Health risks associated with passive houses

[jack]

43 minutes ago, Construction Channel said:

Plumbers run by date stamped 24 hr digital clocks if that is the case

 

Yes, one of these, but blinking! 

 

 

 

[Nickfromwales]

8 hours ago, SteamyTea said:

 

Bugger, I have loads to say, but just in from work.

 

I like a good rant.

07:30 onwards, you're back in business.   Sleep now, for tomorrow I fear more ranting.

My 6-shooter is loaded, and ready to pick off any trouble makers  If we all keep to the facts I may save on ammo. 

"Have a nice day, Y'all"   

[Barney12]

....come on everyone. I got up especially early to sit back and watch the action. It's now 08:19 and nuttin'  

[Nickfromwales]

I'm sure you won't be waiting too long

 

[SteamyTea]

Right.

Addressing the 'small houses' issue.

I live in a small house, 4m by 8m.  It has a corridor for a living room, where the stairs are.  The parking area is at the back, steps up to the front door.

Upstairs the bathroom is wedged between the two bedrooms, one an OK size, the other tiny.

Now someone 'designed' this.  Technically it is well insulated, airtightness seems reasonable and it costs next to nothing to run (why I bought it as I was a student at the time and it is close to the college).

So imaging that you park your car, come in the back door, where is the light switch, oh, other side of the room (kitchen).

I have an ordinary sofa, nothing special, but it is too long to put across the living room, it almost hits the stairs, put it along the living room wall and you then have an even narrower corridor.

You can put the TV under the stairs, it was 'designed this way' as the TV aerial point is there, but as it was 'designed' before flat screen where in existence, it would have 'stuck out a bit', right by the kitchen door.

Now when I live on my own, I can cope with this, but when I had a lodger, the layout just don't work, it really does not.  There is no way to get from the bathroom/bedrooms without passing though the corridor/living room.

Could it have been improved, yes, if it had been made a bit wider, then the stairs could have been turned 90°.  This would have acted as a separator between the front and the back rooms, making rooms truely individual rather than just a corridor.  There was enough room on the plot (of 6 houses) to do this.

 

And that is before we get onto the 'social' side of housing.  Most individuals need some individual space, the larger the family, the more space they need. Men have sheds, women have kitchens, boys have bedrooms, girls bathrooms.  Well it seems that way to me from looking at adverts.

My old neighbours where a family of 4, two teenage boys, mother and father.  They were crammed into 52.5m² total internal floor area.  This is just not right, but probably not unusual.  It cannot be good for mental health to be crammed into such a tiny space.  This may account for my current neighbours being a family of 3 (7 year old child), single, single, single, single, family of 3 (baby).

Now an 'engineer' or economist, may well say that there is wasted space as there is at least 4 unused bedrooms.  But this does mean that we can have friends to stay without putting them up on the sofa in the corridor.

 

Having studied Economics (as well as other things), there is a bit of a myth about Supply and Demand.  There are two ways to look at this.  One, the normal methods quoted by 'industry experts', says that if there is a shortage of house, the price will be higher.

The alternative is that if money is cheap, and it is very cheap at the moment, then the price of housing will be higher.

So what have we done in the last 40 years.  We have built more housing (there is no shortage of housing, just the distribution is not always right).

We have allowed women to have there own mortgages since the late 1970's  Hard to believe that they needed a second (male) signatory on the paperwork just 39 years ago.

Then, a decade later we removed double tax relieve, pushing up property values and speculation that took nearly 10 years to recover from.

Then, though financial manipulation the formula to work out affordability was changed from a simple multiply of of mean wage to median household income (this has, in effect, made more money available as not many people earn zero, but a few earn millions).  Coupled to that is the way that banks have changed the method for lending money, they now work on a multiple of total household income, rather than multiple of major income plus minor income.  Again this has increased the money supply to the housing sector.

So take a simple 'old' method of a man earning £10k and the wife earning £5k, with a multiplier of 3.  They could borrow £35k

Now they can borrow £45k.  This extra £10k (28% increase) is just sucked up by increased property prices, nothing to do with the supply and demand of the housing stock (we still have about half the number of houses as people).  There has been no added value anywhere.

 

So what can be done about it.

First off, everyone that wants to buy a house should work out what they can realistically afford to pay back, (3 times income is pretty good), then, every Saturday morning, spend an hour going to estate agents and point out that their houses are probably at least twice as expensive as needs be, and probably 4 to 5 times as expensive, and would they tell the sellers that.

You will probably get asked to leave the office, but if enough people do it, then the message will get driven home.  This is especially true for first time buyers (and for every first time buyer there is a last time seller).

