F-rated home Renovated to near Passivhaus Standard

great well welcome everybody to open eco homes an initiative by the charity cambridge carbon footprint i'm delighted so many of you have been able to join us um this evening i'm personally looking forward to finding out a great deal about the uh the fantastic work that rachel and jake have been doing upgrading their f rated home my name's anthony i'm a former open eco homes host and my own story was inspired by um uh other people who had done eco renovations so it's it's lovely to be back um a few bits of housekeeping though before we get started um firstly hopefully you should all be familiar with zoom uh there'll be controls at the bottom or top of your screen um and they allow you to turn your video uh and microphone um on or off and we'll we will be using the chat um so if you've got questions comments or suggestions please type them into the chat don't unmute yourself it would be very helpful if you can all stay muted if we do get noise coming in from a line we will we will mute that line you'll need to unmute yourself if you want to speak in the q a um we're recording this video and uh firstly i i should say that names don't show on the recorded video but if you do want to change your name click on the three dots next to your um video or where you see your name pop up on the zoom window and you can rename yourself um uh but if you don't want to appear on the video please don't come forward to speak um or share your video and i recommend in any case because there are so many of us on on this call please keep your zoom camera off unless uh you're speaking uh at some point after the presentation the slides uh and the video recording and a summary of the chat i think will be emailed in two or three days by cambridge carbon footprint this evening rachel's going to speak for about half an hour with a break in the middle for questions and then we'll break again at the end the intention is will be about an hour for the overall presentation um if anybody wants to hang on it may be possible um for us to continue the discussion later but that will depend on rachel being being available um and and indeed you know on the questions being there before we get started um i'd like we'd like to begin with a poll and so this will pop up on your screens and please could you click um the response this is really helpful because it allows us to understand who you are what your level of experience and background is so the poll is about to pop up and please click on it now i don't see the poll yet anthony all right so ray rachel and others do you see the poll it is it is appearing that might be a host thing tom yeah i can see it all right brilliant we've got lots of answers so i'm going to end the poll now um so the poll uh describes um people's background so 11 of the 35 or 30 are looking to start their own um project we've got seven people from the trade or 20 from the trade builders suppliers or consultants um a few people i was one of them uh have already completed their own renovation project and another 40 are here for interest so lots of people interested or looking to start their own project and let's just share the results um for a moment so you should all hopefully be able to see that um brilliant whilst we're digesting poll i'll very quickly introduce tom bragg my co-host uh who's a absolute star as a veteran of cambridge carbon footprint and one of the driving forces behind open eco homes um and then over to you um jake and rachel really looking forward to your presentation well um thank you and jake is just going to say hello at the beginning and then he's going to come back and hopefully um help with the questions but um he's got quite a lot to do this evening so he wanted just to say hi but just for continuity i am i'm going to give the presentation um it seems only like uh yesterday that we were attending the autumn series of eco homes ourselves just about to embark on our renovation journey and trying to glean as much information from other people's experiences so we're really pleased that we can give back we haven't finished our project we're still deep in the middle of it it feels a little bit like diy sos at the moment but we hope to share our journey so far so jake has previously worked in construction so he has some knowledge mainly of groundworks and i work in construction as a social value manager so i have a little bit of knowledge of passive health standards but by no means oe experts and we're both working for full time so trying to fit it into evenings and weekends with lots of help from family and friends so this is the house um this is january 2020 when we first visited the house um and the other thing i wanted to say as well it does talk about passive house um you can go if you want it talks about passive house but we are not aiming for any certification um because this is our family house that we're going to live in um so we haven't completed any air tightness test um and we cannot claim any particular level or of any standard but our plans are to save energy over the life of of the house and and the other thing is we haven't done any calculations for embodied carbon so you know there is you know a lot of materials that go into a renovation not as much as building a house but just to bear that in mind and we're talking about you know energy saved um throughout the life cycle of the house where possible we've reused and recycled such as the roof tiles the bricks from the chimney we removed and some timber and lots of fittings and fixtures we've purchased second hand and we've recycled any waste and the money for the metal recycled from the plumbing has gone back into our budget so this is the house this is the back of the house and it's f rated um it's a chalet style bungalow built in 1968 by the previous occupant he lived and lived there until he was 97 and it's not really been updated um since it was built it's a cavity wall with a fibrous insulation but when we remove the windows you can see that the insulation has really sunk down into the walls and not really providing much insulation at all there's three bedrooms and a cloak room upstairs a kitchen a dining room and a lounge downstairs and a large chimney that goes through the center of the building um it's a single glazed timber windows with lots of signs of rot and subsidence as well in the floors but not in the walls an oil oil-fired boiler and interestingly um the tank it took us a while to realize this the tank is in the house there's a a door outside which goes into a cupboard and the oil tank is actually um attached to the house which as as you know probably doesn't mean building regs now so um yeah a bit of an issue but this is where we started so you see the boiling see the bathroom that you can just make in the top right photo signs of subsidence in the floor um and then there there's the kitchen as well downstairs and it's a flat dormer with felt on the top and there's the bedroom so um there's a lovely south facing view but probably not making much of the view there with those windows so i'm going to just describe our journey i'm not going to dwell too much on kind of the process because you know it's um you know it's interesting but i'm sure you want to know about more about the kind of energy