Two low energy houses have been built in Douglas.
They were constructed as a result of a decision made by The Climate Change Citizen Forum and the members looked around the properties on Friday.
In the face of a potential ban on boilers in a few years’ time, these semi-detached houses in Victoria Road use electric heating rather than conventional gas or oil central heating.
John Sheppard, director at Wren Sustainable Limited, and Steve Crowther, architect at cre8-iom, worked on the project together.
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John was proud of the accomplishment and said that the houses were the first of their kind in the British Isles.
He said: ’I’ve been working on this for 20 years.’
sustainability
John continued: ’Meeting up with Steve, we’ve combined our interest in architecture and sustainability and it’s worked out.
’We’ve got an eco property with that angle of sustainability and affordability.’
One house is heated with a 1.5 kilowatt heater through the winter and the bills make up about £40 for a quarter.
The finished unit with no heat input other than solar gain averages 18 degrees.
John said: ’You’ll get very, very low bills.
’Heating is all off peak, electric as well but because of the high level of insulation it’s incredibly efficient.
’The big problem normally is heat loss but with this you’ve got very little.’
The heart of the new properties is the ventilation heat recovery system.
Each room takes all the heat out and puts all the heat exchange back into it.
The only heat into the house is from solar gain as well as the waste heat that is generated from your body.
John said: ’That’s costing effectively nothing.’
The average bills for heating and lighting are estimated to be £100 a quarter once fully occupied with the only additions being from the kitchen where cooking is done and from the bathroom with showering.
On the outside of the houses is permeable paving which acts as a tree root protection system.
This means when the rainwater comes down, it’s channelled into the top of the car park and then it filters down and gets soaked into the ground.
No drainage system is needed to take it away, it’s all dealt with onsite and trees can still be planted.
Steve stressed the angle on sustainability.
He said: ’The thing that matters to me is getting it integrated into the landscape.
’This is just as important to me as reaching zero carbon.’
The architect explained the controversies facing those in the UK and how we can learn from it.
He added: ’In the UK, we’ve got to deal with building into greenbelt. What we’d like to do is look at how we can integrate affordable homes into better landscape areas.’