The other things we can do is to stop thinking that the country has lack of room for housing.  There is plenty of room.  Urbanisation has only used up about 9% of the land area, housing is probably less than half of that, including infrastructure.

So when a farmer wants to sell an acre of crap land for building, let them, it really won't affect your life.  This has to be better than cramming in more and more people into existing towns and cities.  This fixation with 'brown field' must stop.  Turn a few of them green.

I used to live in Buckinghamshire, where my Mother still lives.  It is a nice leafy green place, popular with locals, London commuters and media celebrities. It has a population density of 404people/km².  Milton Keynes is a good place to live and work (I lived there and worked there once, better than Aylesbury or High Wycombe I found).

Now I live in Cornwall, it has a population density of 150people/km².  So under half the density.  Most new developments are opposed here because of pointless, uneducated arguments about overcrowding.  We have plenty of space, so much space that we can accommodate 5 million visitors a year, ten times the resident population.  Our infrastructure copes, no one gets hurts, all very pleasant in the summer.

Last week there was a major accident on the A30, closed both ways as the helicopter had to land.  It took me an hour to get the ten miles to work.  It usually takes me 15 minutes.  What it reminded me off was my old commute to Kingston Upon Thames from Aylesbury.  The last ten miles could take an hour.  It was just part of life.  A time to sit back, relax and plan my day.

I cured that problem by leaving earlier and getting to work by 7AM, leaving earlier when I could, only too just over an hour then.  It worked well.

The point of that is that there is no need to fear extra housing, or building larger houses, it does not affect the price, that is affected by income potential and interest rates.  Small housing, at the lower end of the scale, is not good for society as it forces overcrowding and ghettoisation, under out current planning system.  Commuting can be good if done right (we are starting to move to an era of lower emission vehicles).

 

So if we start to build slightly larger housing, get rid of housing that is single bedroom because of the inherent restrictions, expand our towns and cities less, move people to the countryside, we can probably reduce overall air pollution, and almost certainly remove very high concentrations of it.  This would reduce the need to 'filter out particulates' as much as we need to now, could help rejuvenate rural communities, disperse income and make for a better society.

 

Not much of that has anything to do with the study of MVHR in Passive Houses.  That is simple to solve, put in a larger unit with larger vents and ductwork.

We really must stop working to minimums.

Edited October 13, 2016 by SteamyTea

[le-cerveau]

 

7 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

Not much of that has anything to do with the study of MVHR in Passive Houses.  That is simple to solve, put in a larger unit with larger vents and ductwork.

We really must stop working to minimums.

I have been following but not contributing to this thread (it appears to have become a bit heated in a nice way), however this is my plan:

I need 472.92 m³/h of vent for my house (yes it is large see my blog), so I am working on 495 m³/h as my working figure (for various reasons).  I am looking at MVHR units in the range 675-945m³/h so that it is running at 50-70% capacity normally.  I am also massively over specifying ducting, flow rates never to exceed 2m/s and most planned much less.  This then gives me the following:

1. The unit will be running slow so quiet and more efficiently (heat exchange efficency drops off towards the upper levels of capacity).
2. If I have condensation/mold problems I have the capacity to increase flow rates relatively easily (some re-balancing required).

But that is my design and I won't touch house builders and people designing to the minimum limit!

[SteamyTea]

Seems the way to go to me.  Bit like an ASHP, they need to be oversized for the same reasons.  Occasionally you have to 'accelerate' the heat transfer, you can't do that when it is already being driven close to the limit.

 

It does make me think that going back to the old forced air heating systems has some merit to it.  Just that now it can do the heating and the ventilation and hot have a huge furnace roaring away in the basement.

Usually I think that combine different functions, that work at different times and at different temperatures (think Space heating and DHW) into one 'do it all' unit is a bad thing.

But in this case, as they are not so different, I think it could work.

[Ferdinand]

Quote

10 hours ago, Declan52 said:

 does everyone not have the right to live in a warm house with no mould and fresh air and doesn't cost a high percentage of their income to run.

 

@Daiking In my personal opinion that is a right and that is something that lies with the government. None of this shoulder shrugging hand wringing about not interfering in the market despite all the other govt interference that freaks it up. Housebuilding is a local service not an international. they should be knocking up houses everywhere they are needed so taxpayers can lead happy productive lives not farmed in worse conditions than livestock for the benefit of landowners.

 

I think those statements are not very meaningful. What do you *mean*?

 

Who has a right to a house and what do they have a right to?