saving and technology we put into the house also just to say i wouldn't recommend anyone maybe taking their roof off and and refitting it themselves um there are lots of bits that we have done that i'd definitely say anyone can do with some knowledge such as fitting the wood stove the air tightness measures and the duct and the mva the vhr duct work um you know it's tedious but you can learn how to do that and it's a diy job the things we didn't do ourselves were the plastering and the electrics and quite a lot of the plumbing so the timeline again i'm not going to go through but these are available these slides are available afterwards so you can kind of see the stages that we went through budget this is what every everyone wants to know on grand designs um you know it's really hard to budget for something like this we've not done anything like this before you know we we made an offer pre-covered um brexit had just happened you know that we didn't know what the cost of building materials were going to be um we initially budgeted 50k we thought well if we can get the roof sorted um and the big ticket items such as the heating we'll figure out the rest as we go along so here is a list to kind of the the big costs the biggest costs were our windows and we we went for really kind of high quality passivhaus timber windows triple glazed um with a really low u rating and the air source heat pump which we are very fortunate to coincide with the green homes grant and um solar panels and battery actually in the case study it's got a lower amount and we decided near the time that we were going to opt we could manage to fit an extra two panels on and we went for a higher um spec battery as well so that was actually 8 000 pounds we spent and the liquid screed um we we had to really dig down are you going to see in a minute dig down to the floors to re-insulate the floors and the mvhr system um for those that don't know um what that is so get so used to using the acronyms but i'm going to go into a bit of detail about that as well and the wood stove and flu and we we we didn't have any heating through winter so it was key that we had to put something in place and to get us get us through it was extremely cold um our olive oil set outside so we had to put it in the fridge to make it liquid again to show you how cold it was um and then the air tightness products um i added them up we've spent 788 pounds on air tightness products which i'll go into detail and the timber i'm afraid i haven't separated out the costs but plywood in december last year was 15 pounds a sheet um and just the other day we looked to order order a bit more and it was 25 pounds a sheet so it's gone up 10 pounds in the in the past eight months so our current spend again more than we've said on the case study because that was written a few months ago it's currently 73 000 and i think i think we're we're there now so here we go this is quite near the beginning and we decided um the first day we saw the house actually that we were going to turn it upside down um i haven't really been to many upside down houses but i know maybe it's more of a thing and other places in europe but we decided that we could have a nice open plan um warm cozy space with a lovely um big view south-facing view making the most of um living on a hill um and then downstairs we would relocate the bedrooms and also the bathroom was downstairs so it kind of made sense that the bedrooms are on the same level as the bathroom to us so this is kind of demolition stage you can see the um insulation there in in the eaves that that was kind of the the most insulation that the place had and then the big chimney in the middle so this is demolition and i'm sorry if my boss is watching um i promise i'll warm my hard hat when i um did the demolition but i apologize for jake's lack of wearing a hard hat i guess that is another thing you can kind of get away with when you're doing doing diy whereas if you had a building company come in there'd be there'd be less of those shortcuts that you could make so this is taking the roof off in december it did actually snow the next day it wasn't forecasted so we had snow inside the house which was an interesting experience and this this was a big big day for us so this is in december um very tricky because it was locked down um we had to get this steel up on the roof with limited resources and thanks to keith collier engineering they did lend us a couple of um genies to to lift steel work but um this was our first big mistake during the renovation so we got the steel work up and jake was looking out at the setting sun and he realized that his eye line was um not below the steels so in essence he wouldn't be able to see through the window he is six foot five but that is not what we had intended so in actual fact we made a mistake we had measured as a goal post and we had taken the internal measurement rather than the external measurement of that steel work um so yeah a little bit of stress but the structural engineer managed to come up with a solution and we raised that goal post and then we put concrete and raised the pad stone that the steel sits on and put some rebar and we've managed to raise that um goal post up so it is now the correct height but very very worrying at the time [Music] so this is it's the first roof that jake had hand cut i think there was a lot of um referring to youtube and ringing up friends um and and calculations on drawing calculations on the chimney breast but we um we got the roof up and signed off by building control and time to put the membrane up i think it was five minutes before the rain started so very fortunate with the weather there and jake's fifteen-year-old son christopher also helped a lot and particularly during his school holidays recently so lots to add to his cv and we borrowed some um we've we've got some secondhand french windows off facebook marketplace so we could have a temporary view whilst we lived lived in the building until our windows arrived the wood stove so yeah we we thought we needed someone qualified to install the wood stove but you can install it yourself as long as you get the right building control permission so when you apply for building control there's an option to have your wood stove signed off and you need to read part j of the building regs and really make sure you meet all the requirements in terms terms of half size and flue height but we used an online flu design service you give them the measurements of your roof and eaves and they design that flue for you and send you the parts which worked really well um just to say it's a it's either five is the name of the the wood stove and it's a defra compliant one that you can use in smokeless zones um it was our only source of heating so we were keen to get it installed although i realize it's maybe not the most sustainable way of heating your your house we we're fortunate to have a big big garden and lots of um treat fallen trees and wood to burn but something to bear in mind so yeah so where we lived for quite a while we moved the bedroom bed upstairs and that was our main living space for quite a while so here um i want to talk about the air tightness measures so we used um something called an airtight membrane called constivap you can see it there on