Thanks, sounds like good advice. I hope Mid Suffolk DC is eco mad...!
I could do with some more ideas of eco friendly ideas. The ones I've got so far are:
- Super insulated - insulation from recycled materials
- wood frame - ?
- passive solar wall space heating
- solar domestic hot water
- wood burners with onsite ash coppice
- low energy lighting throughout
What else? I don't know so much about the eco friendly materials side of things.
Nick
On what do you base this ridiculous assertion?
How many eco houses around you then?
Eco houses in all your back gardens?
What you have is a big chip. You want affordable housing in your area. Stopping people from building houses will not achieve that. In fact the reverse will happen.
The OP has a 2 acre plot. hardly cramming in the back gardens. The solution is allow people to build on the unused subsidised fields. We have a land surplus. You are looking at the matter from the wrong direction. Stopping people from building on subsidised fields, from our taxes, will prevent over development in existing built up areas?
That I could stomach. I don't mind some phosphate and nitrate polluted farmer's field succumbing to houses. It is the permanent loss of some of the most beautiful Victorian Gothic houses that I'm angry about.
Christian.
And it will sonn be a half acre plot with what - four more houses on the other one and a half acres?
Will that be in keeping with the area? Does the area have the infrastructure ( health services, roads, employment, etc.) to support it? I doubt it.
Planning rules are there for a reason. if his two acres are currently outside the loacal plan devolpment area , its no doubt for a good reason and it should remain so. Trying "tricks" - like eco building etc. to have that changed is underhand and does no one good in the log run ( except the developer maybe, who no doubt will sell up and run - no doubt a long way from the mess he creates).
But he isnt in my back yard , so I dont really care. I have just stated my observations in my own area.
Ive just bought another field ( 5 acres) in an attempt to keep any of that happening near me in my lifetime at least. But I guess I am a greedy b*stard of another kind. I like to see wildlife and plants and trees.
Like the five acres of field I have just bought which borders my existing smallholding and the lane ( I own) that allows access to it? There is already one house next to me - built in the 1980's. That will be the last within a five acre radius in my lifetime.
There are no mains services ( gas or drains) in the village down the road from me - I too am outside the current building line - and the storm drains cant take whats thrown at them already.
We may need that land you want to build on to house the millions to feed the bloody hoards in a minute.
It is not greed. The country is short of millions of homes. The problem is that we are not allowed to build on subsidised fields. That is the problem. If we were allowed to build on boring fields then garden in-fills and the likes would not happen.
But those "most beautiful Victorian Gothic houses" were probably put up by the Barratt Homes of their day. Probably 80% of Conservation Areas are just yet another lot of Victorian spec-build and if they can be redeveloped to provide more housing then I'd much rather this happened than it being forced out into areas where there are no shops, no PT, no other facilities and car ownership is therefore all but mandatory.
It's a strange thing about Conservative politicians: suggest closing a steelworks or coal mine and severely impacting a community and they'll be all in favour of it, claiming that it's just market forces at work. Suggest replacing a couple of Victorian villas by a block of flats and they suddenly believe that the state knows best. If market forces were allowed to operate we'd have more housing being built, and with the removal of an artificial shortage developers would have to work harder to deliver good quality.
The Building Structure:
- A light framed superinsulated structure (Minimum of 400mm of Warmcell in the roof, 250-300mm in the walls, heavy foam in the floor if a concrete slab).
- Face the house south to capture passive solar energy.
- Calculate the pitch of the roof for maximum insulation at your latitude.
- Calculate the roof overhangs to keep the sun off the windows and walls in summer.
- Have the north side with few windows.
- Triple glazed with low "e" glass.
- Eliminate thermal bridges. These tend to be where the walls meet the ground and the roof, or one material meets another. Use nylon tie bars if cladding in brick
- Use SIP panels or TJI "I" beams. The void in the "I" beams can be filled with Warmcell cellulous insulation (re-cycled newspaper). The Warmcell makes the structure air-tight.
- Have all of the south facing roof being a solar panel heating water from the sun. That is a large surface generating much heat.
- Could have a full width conservatory on the south side. Better if full width and full height. This will help but not essential. Nice to have though as bedrooms could have a balcony opening into the conservatory.
- No letterbox in front door. All doors heavily insulated and sealed (the Swedes do the best doors).
- Specify a study for home working.
Heating, Vent, Thermal Storage:
- Store the heat in a large thermal store, which would have to be sized to suit. Better have a battery of small cylinders, so if one leaks it is an easy and cheap job of replacing.
- The heavy thermal stores can be at ground level. They could even be in a separate building with superinsulted underground pipes between it and the house if need be. The thermal store should hold enough energy to heat the building over 3 or 4 cloudy days.
- Use "very" low temperature underfloor heating.
- In winter not a lot of very hot water will be generated, but hot enough for very low temp underfloor heating.
- This low temperature water can act as a preheat for DHW.
- If hot water is generated, hot enough for domestic hot water, then this water should be suitably stored for ready use rather than merging into a large low temperature water store.
- The controls will be off the shelf and all be using the odd pump here and there.
- A backup heat source can be incorporated when cloudy days extend over 3 or
4 days.- The water system is understandable by any intelligent plumber.
- As underfloor heating is being used, bets have an extract only vent system. Heat recovery is expensive. The thermal store should store enough energy for the heating system to compensate for vent losses.
Water reclamation:
- There are large water tanks that fill from the roof available ready made. The BENELUX countries have these as standard in new builds.