 

Do I get a house if I just came in from Poland? What about if I am 21 and pregnant or single with a child? What about if my GF is 21 and pregnant and we split up? And so on.

 

Without precise policies we can't work out the impact, and it is just a feelgood handwaving competition,

 

And are you happy with the consequences of such a "just do it" policy? And how will you ensure decent house that people want to live in? How do you ensure they are efficiently built?

 

What happens if the govt CPO your house and build a small block of flats on it? You won't get much chance because under your suggestion the people who build or commission it it will be the same people who give themselves Planning Permission.

 

Still happy?

 

That is the massive conflict of interest that exists in such circs and is why I am vigorously opposed to substantial local political control over housebuilding / management - Housing Associations are OK, ALMOs sometimes, Council Estates under direct political control: No.

 

I'll get on to the numbers implied and the problems of gormless politicians later, maybe. (Taster: Our Housing Cabinet member here's main claim to fame is appearing in a photo next to Ed Milliband wearing a "dance on Thatcher's Grave" teeshirt.)

 

Ferdinand

 

[ProDave]

Re the "houses are too expensive, tell the agent to lower the price" thing.

 

Houses are NOT too expensive everywhere, in fact I would argue they are too cheap up here.

 

i am building a bew 3 bedroom detached house, and by the time it is finished including the cost of land, it will have cost about £250K  My present 5 bedroom house is on the market for £285K (having been valued at £300K)  So it looks pretty damned good value for money.

 

Some people tell me the old one has not sold yet so it "must be over priced" and I need to drop the price.  but I can't drop it much or it will be on par with the cost of the new one.  Downsizing was supposed to release a bit of the equity in the property.  It will be a bitter bitter pill to swallow if I eventually only sell the old 5 bed house for the same as it costs to build the new one (downsizing without being able to release any equity) and I can tell you it will NOT under any circumstances happen that we sell the old one for LESS than the cost of the new one.

 

So what is that ramble all about? well the dominant cost of building the new one is building material and labour. It is only going to be as cheap as it is because I am doing so much myself.  In the present market, if you paid a builder to build your house and did not save money by doing some yourself, you would have a house that cost more to build than it's market value.

 

so I can only drop the price of the old one if building materials and labour to finish the new one plummet in price as well. I can't see that happening?

 

[Oz07]

Has anyone seen the door undercut thread on GBF?

 

Just highlights the point Sensus was making

[Ferdinand]

2 hours ago, SteamyTea said:

Right.

 

We have built more housing (there is no shortage of housing, just the distribution is not always right).

 

So when a farmer wants to sell an acre of crap land for building, let them, it really won't affect your life.  This has to be better than cramming in more and more people into existing towns and cities.  This fixation with 'brown field' must stop.  Turn a few of them green.

 

1 - Agree that more rural housing is a good idea. I don't see why the population of our countryside couldn't increase by a few million. Especially in eg Scotland and other aras of low density. But we need to get beyond the idea of the countryside as a rural museum and tackle "sustainability" head on.

 

My preference would be for the default for communities to be allowed to increase by 0.8-1% a year.

 

The chokehold on rural development is quite recent; Derbyshire is full of villages with 1950s small council estates and 50s/60s bungalows.

 

2 - I think you are mistaken with not reflecting on this more:

 

Quote

(we still have about half the number of houses as people)

 

The impact of demographics is massive.

 

Between 2001 and 2011, for example, the average household size moved from 2.4 to 2.3. Take a population of 60 million and that is a demand for an extra 1.1 million units from that trend alone.

 

That single factor will absorb approx 65% of the houses built between 2001 and 2011 (estimated at 150k a year which is about right).

 

Suspect that effect is understated since there has been an upsurge of rented-by-room HMOs in the last 15 years.

 

If you factor in a population of 65 million (was 64 million in 2013), still at 2.3 household size, then the extra number of housing units needed would be approx 3 million. In fact we built under 2.5 million in the period.

 

I'm ignoring shenanigans such as Councils A-rating individual bedrooms in HMOs and calling them a Housing Unit to get the government bonus.

 

This is one reason why I would support angling benefits and taxes to encourage people to stay together.

 

3 - 

Quote

Now I live in Cornwall, it has a population density of 150people/km².  So under half the density.  Most new developments are opposed here because of pointless, uneducated arguments about overcrowding.  We have plenty of space, so much space that we can accommodate 5 million visitors a year, ten times the resident population.  Our infrastructure copes, no one gets hurts, all very pleasant in the summer.

 

I think we need figures for developable land to get a better impression on that. Cornwall has more hills, whereas Buckinghamshire has more Golf Courses. Are there numbers available?