the ceiling and constant vap 2.3 plus it's slightly cheaper than intello membrane lots of people use intello because it's vapor permeable as well as airtight but we only required airtight as we had a cold roof space above with adequate ventilation for moisture to escape from the insulation we also ordered five rolls of the tuscan varna take you can see the special airtight tape um which which to seal the membrane and one tub of the airasana viscom paint one second um we we actually had to we order another roll of that membrane so we've got quite a bit left over and more more rolls of the tape um but just to just explain you know kind of where what we use them for so the arasana viscon paint is really good on masonry um i don't think i've got a photo of that um so on brickwork um you can you know just slap it on it's a really thick kind of gloopy paint and it can cover holes up to three mil um holes bigger than that so where maybe um waste pipes come through the wall and we used a green gloop we call it orkan f um you get in a um a gun um and just squeeze that into holes and the thing about that the difference between other kind of silicons is that it doesn't crack and um shrink over time and it remains um airtight um so you know we really had to think about our airtight strategy early on and have a continuous um perimeter airtight perimeter in the house it was really tricky and because of the eve the sloping eaves the north face of the house is really hard you can see here um obviously you've got the cold eaves above the seat path the ceiling downstairs and the rest of it um you've got the second floor so we just had to really make sure those joists were airtight and every surface service that went through you can see the airtight duct go going through the cold roof space and then coming into the the room has to be airtight so it was a it was really really tedious it's probably the hardest bit of our renovation um but not hard um as in understanding probably hard as in tedious and getting into small spaces as well and also that airtight membrane it really took four of us to kind of hold it up and tape it um we initially you know we thought the pir the foil backed insulation you know if we take that that would be airtight but and we were very naive that that isn't airtight and you do have to have the membrane as well um and it was really important we had plasters and actually put that we put the board up downstairs but plasters put the board up here and if they screw um screw it in the wrong and take the screw out and then try again that no longer becomes airtight so you kind of have to go behind them filling in the holes with the green loop and i think they they all thought we were nuts but you just have to explain what your strategy is um because not all trades have come across you know such high levels of their tightness i think building rigs don't require such a high level so anyway moving on um so yeah this is after the plastering um big day windows coming in in march um we use green building store for our windows really really pleased with the the whole service they've they've offered we also use them for our um our ventilation system design and as a windows customer you do get 10 off for for the mvhr design but we wanted a you know we looked at various companies and we wanted a company that was going to install this large window for us we didn't want to have a different supplier and a different installer because we could see potentially see lots of problems with this window we had to build that large opening and the windowsill was put in after the windows were ordered so we needed the measurements um before we had that hole if you see what i mean because we we didn't want to take everything off and not be watertight or weatherproof for very long so yeah it was challenging but it all worked well and i'm really pleased so this is um after the windows still still living up there a bit challenging without curtains but um we installed the windows one weekend in the kitchen the next weekend um and it was our living space and then yeah stop for for any questions please so that was brilliant um does anyone have any questions about the material in the first part of the presentation there's more technical detail to come do feel free to unmute yourself and share your video if you'd like to like to ask well okay can i ask a question in the meantime i'm just breathless and amazed so is it right that that you were both in full-time work through all of this yeah yeah working uh you know and jake particularly working long hours i'm i'm employed by a company but jake's self-employed um just asking about our work hours and i mean we were tiling until quite late last night weren't we and there's only about a quarter past eight oh cool past eight okay not that late but yes it's we're you know i can see my mum's online but we've been very fortunate with family and friends kind of cooking for us and and supporting us so yeah we're very very grateful um yeah amazing so we've got a a a very quick question what does a social value manager to rachel if you don't mind i'm saying a little bit yeah well my full title is a bit of a mouthful corporate social responsibility manager and i look at it's kind of social sustainability so we have environmental sustainability looking at um how we um impact the environment during our building but social sustainability is more about leaving a positive legacy where that project is whether it's skills creation apprenticeships or doing community projects and harnessing kind of the supply chain to do um some community work volunteering all sorts of all sorts of things that's brilliant a few quick shall i shall i call on a few questions now we're getting lots of questions in chat now and miller you unmute ask yours um hi there um i was um just interested in you the comments you made about the um um alex um if you just have the um insulation and tend to take the joints um you know we've that's what we've used there was a lime backing on the brickwork um and lots of sort of um foam air sealant um on the brickwork um we're not aiming for passive house but um certainly aiming to get rid of the leaks so i just want to you know did you get any feeling for how bad leaks are if you if you if you put the um is that short term things like that are fine but it's when you get into like the tens of years the expanding foams the silicons just relying on a plaster finish and taping of joints it starts to fail so is it more about the longevity you would say yeah and maybe different standards i mean we've not done an air tightness test but i i'd be really interested to see how well we've done i mean we've still got a few remaining bits and you can kind of feel the air whistling through it can't you yeah if anyone wants to sponsor an air tightness test i'm happy to be proved wrong brilliant yeah one day we will do it and also you should meant to do the air tightness test before you plaster because obviously you know you do it now and there's not much you can do about it so john darley you i see you've got a question do you want to unuse and tell us uh yep you might come you might come to this but you mentioned the cavity wall insulation at slumps um did you do anything about that did you replace it remove it yeah we we had we had