JamesMuenchen wrote:Mike4 wrote:dspp wrote:You presume wrong.
The solar panels are indeed token, but are actually there to allow the builder to skimp on insulation but still score enough points to meet the building regs. Given the opportunity you can rely on British builders to Jerry-build the cheapest possible crap every time.
- dspp
Or more accurately, you can rely on British builders to build to match consumer demand here. UK buyers care about the number of bedrooms and not a lot else as long as its cheap.
Offer a really well-built two bed house and a jerry-built three bed next to each other and the average British consumer will buy the three bed every time. In Germany it is reputedly different, Germans are particularly fussy about build quality and will seriously consider the well built two bed.
This isn't really true, in my experience (currently looking to buy/build a family house in Germany).
Germans are a nation of apartment dwellers and what matters most is the m2 - they can tell you down to the cm how much space their apartment has. This carries over into houses as well. We recently viewed a house that was over 300m2 (huge, you'd normally expect 7 - 10 rooms) and it was only 4 rooms. A lot of the space was in the garage, cellar, loft and garden terrace.
For quality and design, anything before the mid-90s will be absolutely schreck and look like it's from the 50's.
The current energy standards aren't really set by the regulations but de facto by the KFW, a state bank. KFW-55 is the most common one, it means built to use 55% of the energy of a "standard house". The KFW will give you a cheap mortgage up to €120k at 0.75 %, and rebate up to €48k of that for a KFW-55 renovation. Or a €30k rebate for a new-build KFW-40+.
The loan and rebate applies per apartment, so granny-flats are becoming very common.
Without this sponsorship, the actual savings you make by going to KFW-55 is marginal and KFW-40 or 40+ costs more to obtain than it saves the owner. It's all about the national targets really.
Generating your own energy is also complicated. You still have to pay tax and VAT on it and so it doesn't really pay off unless you declare it as a business and get a rebate on the installation. Is it the same in the UK?
Also we have district heating here and it works very well. I'm not sure why it wouldn't work in the UK.
Great discussion by the way, I found it very interesting and informative.
The passivhaus level corresponds to about KFW-40 if one wears rose-tinted specs, or more likely KFW-30 or lower. Here are a couple of UK briefing papers from about 2011/2012 on potential lessons to be learned from the German experiences in considering adoption in the UK. Again, with rose tinted specs one could suggest that the UK's BREAM level 6 / CfSH level 6 approximately attains passivhaus, but again I think that is being somewhat optimistic and that one needs to go further to really reach passivhaus.
Here are the briefing papers,
https://www.zerocarbonhub.org/sites/def ... F47%29.pdf (NHBC)
https://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/dps/case/cp/kfwfullreport.pdf (LSE)
Some comments from me:
- Firstly those two papers (most especially the shorter NHBC one) have a distinctly UK-developer spin about them, the LSE one less so. I recollect seeing rather firmer ones being written with more of a pro-passivhaus slant than these, but I can't find them on the web in a hurry.
- Secondly, imho, to really get the full economic benefits of passivhaus in newbuild you have to delete the conventional heating system in its entirety which is in essence what PhaseThree has done in building his/her passivhaus which only has a
"a 3kW ..(Immersion) heater connected to the underfloor heating pipes. This is run with E7 electricity so is only on for 7 hours per day. In these dark cold days of January I am using around 12kWh per day for heating (around £1 per day). The house is always warm and at the temperature we like with no draughts, cold spots or other nasties. I have wired the house for electric radiators as top-up, this is unused. The total cost of the heating system was no more than £500.".
- Thirdly if you compare those papers from 2012 with what has actually happened in the UK market you will observe that the developers/lobbyists/politicians nobbled the intended efficiency improvements. These had already been nobbled and hobbled on multiple occasions over previous decades by the same trio. The result is that with every passing decade the UK has continued to build more sub-standard housing stock which is an entirely avoidable tragedy.
- Fourthly the Grenfell fire has set the UK back further decades. I personally think that more people will lose more years of their lives as a consequence of the post-Grenfell reduction in UK housing insulation than lost their lives in the fire itself. Furthermore the root cause of the fire (desperately poor technical skills, standards, inspection, specification, understanding vs primacy of commercial factors) permeates the whole of UK society and is so evident in almost all UK housing stock.
Anyway, in the next week or so there will be another room insulated, this time at my GF's. Uprating loft insulation from 100mm to 200mm (amd maybe then 300mm), and fitting 60mm insulation (plus 12.5mm PB) internally, against solid external wall in a grade II listed house, with concommitant electrics and radiator re-site, whilst retaining/reinstating period detailing and doing a full redecoration of that room. It can be done, bit by bit, and it is generally worth doing provided one keeps a sense of proportion. If I were doing a newbuild I would probably personally insist on passivhaus.
regards, dspp