This is what you get when one of Ireland’s most experienced low energy builders creates a home for his own family, with help from one of the country’s foremost ecological architects — a modern and elegant passive house that pays detailed attention to sustainability at every turn.
In the summer of 2015, Cheryl Hitchcock and Dudley Thompson moved from an energy-hogging Victorian home into a new timber frame passive house in Cumbria’s Eden Valley. Below, they give a frank account of what their first year and a half in their new home has been like — and reveal how shockingly low their energy bills are.
The default answer when you want to do pretty much anything to a listed building is ‘no’. The default assumption if you want to achieve the Enerphit standard for retrofit is ‘tackle everything’. So how on earth do you retrofit a listed building to within a whisker of the Enerphit standard — with the blessing of the conservation officer?
A brand new passive-certified nursery at the University of Aberdeen provides the children of staff and students with a bright, warm and healthy space for learning and playing.