Poor-quality construction and design detailing is leading to an unacceptable energy performance in new homes that could undermine the Green Deal, a leading academic is warning.
Professor Chris Gorse, director of the Leeds Sustainability Institute, based at Leeds Metropolitan University, is one of the authors of soon to be published research paper, which shows some new homes are losing twice as much heat than they are designed to.
The performance gap is irrespective of what level of energy efficiency the homes were built to or what style of home they are. Whether the homes matched their specifications tended to come down to the material selection, quality of detailing and management of the construction process, said Professor Gorse.
The university has measured the energy loss of 29 new homes built to the 2002, 2006, 2010 Building Regulations, the Code for Sustainable Homes level 3 and 4, passive house and other enhanced performance standards.
The paper, Building Confidence, is a joint venture with Carbon Futures – an initiative between the universities of Sheffield, Hull, York and Leeds – to provide an overview of buildings that performed well and those that did not. Gorse hopes this will act as a catalyst for the construction industry to ensure it constructs buildings that perform well.
Gorse, a member of CIOB Research and Innovation Panel, said the performance of some new homes was often “way off target”. “We can’t allow that to happen,” he said. “If there’s no confidence we can build homes that perform as they are meant to, what confidence can we have that the Green Deal will work?”
The government’s flagship energy policy is to be launched in October. It follows a so-called golden rule where households make energy efficiency improvements to their homes that are paid for over a number of years on the back of saving in energy bills. The paper builds on an earlier collaboration with the Zero Carbon Hub and work from Professor Malcolm Bell that first highlighted the energy performance gap.
Leeds Metropolitan University research has pinpointed common problems: cold bridging; vapour barriers poorly fitted; loosely packed insulation allowing heat to flow through fabric. “Some homes are hitting the mark so we can get it right. In these instances the Green Deal would work. We need to identify the good practice and builders that deliver buildings that perform, and learn from them. We need to start to think carefully about the way we sequence work on sites – all too often we’re putting holes in the fabric and making ad hoc decisions that are building in thermal defects,” he said.
Communities minister Andrew Stunell branded UK housing a “joke” due to the construction industry’s failure to build houses to design specification.
Speaking at a seminar at the Ecobuild conference in London last month, Stunell compared UK housebuilding with the British car industry of 20 years ago.
New houses were “leaving the factory broken”, he said. He called on the building industry to adopt a more Rolls Royce approach to quality.
