Local businessman aims to create UK’s greenest house

A local business is aiming to build the most eco-friendly house in the country.

Freewatt’s Julian Patrick bought a 300-year-old Georgian stone house in Ingham village to transform into an energy-efficient home.

Currently, the house costs £12,000 a year to heat and power, and Patrick wants to reduce this by 80%.

The project has already gained interest from the likes of English Heritage and Lincolnshire County Council too.

The house will be filled with the latest technology, such as a computerised energy management system to switch appliances on and off, correlating when power is available from the solar panels.

Other parts of the project include:

• dig out existing earth-floors and re-lay with insulation and underfloor heating
• remove the roof and heavily insulate creating a warm-roof
• insulate walls internally where possible, draft proof windows and install some secondary glazing
• install a 25 kW solar array to generate electricity for use within the home and generate an income through the Feed In Tariff scheme that can offset other energy costs.
• equip the house with smart-energy systems designed to optimise energy from renewables when it is available. It will switch electrical loads on and off at times when electricity is generated from the solar PV array
• install a 50kW biomass boiler using locally sourced fuel or a 50kW heat pump array with ground source collectors to be laid in the adjoining paddock.
• mechanical ventilation and heat recovery, this will aid fresh air ventilation to improve energy efficiency and air quality, it will also help overcome any potential problems with damp caused by insulating and draft-proofing the house.
• low-energy lighting
• rain-water harvesting

Julian Patrick feels that while the project could cost him a large sum of money, the venture could demonstrate how to make old homes sustainable.

He said: “The objective is to help provide a blue-print for greening period-properties.

“There are thousands of beautiful period properties in the UK that must be preserved but they remain incredibly inefficient so are becoming financially unsustainable.

“Simple eco-measures applied in modern homes do not apply to period properties.

“Making a period property green is much more challenging and information on best-practice is harder to come by because there are so few examples in the UK.

“So we want to show, in practice, how this can be achieved and give people real examples of how even the oldest homes can be green, cost effective and sustainable and we are confident this will become the greenest period home in the UK.”

Once the project is complete, Patrick hopes to move his family into the house, and also do a few tours of the property.

“We are very much looking at this as a long term investment for the family. In reality the work will reap financial rewards within less than 10 years.” he added.

Source: Grubb Street Media