some people come around the house and offered to upgrade our cavity wall installation and we didn't we thought maybe there was a catch but um they came to do it and um we because we're taking the fascia off and we had the windowsills open they said it the fibrous stuff when they removed it would blow everywhere so we've got to wait until we finish sealing those bits outside and then they're going to come back and put thermo something in they're like polystyrene polystyrene beads with a glue on yeah so we we are going to upgrade it apparently the east cams council are doing grants for upgrading cavity wall so yeah we've we at the time of the survey we were f rated with an oil field boiler so yeah we i think we qualified but yeah hopefully we still qualify rachel and tom could we press on now just keeping an eye on time we can potentially pick up the remaining questions later but thank you and do keep the questions coming in the chat so rachel back to you so air source heat pump um we you know we had made a decision we we we had an option of oil we don't have gas in the area we we decided we wanted to go for an air source heat pump um we were very fortunate we um green homes grant came out i know it's now ended so i won't talk too much about that hopefully something some kind of scheme will come back um it was fraught with difficulties to understand but we found an installer and applied for the grant in november and got accepted in january and this was installed in february um so it was ten thousand pounds and pence like it was ten thousand pounds um and that was for the cylinder the buffer tank the air source heat pump and the underfloor heating manifold and all the thermostats for the room and the installation of that but not installation of the underfloor heating um so we got the panasonic aquaria five kilowatts and we had it mounted um on this wall high up so it didn't um take up we've got a very up narrow driveway and we were worried about losing that um and a 200 liter cylinder um really pleased with it it's not as noisy as we thought it would be we get lots of hot water and we have a cloud-based system which tells us how much money we're spending each day on hot water and heating and thermostats for the underfloor heating zones allows us to control the heating and set timers so we just have the underfloor heating in the bedrooms and the bathroom downstairs so this is uh the smart based thing you see i know it's in august and we've got heating on but we're trying to dry the plaster so you you get to see the kilowatts and energy consumption and you can you can switch between heating and under and hot water and then you can also see what the estimated cost if you you put in what your the cost of your energy is from your energy provider um so that's really really useful and also we had we had did have an issue where after a power cut and it went really high consumption and and and you know clarity heating came round and told us that this it was stuck on sterilization so it's really fortunate we had that cloud-based system and we could see that and correct it and so meanwhile in january the very very cold months we took down we dug out the floors um it was two two busy weekends digging out all the old hot it was all kind of odd bricks and things and we had had subsidence in the back of the house which had to be um rectified by the vendor before the house was mortgageable and they did that using block and bean but we we didn't want to have the same problems in the back of the house because the house is on the slope um so we took out all the old hardcore and um replaced it with um clean mot type one and damp proof membrane and insulation 100ml of insulation um the the concrete day was quite stressful because the concrete mix comes and you get them for an hour um to barrow the concrete out and then they start charging after that first hour and my borrowing skills were much to be desired and the the truck driver took pity on me and um let me control the mixer why he buried the concrete so we're ever grateful for him um second problem i mentioned the first problems of steels the second big problem was our underfloor heating we we laid jake laid the hunt under floor heating with help and support from a friend and um we booked the screed day um it was bank holiday weekend in may and um on the on the bank holiday monday we spoke to the screed guy and he said you know make sure it's all pressurized it needed to be pressurised before screeding we were told we needed to fill it with water which we did but we didn't pressurize it so unfortunately we're unable to go ahead with the screed and and went to the back of the queue and so we weren't able to to live there for a month which probably um was in hindsight a gift it meant that we could have a month um stress-free and not not worrying so much about it but it did seem a real um issue at the time so screed was laid um yeah and then um i'm going to tell you a bit about the mvhr machine um so mechanical ventilation heat recovery so easy just to use the acronyms um it's kind of the cornerstone i guess of a passive house you do everything to make it airtight and then you have a problem with air quality because you've got no air coming in and out so you have to come up with some kind of ventilation strategy um we wanted to retrofit mvhr ducting and machine it's it is hard in a retrofit but we had you know the design of the house with the sloping roof on one side um and there was quite a big space next to the stairs that was unusable so we you know we thought it would fit in here so we got the um designs this is the cad drawings for ducting from green building store and there was quite a long lead time we had to wait three months for the design i'm just going to tell you about mvhr for those that aren't in the know i wasn't in the know until the autumn series last year but it provides fresh filtered air into the building but at the same time retaining the energy it's already been used in here eating the buildings so when you open your windows to let fresh air in you're letting a lot of that heat escape but heat recovery ventilation um is a solution for an energy efficient building if it's properly fitted it provides a constant supply of fresh filtered air maintaining the air quality and you shouldn't hear it you shouldn't notice it's not like an air con it's not a gush of air it shouldn't make any sound quite simply you're extracting the air from the polluted areas so that's the green duct on this picture so it's extracting from the kitchen the utility and the bathroom and it's supplying fresh filtered air to the living rooms e.g the bedrooms the living rooms study so the extracted air is taken through a heat central heat exchanger in that red machine and um it recovers i think it's something like 85 of the heat from that air and it's got filters as well i just checked the filters today and there's all sorts of stuff on the incoming filter um we really wanted this you know jake's boys have asthma and we just thought it'd be you know having nice fresh filtered air just sounds like a winner for us um you also have a summer bypass and so it's not a cooling function in summer but when when you get to a certain temperature we set ours at 23 you um it doesn't conserve the air it just brings in