The houses at Lingwood are a mixture of 2-bed 3 person and 3-bed 5 person homes, designed to meet the developing association’s Design Brief. All homes were south facing, arranged in a pair and three terraces. All the houses are timber framed with untreated larch cladding and high levels of insulation. In many ways they were very conventional affordable homes for their period.
What makes the GreenGauge Homes at Lingwood different is not the layout or aesthetic, but the use of the project to evaluate a range of tried and tested energy saving and generation technologies already on the market, with conventional tenants in permanent residence. The data collected would inform future developments and avoid costly mistakes.
The houses are arranged in four groups.
- One pair of homes is heated with highly efficient gas condensing boilers. These would act as the ‘control’ group against which to compare the others.
- A Solar group use solar power for a substantial proportion of energy requirements. Solar collectors pre-heat the water fed to the gas condensing boiler for hot water and central heating. In addition, Solar PhotoVoltaics on each home supplement conventional electricity supply for lighting and power.
- A Sunspace group incorporate a double height conservatory to the south facing elevation of each house. A black facing brick Trombe wall is used to store heat during the day and release into the sunspace during cooler hours. A mechanical ventilation and heat recovery unit heats and ventilates all rooms using energy from the sunspace. Backup heating is by gas condensing boiler with radiators.
- The Ground Source Heat Pump Group of homes is the only group without a gas supply. All space heating and hot water is provided by a vertical array of ten collector pipes and a 5kW Heat Pump in each house. Space heating is via underfloor heating on the ground floors and radiators upstairs.
Why were these combinations chosen?
As with all design projects, there are a number of factors.The houses are a standard size and layout in accordance with the housing association’s brief, and this influences what size of sunspace is possible, for example.
Why didn’t we use wind turbines? At the time of construction, rooftop wind turbines were very popular, but the site was evaluated as not suitable for turbines so they were ruled out. In the event this has proved fortuitous as the effectiveness of micro-wind generation has since been called into question by others.
Many rural affordable housing sites do not have a gas supply, so a solution which doesn’t need gas can save the cost of a connection, and as the price of gas increases, that solution will be more attractive in the long term too.
The project was completed in February 2008 and monitoring began.
