Zerochampion

Continuing the series on my personal refurbishment

You wonder why the general consumer can get a tad confused about how to progress with domestic building work. Then you do it yourself and wonder how anyone comes to coherent decision. An example: my wife and I have had the pleasure of nigh-on six or seven plumbers inspect our premises in the past few weeks. They have a few things in common: most are eastern European. Quite a few employ the fateful words “I’ll be honest” before proffering an opinion. It’s akin to a flashing light moment when you wonder whether what they are about to say is complete cobblers.

What they don’t have in common is their advice. Perhaps this is inevitable, and I’m being incredibly naïve in thinking that experts in any field don’t  disagree. So there’s been pretty much a 50/50 split on underfloor heating and other differences in preferred systems and solutions. That’s understandable. But how about this on advice for positioning a boiler in the house? Two or three plumped for the cellar, one for the back of the ground floor next to a planned utility room. Another opted for the first floor bathroom. And to complete the set Jim from Scotland went for the loft. I’m wondering whether we need further clarification or advice this - perhaps it should be suspended in a flotation tank in the garden? Or tilted at a 45 degree angle in outside the sash windows?

I came back from a day trip to Bristol on Wednesday encouraged for two reasons: firstly to be part of a packed session of interested professionals seeking solutions to greening existing buildings; secondly to see that my head scratching on what are the most effective and proven solutions to refurbishing historic houses and properties is shared by most of the industry. Clearly there is an urgent need for more events like the Green Register’s Becoming an Accredited Eco-refurbisher course due to the environment and industry demand for speed and scale in tackling our leaking housing stock. The first speaker, Dr Paul Rainger from Forum for the Future, estimated the challenge - 7 million houses need to be refitted by 2020, which equates to 1,700 homes a day, or one a minute. Continue reading →

I can’t say I’ve been a huge fan of business networking site LinkedIn since its emergence as the leader in the field of Facebook for professionals. For me it was nothing more than a CV-uploading service, which in the past year has been particularly useful for those looking for new or alternative employment since the jobs market took a turn for the worse. Hence it was (and still is) crawling with recruitment consulants - not the most appetising of prospects. Barring that there was nothing very sticky about the site. That was until the groups area of the site started to explode. Now I’m nearly hooked - not Twitter-hooked, but at least to the point to clicking on to it most days. This is now largely because I have formed a new group, entitled Green Shoots in Construction?, which is tracking whether economic optimism for the industry is well founded.

Continue reading →

First in a series seeking free advice for my upcoming refurb project

So, about six weeks have passed since I moved into my Tooting pile, if that expression doesn’t sound somewhat inappropriate. A month and a half of doing the easy, if still sweat inducing, stuff. Pulling up, ripping or steaming off or smashing into smithereens. Yes a lot of this is quite fun. But things are about to get a bit harder. Plans to be considered and then decided, cold hard cash to be spent and a deadline of three to four months to be met. Yes we’re about to meet the inevitable crashing of dreams, ideas and nice notion into cold (yes it has been quite chilly in here) hard reality. That rather snazzy PV/ground source/solar thermal system is literally days away from being firmly crossed off the cost plan. Oh well, it was nice while it lasted. Continue reading →

Un-related sentences that have grabbed me:

How different this country is compared to 1946, when I first arrived here.. Politics mattered, the welfare state was invented.. the church was still strong. We were a very deferential society. There hierarchy and values and obedience. All that’s gone.. Politics is a public utility and a bit of a racket, the church has lost its authority. The monarchy is like a disfunctional family, a super-soap  opera. The tragedy is there is nothing left but consumerism and celebrity, that is all that gives us our values. But celebrity hasn’t been put under any stress… that’s the real problem. The British in the Second World War called on centuries of loyalty to the Crown and civic pride to stand against the Nazis. What would happen now? What do you do now - rush to your nearest retail park?

The late JG Ballard, interviewed on Radio Four’s Front Row programme, 2006

Continue reading →

I have something rather shocking to report. I went to see a dramatisation of climate change last week - a play called Resilience - which was eerily accurate, funny, pointed, powerful and moving. For me there’s always been a mixture of dread and guilt as one is presented with a documentary or fictional account of the issue. Al Gore served his purpose with An Inconvenient Truth but I’m loathe to sit through it again. Leonardo DiCaprio’s The 11th Hour was Gore-light with added disaster clichés (burning forests, ice sheets melting etc) that prompted boredom rather than a call to action . I admit to my shame not having caught The Age of Stupid, a film set in the future where humans are pilloried for not acting earlier as the true consequences of their inaction and folly are exposed. So playwright Steve Waters’ The Contingency Plan double bill at the Bush Theatre in West London had something of a point to prove. To walk the tightrope between drama and melodrama, to being informative in science and politics without shoving the writings of Monbiot or Lovelock down our throats. To entertain. He performed the balance brilliantly. Continue reading →

Third in a series of posts on the ambitious refurbishment of a Hackney Victorian house. This time it’s the turn of the builder Dave Manby to tell his side of the story.. after he recounts tales of white water rafting

Rowing the 18ft S.O.T.A.R raft through Granite rapid

Around two years ago my sister Bron and her partner Rob bought 89 Culford Road, and I was told I was going to do the building work on the house — once they had appointed an architect, decided just what they wanted to do with the house, decided how far to take the green refurbishment and sorted out the planning permission. In due time and without any real great haste as far as I could gather Bob Prewett was appointed as the architect and Bron and Rob instructed him on a “no compromise” refurbishment. Continue reading →

As technology continues to evolve and expand, for a content man such as myself it’s exciting to be presented with entirely new options for disseminating information. So it was with Sustainability Now, the virtual event I chaired earlier in the month. As with such ventures, and particularly in this case, one has to be flexible and philosophical. By that I mean ready to act at the last minute and have an acceptance that things may not happen quite as you expect. Or not at all. It was only really the evening before the show itself we had established it was possible to introduce a live video feed at the show. So the prospect of scripting our a carefully worded and thought-out message to the audience was not really an option.

Continue reading →

Less than a day to go until the Sustainability Now event. We’ve released an agenda for events that will take place, available on the Building site. I’m hoping for a mixture of free-form chat with more structured debates. Few things to highlight:

• Legislation - Pooran Desai makes a strong case for decluttering green legislation in a piece I commissioned for him specifically for the event. He wants simplicity rather than rafts of bureaucracy. I think it should spark a lively debate on whether the policy directions that have been set for the industry are the right ones. Continue reading →