fresh air and you've got to bear in mind that's an average temperature so if you've got your under floor heating thermostats to 21 you need a couple of degrees leeway otherwise you're going to have the heating on and the summer bypass at the same time um if you want to know more um there's you i've put the youtube thing on um which from the green building store about how to install one and the pool heat recovery site is quite informative um but yeah it was really challenging we were to get into very tight spaces with the ductwork it was quite quite difficult working out how everything connected once we got the hang of that and the youtube video from the green building store it was a lot a lot more useful there's just some more photos here this is at the beginning um until you've screwed that duct work together it's not rigid so you have to kind of support it but you do screw it together once you've got all the lengths and the design sorted um yeah there's jake squeezing in tight spaces oh we also had an issue with this um it had to pass over our shower and we really didn't want to lose height in our shower and jake being six foot five so we had an issue with the original design but they um our gbs designer and came up with a solution where we swapped to this uh plastic semi-rigid ducting and then back into the spiral spiralized ducting which is a much kind of higher quality and less issues with sound and and better issues with better longevity and that square bit you can see to the right of the screen that's called a silencer it's just like a muffler so basically in the bedrooms you shouldn't shouldn't hear the air moving and we we don't we we can just about hear the machine but um that's going to be boxed in so we hope not to hear that either and solar panel in store and this happened in august this is part of the cambridge share solar together um consortium um again you know we're really pleased that we had that because we we wouldn't know who to choose for our solar panels and you know cambridgeshire council did all the research for us and found um a company to do it called greenscape energy um it was quite a long because of covid obviously a delay in the install but we got fit in the end we got our 15 q cell 340 watt panels it's a 5.1 kilowatt system and we're very fortunate that we're due south um you need planning permission i understand if you've got a flat roof so we're very keen to change that flat roof dormer for a sloping roof which we did um and we also have got a 7.2 kilowatt pylon battery in the loft and the inverter is called solace for those that want to know um when we've got a 20 degree incline at the moment we're producing more electric than we're using and it's all going back to the grid for free and about lunchtime normally our battery is full and then everything after that goes back to the grid at the moment yeah we're producing more electricity but we haven't got the heating on and obviously we've got the long summer days and obviously that horrible rainy day yesterday we hardly produced any so um yeah it really makes you think about it we you know i try not to um put anything on if i'm doing washing it doesn't go on to the afternoon um but yeah it really makes you aware you you get a an app as well which it's really hard not to be obsessive over but it tells you you know how much is you're yielding how much is going to or from the grid and how much is going to from the battery and lots of pretty statistics and really nicely you also get a thing at the bottom saying how many how much carbon you've saved over the life there we go on the right environmental benefits and how many trees um you've planted in the equivalent trees um so coming near the end did we achieve what we aim to do um i we're not quite finished um i certainly feel that we did um i've got some before and after photos um we feel that the house feels comfortable it feels a lot quieter with the triple glazing the air feels fresh inside we really enjoy looking out the window at the view on the rare occasions that we're not working um and we're really looking forward to having a cozy winter there's just some views and some photos of what what we've achieved in the last year i'm just going to quickly show you this walk through video that works nope unavailable sorry about that don't know why that is kodak unavailable sorry about that so what's left to do we've got um still got to do the exterior cladding on those dormer cheeks and the fascia and the guttering some window sills that cavity wall upgrade still to go um and the patio just quickly the garden was our kind of our escape from all the building work um this is what the lovely long gardens what it looked like when moved in um and this is what it what it's like now we've got a centerpiece which is this beautiful walnut tree which is 102 years old um and we used the pallets that the windows were delivered on to make a little fence around our veg plot and our first crop broad beans very pleased with and the wild flowers we planted in the little orchard at the bottom so there's some contacts for you the people services we used um this will all be available i think they're on the case study as well um yeah and then we've got our blog as well absolutely that's absolutely brilliant and thank you so much oh great yeah okay so going through the front door excuse the mess still a work in progress downstairs as our bathroom with our tapless bath which we're very pleased with um it's our main bedroom with bi-folds looking down over the garden and spare boys room spare room oh it's just catching up with itself i think i'm not doing well with this oh the best bits upstairs oh yeah here we go so downstairs utility um we've got another lovely south facing room very light and we dry lined the the walls because of the lintel we didn't want the cold um thermal bridging up the stairs and then we've got the open plan and kitchen and lounge we're just in the middle of the flooring this was done at the weekend um and we've just been delivered our glass balustrade obviously if you open that window you you would fall out so we need a juliet balcony there and then i've got a little office nook tucked around the corner where we're sitting now there's the the tank taking the door off the painting we've got a little plant cupboard there and got the mvhr machine which we we can now box in goes up into the attic and down into that eve that roof space you can see the air source heat pump just out the window we've got that quite close to where the mvhr exhaust and intake we're a little worried about that but it's okay and an airtight lock attach there um there we go that's it great thanks tom so that was absolutely brilliant um and thanks for sharing it this kind of warts and all um uh rachel i think it was it was great to understand some of the things that were difficult um perhaps some of the lessons that that that that you've learned um we've got time for about 15 minutes of q a um coming up so um i think if that's all right let's get started um tom do you have anything to add or any questions could you just describe some of the layers of insulation that you installed rachel um so for example in the roof um and in the walls she's she's muted rachel are you you muted so sorry i was yeah start again joke sorry we used