 

Ferdinand

 

Edited October 13, 2016 by Ferdinand

[PeterW]

3 minutes ago, Sensus said:

 

Back on PassivHaus, vaguely:

 

My course tutor on my Architecture degree was Robert Vale, one half of the man-and-wife team who wrote the groundbreaking book 'The Autonomous House', back in the mid-70's. His wife, Brenda, was a full-time lecturer at the same University, so I knew them both - Robert was a lovely fella; Brenda came across as a bit fierce and would certainly have concurred with points 1 and 5 of Barney's first post on page 1 of this thread!

 

 

The "New" Autonomous house is just up the road from me - clever in its design saying it was built in a conservation area too !

[tonyshouse]

There are passive houses and there is also Passive Haus or here Passive House UK 

 

I live in the former and am as you all know very keen on reducing energy use.

[SteamyTea]

1 hour ago, Ferdinand said:

I think you are mistaken with not reflecting on this more:

 

Quote

(we still have about half the number of houses as people)

 

The impact of demographics is massive.

Yes, in away, bit it is why I said 'about' rather than 'exactly'.

 

Many things have changed the demographics of both population and housing (if you can talk of houses having demographics).  There are also more empty properties as a by product of a larger number of properties.  We have also split many homes into two or more 'flats'.  It is not all about new build.

 

Our old mate Ed Davies, over at the other place, pointed out that each year the UK builds more metres² new cars than new housing.  We don't think of that as the same problem though.

 

55 minutes ago, Sensus said:

One thing that many self-builders don't 'get' is that the English planning system no longer really cares very much whether the house you're proposing to build is energy-efficient or not

Yes, nor should it ever have been.  Trouble comes about with local authorities interpreting national policy differently.  This was once explained to me by my local MP (Matthew Taylor).  He was doing a non partisan talk about energy and why it takes so long for government policy to be acted on 2 to 5 years usually.  Was very interesting.

Government should create policy based on the best available evidence, then the private sector should develop and then implement it.

 

When I say Passive House, I mean anything of very low energy usage.

With the official version of it, is that PassivHaus, don't they specify the energy rating of white goods as well?  Which is going to far in my opinion.

 

[Ferdinand]

24 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

  There are also more empty properties as a by product of a larger number of properties. 

 

I am familiar with the numbers on that and we have done very very well - we actually have very few. In England it is down by 35% on 2004.

 

Currently housing-shouters are struggling to generate outrage from an England (getting UK figures is a sod since devolved) long term empties (>6 months) figure of a little over 200k homes.

 

London has 20915 (2015) out of a stock of 3.4 million. That is about 0.6%.

See table 615:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/live-tables-on-dwelling-stock-including-vacants

 

London is down by more than half since 2004, England by 35-40%.

 

Quite a remarkable performance, but there are still people trying to generate equivalent outrage from a far smaler problem, so the claims need to be ever-more extreme (see by analogy Greenpeace and climate change). 

 

eg here is the Groaniad translating a figure of 22,000 into a headline of "Tens of Thousands":

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/feb/21/tens-thousands-london-homes-deemed-long-term-vacant

 

Here is a piece from 2014 comparing the UK with Germany, France, Italy and Spain. This includes short term empties.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/feb/23/europe-11m-empty-properties-enough-house-homeless-continent-twice

 

UK: 700k

Portugal: 735k

France: 2.4m 

Italy: 2.4m

Germany: 1.8m

Spain: 3.4m

 

That is one reason why it *may* be a sensible policy for Germany to invite 1m refugees, while being a silly idea for the UK, if you ignore handing a million people over to traffickers and 2500 drowning in the sea, and the 93bn Euro Merkel has budgeted for expenditure in Germany over 5 years compared to perhaps 2bn Euro for the ME where 95% of the refugees continue to exist.

 

Graphic:

 

 

Ferdinand

[TerryE]

@Sensus,  From your responses I get the impression that you don't understand the difference between AH and RH and the physics which underpins this.  The AH of air won't change when it's temperature is increased.  Air which is at an RH of 60% at 0°C will have the same AH if heated 20° but it's RH will roughly half.

 

Adding roughly 20° to 500m³ at 0.6 ACH gives it the capacity to absorb 2-3ltr of water per hour.  This is more than an order of magnitude more than 3 occupants will add.  So why are my points outrageous / unfounded?  Sorry, but your sums don't add up.

 

In my reading,  you are making unfounded claims about the supposed health risks of properly designed passive house using MVHR based on anonymous anecdote and "experience".  Give some facts,  evidence,  data and they might carry some weight -  for me at least. 