- The water tank is under the garden.
- The water is used to water the garden and flush toilets, reducing water consumption drastically.
PV Cell:
- Don't bother as they are still super expensive with very long payback times. If the hosue done as above then little elecricity will be used.
Low Energy Appliance:
- These tend to be German like AEG, etc. Find out which of these is the most economical in energy and water consumption and put these in the spec.
Comms:
- Wire the place out in CAT 5 to accomodate computers and home working.
The above is the basic concept. Then, depending on site, size of house, etc, it is a matter of applying numbers to size up the thermals store, heat loss, How much energy the solar roof will generate, sizing a "very" low temp underfloor heating system, etc.
Best of luck. I hope you get it and you build the house. We need more people like you around.
And building over green spaces in cities and towns. I see Liverpool FC, or is that Bangkok FC now, want to build a stadium on the adjacent park. Scumbags.
1/2 acre is a large plot for a house.
Don't know.
employment,
Don't know.
Yes to keep very large landowners very, very wealthy. 1% of the population own 70% of the land. Only 7.2% of the land is built on, rural and urban.
The reason is to create an artificial land shortage to ramp up land prices.
2/3 of the value of the average home is the land value.I thought so. A NIMBY!!!
But lack understanding of the issue and don't see the big picture.
So it cost you 15K approx. If the local plan in the future covers your field, then it will be worth millions. Let's see your NIMBYism then.
So don't we all. We don't see it crammed into urban areas while field lay there empty for mile after mile after mile.
message
If you want to build there, why not? As long as neighbours are not duly inconvenienced nothing wrong with it.
Good for you, if that is what you want. It would be nice if someone could build a house in the fields near you and also have 5 acres around them too.
"may need". WE NEED IT NOW.
Large Victorian house around our way has just gone via auction. Waiting to see what happens to it (Worcs).I suspect that it will be going to new flats.
Dave
Excellent post. The term Jerry Built was from a Victorian builder named Jerry Bros. It is the draconian planning act that is the problem, closely followed by the land being in the hands of a few people. The artificial shortage prevents market forces serving the people. There should be little requirement for publicly subsidised housing, which takes an enormous amount of taxpayers money each year, if the free market was to reign. And better competition would mean better designs and quality and far cheaper house prices. In short, solve the land/planning problems and many ills are also solved. Land is the root cause of many of the country's problems and if tackled even our taxes will drop.
The large landowners spend millions each year in propaganda to convince us we are short of land (a downright lie, as we have a surplus) and that subsidised fields, by great expense from our taxes again, should be left and we are all rammed into tight urban spaces.
Contrary to your view I am not a wealthy person. I do care about the environment and cannot see any way in which building more and more houses on green fertile fields is good for anyone. I cant change the world but I can make what bit of it I have a more enjoyable place. Building on rural land creates ghettos of rich people getting out of sink suburbia and then building more sink suberbia before moving on to more green fields. Thats the bigger picture.
I have principles to wit:
It cost me all the spare cash I had - and I work hard for my money, I am not a financier or a banker and I am not getting mega bucks , but its not about money, its about having a decent home and a decent environment to live in.
I said NOT IN MY LIFETIME and I MEAN IT. ( I am forty). The sole reason for buying the land is to stop development NOT to cash in on anything in the future. I consider myself a guardian of that land, not a wrecker of it. I haven't got the land under cultivation and I wont do so. Its currently been cut for hay and reseeded this year ( done before I got it) but I have a large hedgerow and a deep border of uncultivated land right round my boundary. I also have a small pond - and five years ago there was no wildlife in it. I now have frogs, newts ( including crested) and toads. A small colony of slow worms.
We have as well as the more common birds , swallows, sparrows ( tree, house and dunnock) song thrushes, mistle thrushes, bats , barn owls and brown owls living and hunting on this field. And of course I havent begun to check whats in the hedgerows - voles etc.
They need homes too. They wont find them in a bloody housing estate and I will not see them homeless to create one. As I said , I have principles and I am sticking to them.
Well when someone actually makes that clear to me ( ie starts saying grow on this land , not build on it) then I will put it under cultivation. Its just a nature reserve at the moment ( not a managed one I might add.) The previous owner was a "part time" farmer and put a few cows in the field every now and then ( like once a year) and cut it to hay in the summer.
I havent done anything yet.
I like your approach.
You are right we should be living amongst wildlife. If they allowed us access to build on all this land we could all be living like that. Unfortunately we are all crammed into small spaces. that is the problem. Allow people to spread out on the land and high density housing will be vastly reduced.
But most people dont want to live with wildlife ( despite Bill Oddie and the Beebs attempts to convince them otherwise) . No matter what the density of housing, they will try to eradicate the wildlife around them. They will either seek to prevent or evict the bats from their roof spaces. They will eveict the mice from the Englsih natural hedgerows by grubbing them out and planting the scourge of suberbia - leyllandii .
Better that people cram themselves into small spaces where they can share the task of killing off other species in their particular ring fence of territory , than they travel around and kill it all off everywhere.
No need to. No need to grow anything on it either as we pay farmers not to produce. You should not have to go to these extremes to maintain your quality of life. Change the planning system/land ownership and what you are understandable doing will be a thing of the past.
Your are out of date. Its no longer commercially viable to use heavy fertilizers on crops.
Round here they get a quick dusting of herbicide, and a little fungicide, and the weeds grow alongside em.
A rotation takes care of butrient.
No, its overflowing with idiots. Like you. Where's Shipman when you need him?
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