a pu board called quinn board um we put 150 mil between the joists of this the new roof and then 25 mil under to stop coal bridging that's 175 altogether 175 all together and then in the diagonals we put 50 between because you had to leave an air gap for the old felt and then 100 over the face and then the upright walls we put 100 between and 50 over the face so the new part that we've constructed is slightly better insulated than the original you hear that okay yeah brilliant thank you tom do you have a the next question so um i was calling on casey rogers followed by dom reed you there katie you're on mute we are here and and you've just answered our question which was about the installation let's go on to dom reed thank you thanks mom yeah i'm here just trying to get things working um so i was curious about whether there are any places where you had to do um any anything specific about um handling coal bridges or like somewhere like the internal um brick walls that you might have coming up and things like that or yeah and around the steel as well that sort of thing so that the main cold bridging issue we had was above the existing doors and windows they had cast in situ lintels so yeah so you've got your external face work of brickwork then the internal block work and the builder formed a box and just poured concrete with rebar into that connecting the the two skins solidly yeah so there's no cavity there so i mean it's quite common in this this age of building so i used a dot and dab dry wall adhesive and stuck on insulation back to plasterboard we were quite restricted because the house isn't massive so ideally you could have done you could have stuck more insulation over them but you're just eating into your living space then well you can get that really expensive um the nasa um created yeah but but it's yeah it's beyond our means really yeah i did it more to stop because we're going for such we're hoping for a warm dry house what i didn't want is somewhere that you could get a damp transfer yeah yeah i mean i was certainly curious about things like um uh thresholds and things like that they're i guess tricky to um you know for example we have an old victorian house where we're looking to do something similar and we have um again similar sort of situation there are some cast concrete lintels and concrete thresholds which i guess we're just going to end up having to take out or or deal with in some other way so a concrete threshold below the door yep um i think would be trickier than above the door um i don't i don't honestly know what you might have done yeah i don't know if i'm honest on that one that's that's tricky but i'm sure it's doable you could you could remove it or cut it back somehow yeah i have a suspicion that might be what we end up doing um okay thank you that's been great i'll move on to somebody else a couple more questions then if we've got time i'm going to call on alan chapman followed by ayman darling helen is alan chapman still here can you run mutes yes i can see you're here can you are you can you run mutant mute and ask it's a little bit like a seance a zoom call yes it is okay well uh i think ella's having trouble on muting so uh how about eamonn balling are you ready yeah thank you very much can you hear me okay yes yeah excellent that i've got a very similar solar panel set up to yourselves and i've also got a battery backup and i'm not on one of these um tariffs that enables me to get anything back from the grid so i don't like i don't like anything having to go to the grid if i can possibly avoid it so i've got one of those um clever little boxes which senses when you're sending energy back to the grid and it will divert it into my immersion heater so that that great big tank you've got there of course you can heat that up from the free electricity that you're generating yeah the isola boost well the thing is we we discussed that and actually because we've got an air source heat pump we're using that free energy to to use it to power the air source heat pump which is us um heating our water so it wouldn't have really been a use to us but there's a great idea and i think there's lots of technology that we're going to see in the near future and using you know car electric cars to uh as a sink for all that power but yeah we haven't actually signed up yet so we're not getting anything for we just figure we're giving giving all that electric back but we you do get this feeling like that everything needs to be turned on at that point but yeah no we're we're contributing our electric i don't know where it goes but someone's getting it thank you all right so i understand that um you know big changes are coming whereby you will get paid a reasonably fair price for exporting your electricity yeah it's 5.5 p at the moment from bulb and 18 p i think it's just gone up actually to buy it it doesn't that doesn't seem very fair does it that doesn't seem a great margin does it and then there are also these agile tariffs as started by octopus where you get paid more uh when there was a peak demand for electricity when our electricity is really needed and if you can empty your battery into the grid you you get paid accordingly again i don't know how fair it is but this is a really good method for reducing the peak electricity demands and saving building more power stations so i haven't got anyone else in chat asking a question yet that hasn't already been answered well perhaps i could ask um alan's one because i think it's one that i'm also interested in so questions how have you prevented air leakage around the wood burning stove is it one of these systems where the in intake kind of comes inside the flue so it's room sealed it is room sealed and it's got to have a direct air supply so it's got a separate um mini flue coming in the back of it um which brings brings the air in and yeah that was really important we again you kind of have to think about all this right from the start and things like as well when we ordered our windows we didn't want trickle vents because we were going for air tightness so this kind of mvhr is probably the you know the replacement for those trickle vents um and anything else we had to think about with their type the loft hatch we had to get an airtight loft hatch we got one from dollai there is another one well hoffa which is super expensive but this seemed to be a little bit cheaper um what else their tightness the water main coming in the soil stack you've got to be able to get round every side of it the sink waste going out the wall the electricity coming in i saw a spider the other day and i was like how did that get like if the spider can still get in well we haven't finished there are no there's a few little holes the water pipe by the the soil the soil stack i've still got a point around the base of before we paint the wall and finish painting the wall behind yeah effectively if it's coming into the building or out of the building you have to think of it or you'll kick yourself in a year's time and and the other i didn't share this concern either obviously we were south facing and it's a mighty big window we were really worried that we were going to be like a greenhouse in summer so our simon ward our architectural technologist he um factored in the design and overhang