Posts Tagged ‘existing stock’

Spring is here. Time to get over our post-Copenhagen hangovers and kick back into action. Ecobuild starts today and, more significantly we have the introduction of the Pay as You Save policy by the Government. I’ve only seen early new reports on this, such as in the Telegraph, so we’ll have to see the detail. [...]

In a recent post I rather jokingly referred to my chilly house with no central heating. It’s all very well for me making gags about wearing slankets but for some the situation is entirely more sobering and uncomfortable. Holly Billen, an eight-month pregnant 26-year-old who lives in Wiltshire and features in today’s Guardian, is having [...]

Guest blog by Robert Cohen, technical director at Camco, who is undertaking an ambitious green refurbishment project in east London. Here he reveals some numbers on the performance of the house and the long painful process in achieveing and measuring air tightness
In my first blog in this series (January this year), our project was on [...]

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 [...]

Expecting what appears an increasingly worn-out government to tackle what amounts to a fundamental shift in policy and approach to our built environment is too much to ask. The piffling amounts offer by penniless Alistair Darling to address existing properties is pathetic. It’s not even clear quite how much was actually on offer – Building [...]

One of the most intriguing sessions at last week’s Ecobuild event was a debate on the fate of the Robin Hood Gardens on the Wednesday. This East London council estate, designed by Alison Peter and Smithson and completed in 1972, has attracted plenty of attention since a very well publicised BD campaign to list [...]

Guest post from Robert Prewett at architect Prewett Bizley, who is designing the eco-refurbishment of a Victorian house which featured in a previous post in January

In around six months time, works to a Victorian terrace house in Hackney will be complete. Though a modest project in terms of scale, it’s an exciting one for [...]

Just had a quick spin through the Tories energy policy paper. Lots of sensible ideas – decentralising energy supply, expanding EPCs and DECs to more buildings, feed-in tariffs, existing stock ideas etc etc. Cameron speaks about them below, believing that being Conservative and green are not mutually exclusive. And there’s a webchat tomorrow you can [...]

Guest post by Robert Cohen, technical director at Camco, who is carrying out an exemplar low energy refurbishment in Hackney

We didn’t anticipate it being easy, but 20 months after completing the purchase of our dream home cum exemplar low energy project, we had expected to have achieved more than the demolition of two small shed-like [...]

To the Design Museum yesterday to chair a conference entitled Retrofitting & Energy Management. I was given a matter of days to prepare for this so was rather relieved that the whole thing went pretty smoothly. The presentations and ensuing discussions on what and how to address energy use in our existing stock could be [...]