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A Green Barratt Home? (It's True)

18 May 2008 by evinson

‘Barratt’ may have become a by-word for bland, anodyne, suburban development but the housebuilding company is claiming to be at the forefront of the coming zero-carbon housing boom.

This week they unveiled what they say is the UK’s first first zero-carbon house from ‘a volume house builder’. It’s got solar panels, rain water harvesting and an air-source heat pump. A special concrete for the walls and floors, plus mega-insulation and triple-glazed windows means you won’t need much heating – and when you do the fresh air that enters the house through a heat exchanger will transfer the heat from the outgoing stale air and put it back into the house. Your loos are flushed thanks to the rainwater harvesting system.

The Barratt eco-house uses no gas and the air-source heat pump is powered by electricity produced over the year by the solar photovoltaics on the roof. Hot water comes mainly from a solar thermal panel on the roof, backed up in winter by the heat pump. Automatic shutters slide across the windows to prevent the house getting too hot in the summer, although you can manually override them.

Andrew Sutton from the architects Gaunt Francis which designed the house, told The Guardian that the heavy use of concrete released some carbon in its manufacture, but gave the houses excellent “thermal mass” and would last well over a hundred years, meaning the building’s lifetime carbon footprint would be extremely low.

House builders in the UK will be forced by government legislation to build only zero-carbon houses from 2016 onwards but, given the long lead times in the industry, they are already trying to meet that target.Barratt plans to roll out 200 zero-carbon homes on the site of Hanham Hall hospital near Bristol – ready to move into by 2011.

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