um so the point of the overhang is when the sun's high in the sky in the summer it's blocking that sun and it does in mid-summer it blocks most of it but when it's lower in the spring or the autumn you want to get that soil again that's our only source of heating upstairs really apart from the stove um and the low sun can shine in the only problem is we had that heat wave kind of recently which the sun was lower in the sky and it did get really hot and you can get different g ratings for the windows so we're really trying to find the answer what g rating and whether we needed any shading on our window like tinted glass and i think you need to get the phpp software and model it and we didn't do any of that so it was you know a bit of suck it and see and it's okay i mean there were that really hot week i worked downstairs where it's really cool but um yeah generally it's it's good and i i we haven't been cold yet have we but we've got the winter to go through so yeah passive houses you you want to have it's wants to be warm with low energy and also cool so you know putting air corn in isn't an answer for a passive house there was a question about insulation i just saw pop up um well not insulation underfloor heating um whoever asked that the main reason i didn't even consider that was we got pressurizing no it was about laying and insulating matting down and then putting rather than removing the whole floor because the back floors had already collapsed and been replaced the front floors i thought were on borrowed time because they were 1960s 70s construction where they didn't compact them to modern standards and we did remove big clumps of brickwork and basically my my brother's a lot bigger than me and when we stood on the slab and started breaking it it just collapsed so i was confident it was going to go wrong if we took a shortcut and i didn't want to be bitten yeah you don't want to spend all the money on new flooring and decorating and then later date you know there are ways i found out since of testing it you can cut test holes in the slab and dig down and see what the structure's made of and then prove to yourself whether it's worth it but that had already happened at the back of the house so we were quite confident to me it was and because our our garden's on quite a slow i would think it's something like 20 25 degrees from front to back so there was a lot of build up which on a lot of how older houses you wouldn't have but i would think we had we had a minimum of 450 mil of rubbish to dig out in the hallway it was more like 900 so it was always going to fail and and the original builder either he's in his 80s now he lives over the road so we've he's brought us over the original hand hand-drawn plans that he he did with the building and yeah i think he was quite interested to see what we've done i'm brilliant any more last questions tom or or do you think we should um wrap up um my powerpoint is frozen so i don't if you are able to show the closing the closing slide of the feedback form tom oh okay yes let me try [Music] and tom tom's also shared a link to rachel and jake's slides um feel free to um click on that and in the chat we've got the uh the message here so just coming through through now so we'd be really grateful um if you can um fill in the feedback form i've just um sent the link um round it's it's super useful so that we can understand you know did we cover what you wanted um uh and how's this um and and really kind of you know what have you learned uh what you might change um uh i think we can probably stay on there's there are a few interesting uh questions remaining so we might be able to keep the call open a little bit afterwards but some people will want to go so please before you go if you've um if you've already donated thank you very much the charity cambridge carbon footprint runs open eco homes and it's a major undertaking to arrange these events so please be ready to make an online donation and i'm going to share share the link now for example five five or ten pounds that really just helps them keep their work up and you know my own experience with a build like this is you need to get started um we we've had a a similar journey but i didn't do all the work myself so i have huge respect for rachel and jake um on that um but it it's absolutely great if you can do this and finally lastly jake rachel thank you so much for sharing um such an amazing journey with us um lots of really positive comments have come through in the chat we've enormously enjoyed it um i hope you'll be able to hang on for a few minutes for q a but um let's stop there um uh if anybody um does one does want to drop off you're very welcome to and finally as i said before slides and video will be coming around from cambridge carbon footprint again at the end great thanks very much i'm sharing uh about the next questions next steps here you mentioned about feedback and donation should i go on to the final slide yes please tom and so these are just um some other resources you might want to look at click any of these links in the pdf of the slides that's already been shared in the chat and you can look at case studies of about 80 other homes to give you further ideas and you might want to borrow a thermal imaging camera which we're going to be restarting training and camera loans in november okay i'll unshare that brilliant and thank you again for joining um for those of you who do want to hang on i'm quite happy to to stay here um rachel i don't don't if you're able to but um if you can hold on there were a few more questions that that came through um that we could look at um um and miller i saw that you had a comment about that um door stab a door slab um one would you mind just sharing your experience yeah there was somebody who's asking about the um the slab um we um replaced our back door um which was a very ropey victorian um sort of mini french doors and there was an enormous stone slab underneath and fretted a bit about the same issues about what to do about the cold bridge finally it was really simple i mean the guys who installed the door started by ripping it out i mean it's incredibly heavy i don't know 100 kilos or something and they put a few bricks in um and then we put the door in and sorted well why did why did i fret for so long actually it was really simple but the key thing was and this had taken a bit of um stressing about and we nearly got it wrong um was to be really careful in measuring about what size door one wanted to order given that the thing that previously had been the dating surface either top of this concrete slab little stone slab wasn't going to be there and we nearly got it wrong which would have been very annoying because the windows the doors look about i don't know 15 weeks to come or something right well gosh there's a perspective um there was a a question from fiona um are you there still fiona hughes wise i'll ask it hello yes still here hello um i was curious uh what you had for heating up stairs whether you had also some underfloor heating i think you had wood looked like a wood floor or is there some other solution for upstairs or maybe that was not even not even needed so we figured two things we've got the solar gain from the windows and you know we're relying on the sun there obviously