BRE’s unveils £75,000 ‘Level 4’ sustainable home

The Renewable House, which is currently under construction for launch at BRE’s INSITE09 exhibition in June, costs £75,000 to build, excluding groundworks, and meets Level 4 of the Code for Sustainable Homes through the materials it uses.

BRE said the scheme would demonstrate that mainstream affordable homes can be constructed from renewable materials and would provide a solution to the Government’s aim of building 250,000 sustainable, affordable homes in the UK.

The key sustainable building material being used in The Renewable House is a thermal hemp-lime walling solution called Hemcrete, which absorbs carbon from the atmosphere making it 'carbon negative'.
 
The material has been around for a number of years and is produced in the UK by a company called Lime Technology. It was recently used in a housing development of 26 affordable homes in Suffolk, Clay Fields, where it was sprayed onto the walls. In this case, it is estimated it will enable the 'locking up' of around 65 tonnes of carbon dioxide, because the C02 captured during the rapid growth of hemp has been locked into the fabric of the buildings constructed.

Other green materials being used in the design and build of The Sustainable House include a timber frame, high performance triple glazed timber windows, a heat recovery ventilation system, an air source heat pump and an underfloor heating system.

While these components will enable The Sustainable House to meet Level 4 of the Code for Sustainable Homes, the design of the house enables the easy enhancement to meet Levels 5 and 6 – a big step towards meeting the Government’s target to make all new UK homes reach Level 6 by 2016, said BRE.

The National Non-Food Crops Centre (NNFCC) is delivering the project, which was unveiled at the EcoBuild exhibition in London this week, with funding from the Department of Energy and Climate Change.

“The construction industry faces challenging times; new homes must be built but at low cost and low carbon footprint,” said Dr John Williams of the NNFCC. “This house will show how innovation in the UK construction industry can meet all these aims by using renewable materials. What’s more we can grow the crops here. If just one per cent of the UK’s agricultural land was used to grow hemp, it would be enough to build our entire target of 180,000 homes per year.”

The Linford Group is managing the design development and construction, working with design partners Empyer Homes and Archial Architects.

Once completed the house’s performance will be monitored over a three-year period in order to establish evidence of the performance characteristics and the sustainability profile of renewable building materials, said BRE.

Last month, designers unveiled a zero carbon housing project in Kent, which is designed around one large vault spanning 20 metres dating from Medieval architecture. Its designers, based at the University of Cambridge, claim that its low-cost design means it could also potentially deliver affordable zero carbon homes for the UK low-cost housing market.