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Grand Designs new series


ProDave

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1 minute ago, Russell griffiths said:

I was hoping @Onoff was going to give me a detailed explanation and then @pocster would comment and then @Declan52

could ban them both. 

Dam my plan has failed. 

 

My final word on the subject is that the term dogger, (I have on good authority from one), is in fact incorrect. "Bogger" was the original term. Boggers would take the family dog for a walk on the pretext of simply that. The dog was used as a handy ruse to 1) get out of the house and 2) be used as an excuse if caught whilst engaging in whatever. 

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1 hour ago, pocster said:

Admin must be busy on Zoots heating system or passed out on wine AGAIN !

 

I heard they'd all broken Lockdown to travel to a top secret location. Top of the agenda is how to separate an ASHP from a cottage door. Seems there was a transporter accident in a parallel universe and the two got mixed up. 

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Am I the only one thinking there was nothing eco about that house?

 

It was just a subterranean house with a novel heating system?

 

How do they heat their hot water, cook etc?

 

I'm sure they could have achieved an equal level of 'eco ness' using ASHP and Solar.

 

Lots of non eco concrete - however much they want to kid themselves they used an eco type. Lots of dirty great big 'oil' based insulation sheets.

 

And those graphs.....decrement delay....Nice one. Most of the builders on this forum could produce similar graphs for their build without having stuck 500 ton of soil on it?

 

Don't get me wrong, looked nice. But 'eco' nah.

Edited by LA3222
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1 minute ago, LA3222 said:

Am I the only one thinking there was nothing eco about that house?

 

It was just a subterranean house with a novel heating system?

 

How do they heat their hot water, cook etc?

 

I'm sure they could have achieved an equal level of 'eco ness' using ASHP and Solar.

 

Lots of non eco concrete - however much they want to kid themselves they used an eco type. Lots of dirty great big 'oil' based insulation sheets.

 

And those graphs.....decrement delay....Nice one. Most of the builders on this forum could produce similar graphs for their build without having stuck 500 ton of soil on it?

 

Don't get me wrong, looked nice. But 'eco' nah.

It always makes me ?‍♂️ when you see third builds saying it’s an eco house and the first thing they do is pour hundreds of tons of concrete.   It looked nice on the inside but the outside looked a bit bunker like, and I couldn’t live with the house at 15-16 degrees! 

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Very commendable if it can be "self heating" but how long will the expensive construction take to pay for itself Vs passive level timber frame and small heating cost?

 

And they were marveling at it achieving about 14 degrees inside.  I don't call that "warm"

 

I did note the WBS not sure if it was installed yet but it would make sense with the woodland they have.

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Heating is one part of the equation. DHW and general appliance use will be a massive chunk of the energy consumption. No provision for them? They spent a massive sum of money to reduce only part of their energy consumption!

 

Seems to me that the geezer didn't take a step back and look at the bigger picture. This is more like an idea he was fixated on and everything after is geared up to prove himself right.

 

Yes, the principle works. But was it worth it and did it make sense. I would argue no. I think that the builds on here would be more eco than this one?‍♂️

Edited by LA3222
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It will overheat in the summer and be cold in the winter. If the wood burning stove is used it's not an 'Eco House', what ever that is. It would have been better if the concrete had EWI and then it could have been heated in many simple ways.

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10 hours ago, ProDave said:

Very commendable if it can be "self heating" but how long will the expensive construction take to pay for itself Vs passive level timber frame and small heating cost?

 

And they were marveling at it achieving about 14 degrees inside.  I don't call that "warm"

 

I did note the WBS not sure if it was installed yet but it would make sense with the woodland they have.

 

 

14 Degrees.....really? I have no heating in the downstairs of my house and in winter its 14 degress on average in the evening. Granted it does have a south facing window but there's no insulation what so ever above it either. 

 

I haven't seen this episode yet. But seem some pictures and it does look good.

 

 

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10 hours ago, LA3222 said:

Am I the only one thinking there was nothing eco about that house?

 

It was just a subterranean house with a novel heating system?

 

How do they heat their hot water, cook etc?

 

I'm sure they could have achieved an equal level of 'eco ness' using ASHP and Solar.

 

Lots of non eco concrete - however much they want to kid themselves they used an eco type. Lots of dirty great big 'oil' based insulation sheets.

 

And those graphs.....decrement delay....Nice one. Most of the builders on this forum could produce similar graphs for their build without having stuck 500 ton of soil on it?

 

Don't get me wrong, looked nice. But 'eco' nah.

Hot water and cooling looked like grid electricity - no sign of PV, and I suspect no budget left over for it.

 

10 hours ago, joe90 said:

However it did work, I remember talking ground heat store and insulated wings being talked about over on the green building forum a few years ago. Hope we get to see the data in the next year or two.

At best you'll average out the temperature over the year. In practice you'll always do quite a bit worse, probably depending if there is any groundwater flowing under the site.