that's england it's not always sunny and we've got the mvhr which is redistributing heat um it's not um it's not a wish of air and you know it's still you get temperature differentials but hopefully that will even it out a bit and also heat rises so we've got underfloor in our hallway which is open to the stairs which open up stairs so we're hoping we get a little bit of heat coming up the stairs and also yeah for those really cold days and where we do need extra heating we've got the wood stove so yeah i will let you know we'll have to do one next year and tell you how much we spent on on energy and heating over the year we'll definitely be keeping track of that related question from john darley are you still here john do you want to ask it all right yes i can see you are here can you un unmute and ask yes um yeah you mentioned that you didn't model any phpp um i just we had some very specific um designs for your roof uh i just wonder whether you had any target values you're trying to get to for floor wall and roof yeah no good good question i mean we we we've uh you know understand the principles of of um passive house design but we figured we would do everything we could that was in our budget and our abilities and and we will be happy with that result but the windows we know are 0.8 new value um and the doors 0.85 i think it was interesting calling window companies and saying we wanted you value under one and they said no you can't get that they don't exist but they definitely do um you just maybe have to pay a bit more for them and you know making sure as well you've got an airtight strategy for around those windows and doors but the walls we've got such a variety of walls because we've got the old roof the sloping one and the the new roof that we put on um that we i don't have figures for that i'd be really interested i i'd love to do the passive house design course at a later date um and maybe um figure that out but no and the thermal bridging calculations i haven't done either rachel i'll just butt in on that if you don't mind um we we actually built our uh insulated star roof to quite a similar spec with about 175 mil and 50 in our case 50 mil on the inside to reduce thermal bridging i think we got to you value um which is certainly better than building rigs i think we were about 0.15.16 [Music] and we used the celetex now sangoban have got an online calculator that will do for those sorts of flat areas but what they won't do is some of the thermal bridging um uh kind of considerations that that phpp can do so i'm afraid i don't have a link to share but if you you google celotex new value calculator you'll hopefully hopefully find that particular one well that's useful thank you and i see someone put in the chat about um b's passive house with external blinds i'll be having a look at that because that might be an option and the other thing we think we might uh maybe extend the overhang um because we could you know we could still do that and um yeah think about that and i've just shared the link to the um cellotext calculator i've used that calculator too [Music] brilliant i think we're running out running out of questions um but um so any any last thoughts anyone want to unmute and um uh join in and the discussion go for it allison thank you i just want to say that was an amazing uh project so well done but i wanted to ask if you were doing it again is there anything you do differently yeah well get that steel measurement correct the first time um we we said right from the beginning a really good friend actually layla she said enjoy the journey you know make tight time to and celebrate those successes so we we had um a couple of bottles of bubbly that we opened when the roof was on um i think when the floors went down um and i think we're going to be opening one um next week we've got a big deadline coming up on friday we we're being filmed for a tv program i can't really say any more but um yeah which has been actually another added stress that we probably didn't need um but yeah we i think i would just it's really hard isn't it when you're in it and you think oh if only just to have uh you know the roof or just to have the windows in or just to have a kitchen again you keep having these moments where you just think one step further but you've just got to you know enjoy i don't think i could ever do this again um i wouldn't i wouldn't go back and and it's taken its toll i guess on on ourselves you know we we're looking forward to the end and getting back to normal routine and normal life but yeah i just i just say just take your time i wouldn't expect anyone to do a project like this in a year i don't think it's probably that practical oh and jake said don't take a roof off in december the day before it snows yeah it did [Music] and and a question for man did covered make it harder or easier um yeah i mean we didn't know about the pandemic when we made the offer in january 2020 um it would have been with great i was furloughed for 12 weeks and it kind of would have been more stressful because i wouldn't have known if i'd had a job but we would have had time to do stuff um more time and we moved in on october so i was back at work and really busy but um covered i think it made it hard in getting building materials and and trades as well and we you know we did a lot of work ourselves which we were very lucky i think if you were relying on builders it would be hugely hugely difficult i think builders have been very busy throughout lockdown it did mean at weekends we had no excuse but to have a horrible time yeah you didn't get any fear that you were missing out you didn't fear that you were missing out with all these social events because all these social events are starting up now and we feel like we're missing out on them but yeah so that was good in a way we just could focus on being at home and getting stuff done but that's still going up i mean we were lucky to have some family and friends to help us lift that but i don't yeah we had to kind of be socially distant and get that steel up on the on the first floor that was very tricky cool great any last questions no so let let's let's wrap up there but again this has been so illuminating i wish i had known the tips um the the things that you've done uh when i did our eco renovation we we made the celatex the tape joints over the pir insulation mistake for example and we already get drafts coming through just five years on you've taken enormous care over doing this i think you've got an absolutely wonderful space now and i'm sure it's going to be super cozy you'll you'll be generating far more um energy than you use um and it's something to be really really proud of so from all of us thank you thank you again yeah and thank you to all our friends and family that have beard with us and you know helped us through this we can't name them all but we're very very grateful especially muncie outdoor catering services that's my mum no she's been wonderful she's coming this weekend as well i think to feed us thank you mum okay thanks all great thank you very much

Channel: Cambridge Carbon Footprint

Views: 2,551

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Id: oeliiZOuv0A

Length: 69min 31sec (4171 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 16 2021