what we do without our wonderful patreons do have a look at the patreon link that's beneath this video but that's it until next time if you have been thank you for watching [Music] don't forget our great eb giveaway subscribe and enter for the chance to win one of several electrifying prizes including one of four electric cars

Channel: Fully Charged Show

Views: 123,504

Rating: 4.9597878 out of 5

Keywords: electric car youtube channel, why should i buy an electric car, green energy comment, grid storage technology, renewable energy youtube, new transport ideas, green technology review, renewable energy comment, renewable energy electric vehicles, latest news on renewable energy, kryten, ev show, fully charged show, robert llewellyn, electric cars, fully charged, solar, batteries, heat pumps, eco housing, sustainability, zero carbon, carbon neutral, GRIDSERVE, insulation

Id: ovytcaA82bA

Length: 18min 0sec (1080 seconds)

Published: Tue May 18 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/UnloadTheBacon]

This is pretty much the dream for me. Just need to work on being able to afford a nice house in Oxfordshire.

[u/IntellegentIdiot]

Can someone give me a TL;DW? Are they defining carbon negative as saving more CO2 than they use?