 

9 hours ago, Jason L said:

It always makes me ?‍♂️ when you see third builds saying it’s an eco house and the first thing they do is pour hundreds of tons of concrete.   It looked nice on the inside but the outside looked a bit bunker like, and I couldn’t live with the house at 15-16 degrees! 

Outside is a bit marmite, but I quite like it. I'm too young to remember, but as I understand it their living temperatures are essentially the same as people lived in prior to central heating. From what we saw of their old house, it might well be that it's warmer than the conditions they presently live in.

 

9 hours ago, ProDave said:

Very commendable if it can be "self heating" but how long will the expensive construction take to pay for itself Vs passive level timber frame and small heating cost?

 

And they were marveling at it achieving about 14 degrees inside.  I don't call that "warm"

 

I did note the WBS not sure if it was installed yet but it would make sense with the woodland they have.

CO2 emissions are about 70kg/tonne for concrete. He had what, about 20 mixer trucks @ 30 tonnes each over the course of the build? ~42 000 kg of embedded CO2 in the concrete, equivalent to ~10 MWh of electricity from gas. Passivhaus heating requirement is 15 kWh/m2/year, assume from a COP 4 heat pump -> 4 kWh of electricity a year. Assume house is 300m2 since it looked fairly big -> 1.2 MWh of electricity for heating per year "saved", payback is 10 years.

Not sure costing is a fair comparison - he seemed to really want something shaped like that, and I actually really quite like most aspects of the design (as opposed to the engineering). You might have got it a bit cheaper using some ICFs and a more conventional insulation scheme, but anything underground will always be expensive.

 

9 hours ago, LA3222 said:

Heating is one part of the equation. DHW and general appliance use will be a massive chunk of the energy consumption. No provision for them? They spent a massive sum of money to reduce only part of their energy consumption!

 

Seems to me that the geezer didn't take a step back and look at the bigger picture. This is more like an idea he was fixated on and everything after is geared up to prove himself right.

 

Yes, the principle works. But was it worth it and did it make sense. I would argue no. I think that the builds on here would be more eco than this one?‍♂️

Concur. It's also worth noting that he fitted underfloor heating pipes in the end (would have been cheaper to cast them into the slab), which I think it said were connected up to the wood stove. It's quite likely they're using wood stove and immersion for the hot water - if so total energy use would be lower over the course of a year if they replaced that with a heat pump for heating + hot water.

 

9 hours ago, Ralph said:

According to Kevin McCloud £310k is social housing level of spend. Arse!

Per m2 it probably is - it was a pretty big house. Then again, not many social housing landlords will get 3 acres of land in Buckinghamshire for free...

 

9 minutes ago, PeterStarck said:

It will overheat in the summer and be cold in the winter. If the wood burning stove is used it's not an 'Eco House', what ever that is. It would have been better if the concrete had EWI and then it could have been heated in many simple ways.

There was no sign of a flue being fitted for the stove (big hole in the top of it where one would have gone, so I don't think they were going to use a back flue), and no sign of an outside chimney. Cutting a hole for one through the roof and getting it waterproof will be fun.

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4 minutes ago, pdf27 said:

At best you'll average out the temperature over the year.

Yes but people, cooking, lighting etc add to the heat input into the building (Jeremy cited this with his build,)

6 minutes ago, pdf27 said:

In practice you'll always do quite a bit worse,

Why?

6 minutes ago, pdf27 said:

depending if there is any groundwater flowing under the site.

When he dug it out there wasn’t 

7 minutes ago, pdf27 said:

It's also worth noting that he fitted underfloor heating pipes in the end

No, that was part of his original plan to distribute heat across the slab (again like Jeremy does, and his worked)

 

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1 minute ago, joe90 said:

Yes but people, cooking, lighting etc add to the heat input into the building (Jeremy cited this with his build,)

Why?

When he dug it out there wasn’t 

No, that was part of his original plan to distribute heat across the slab (again like Jeremy does, and his worked)

  1. Sorry, that wasn't clear. I was thinking about temperature stability - for a perfectly insulated box, you could potentially keep it at the same temperature over the course of a year, and that would match the average ambient temperature at the site. That's essentially what we see for modestly deep excavations - they match the ambient air temperature due to the large thermal mass (I know, I know) combined with the insulating effect of tens of metres of soil.
  2. Because the heating inputs are concentrated in 6 months of the year, so you'll get seasonal temperature swings at best. It's a follow-on from the zeroth law of thermodynamics: you need a temperature difference to drive a heat flow, so even if you have an infinitely large reservoir of heat around your living area the temperature in it will always be somewhere between the source and sink temperatures.
  3. When he dug the foundations it wasn't. His design had an uninsulated slab and relied on warming up the soil under the slab for a very large fraction of his heat storage (driven by surface area, and there is a lot greater thickness of soil under the slab than above the roof). That means ground conditions up to maybe 5m (judging by the apron size) below slab also have an impact, and we have no information about those.
  4. I could have sworn they mentioned connecting the wood stove up to them too right at the end of the show when they were giving a tour of the nearly-finished building.
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