[SteamyTea]

@Ferdinand

I read this a year ago when we last discussed this (can't remember if it was on eBuild or GBF).

http://www.emptyhomes.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Empty-homes-in-England.pdf

 

Just knowing about housing though is only part of the story.  It has to be related to the age distribution in an area.  But with around 600,000 (200,000 long term), we can easily house 1.2 to 1.8 million people (2 or 3 people per house).

 

I wish I had more time to look at it again as it is an interesting economic area that needs a lot of unpicking.

[joe90]

2 hours ago, Sensus said:

 

The point being, of course, that perhaps we're getting way too fixated on the entire 'PassiveHaus' concept and recipe for low energy housing: there are alternative ways of doing it, and some of them, just perhaps, may be healthier and more flexible, if only we would open our minds to them?

 

I for one would like to hear about the alternative way of doing it. 

[SteamyTea]

Abundant, reliable, flexiable and very cheap, non polluting energy sources is one way.

[joe90]

 

 

26 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

Abundant, reliable, flexiable and very cheap, non polluting energy sources is one way.

 

For example?    (Don't know what happened above,?)

Edited October 13, 2016 by PeterW
A kindly admin happened.... :-)

[SteamyTea]

A combination of nuclear, large and small scale hydro, solar, wind and tidal, plus some geothermal.

Just needs to be deliverable at 3p/kWh (wholesale price).  That is the real challenge.

 

In last weeks comic there was a bit about reforming natural gas into hydrogen, but leaving carbon behind, rather than CO₂.  That looks a promising idea, but does rely on natural gas.  So let us frack away, it is going to happen anyway (for those that don't know, my BSc is in Environmental Science, specifically renewables, but I am a pragmatic person).

[joe90]

Perhaps I misread senses,s thread above, I thought he meant there must be another way "of building houses" ??

 

 

[Ferdinand]

1 hour ago, SteamyTea said:

@Ferdinand

I read this a year ago when we last discussed this (can't remember if it was on eBuild or GBF).

http://www.emptyhomes.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Empty-homes-in-England.pdf

 

Just knowing about housing though is only part of the story.  It has to be related to the age distribution in an area.  But with around 600,000 (200,000 long term), we can easily house 1.2 to 1.8 million people (2 or 3 people per house).

 

I wish I had more time to look at it again as it is an interesting economic area that needs a lot of unpicking.

 

Yep. I'd admit that this is a bit of a bee in my bonnet. I think that a lot of measures are already in place quite successfully.

 

One question is what is the minimum level which can be achieved? It is not zero - like unemployment because there is always some friction.

 

My suspicion is that we may be quite near the minimum figure, but whether it is 100000 long term empties or 150000 or 50k I am not sure. Does it include slow sellers?

 

There will also be some dependency with private rental regulation, and I think that say 6-12 month contract workers abroad may be inclined to leave it empty rather than engage with items such as identity checking or the eviction bureaucracy. It is being professionalised by bureaucratisation.

 

But ... back to topic.

 

Ferdinand

 

[ProDave]

Internal Vs External temperature.  -10 outside for a couple of weeks is not uncommon up here, but then I accept out climate is a bit harsher than other parts of the UK.

 

And empty houses.  I guess it depends on why they are empty. The one that bugs me is an empty house that's empty because it is for sale, gets "penalised" with double council tax after 2 years, to "punish" you for the housing market being slow and you being unable to find a buyer.  I know a familly in that situation and they say in December when the "penalty" kicks in they are going to take their house to auction to dry and shift it.
 

[oldkettle]

1 hour ago, Sensus said:

 

Adding 20° to the air temperature is actually a fairly extreme case in the UK climate, these days: you're very seldom going to be adding that sort of temperature increase to the incoming air. There will be many times when there's little or no temperature increase to the incoming air (particularly when your MVHR is set on summer bypass ).

 

Conversely, we have a very humid climate: average relative humidity for the UK typically runs between 70-90% (well above the level that can promote mould growth). So it's pretty self-evident that there will be lots of occasions when you'd actually need to increase temperature when you may not want to (unless you actively dehumidify the incoming air) to bring RH down to 'safe' limits to prevent mould growth in environments of poor air circulation, even without taking into account any further moisture added by human occupancy.

 

If my sums aren't adding up for you, it may be because you're using the wrong assumptions as the basis for your calculations.

 

 

@Sensus, are you saying that when we compare two houses, one built by large developer to their usual standard, i.e. leaky :-) and PH, in the same conditions of 70-90% average RH, PH with ventilation is going to suffer from mould etc. more?