New ways to make old houses more energy efficient will be tested in a four-year project. People will be asked to live in a test house in order to evaluate the new technology, writes Dick Ahlstrom
THE CARBON footprint produced from heating our homes may start to shrink soon as a result of an innovative research programme involving the University of Ulster and five universities in Britain.
The €2.55 million project is targeted at the most difficult of homes to heat, solid wall buildings which went up between 1930 and the 1950s, constructed when there was little concern about the cost of heating or carbon footprints, explains the University of Ulster's Prof Neil Hewitt.
Announced last week, the four-year project is entitled CALEBRE, Consumer-Appealing Low Energy Technologies for Building Retrofitting. It seeks to deliver new conservation and heating technologies that are low-cost, easy to fit in existing buildings and also wholly acceptable to the home owner.
"The overall project is aimed at what are called hard-to-heat homes," says Hewitt. About a quarter of the UK's housing stock of 24 million homes fall into this category. "The thinking is if you can get these homes right it will make it easier to get less difficult homes right."
Hewitt is the director of UU's Centre for Sustainable Technologies, a multidisciplinary research unit that includes 23 academics, six post-doctoral researchers and 26 PhD students. The mix includes architects, engineers and construction specialists, but the majority are studying energy-use and conservation, he explains.
Prof Dennis Loveday, of Loughborough University, leads the project, which involves UU plus universities in Nottingham, Warwick, Oxford and Herriot-Watt in Edinburgh. Funding for the project comes from the UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and from UK energy utility, E.On.
As part of the project, Nottingham will construct a house built to 1930s standards, serving as a test-bed for new technology.
The project is most unusual in that even as new retrofit technologies are developed, the team will rely on a 200-strong panel of consumers who will be asked to use the new systems and comment on their value.
People will be asked to take up residence in the home and provide a real-life response to the new technology, says Hewitt.
UU's main focus will be in three areas: heat pumps, new forms of glazing and measurements of the "thermal comfort" afforded by the new approaches.
Hewitt has spent the past four years at UU designing and developing a new form of high efficiency, high output heat pump that can run, summer or winter, using ambient outdoor air. For every kilowatt of electricity put in, the system outputs 3.7kw of heat, he says. This project provides a first chance to test the new system in a home.
His colleague, Dr Trevor Hyde, will test a new form of double-glazing developed at UU. It uses two sheets of 4mm glass, separated by a 0.25mm space. But rather than filling this with an insulating gas, the team evacuates the air to create a vacuum to provide a low-cost, lightweight glazing system that is ideal for retrofit. Tests suggest it insulates better than existing triple-glazed systems, he says.
UU's Griffiths will assess thermal comfort. The team will use "thermal comfort mannequins", often referred to by the researchers as "Danish Ladies", to capture an objective measurement of comfort, says Hewitt. The mannequins are packed full of devices to measure air temperature, identify cold or warm spots, and drafts.
The combination of a realistic test-bed, plus consumers who will comment on devices and approaches, will prove extremely valuable to the researchers, says Hewitt. "We will be looking to see if you change the glazing or the heating, how does this affect thermal comfort.
"We are also looking at how people adapt to it. This is where we start to engage with the users. We will incorporate their ideas into our designs. It is all very well to do things in the lab, but this will be in the real world."