Withington Co-operative Eco-house - ecogen

Spacetherm internal wall insulation (and a general update)

Robert — Fri, 20 Sep 2013 18:32:11 +0000

A while since the last entry... we've now taken delivery of £4,500-worth of Spacetherm, for internally insulating the front wall (see article for a more detailed description). As the delivery was on an 18-tonne truck, we had to decant it into my 3.5-tonne van in order to get as close as possible to the house. The contractors are using their joiner to fit the Spacetherm: a slightly curious choice, but makes sense given that there's some difficult angles around the bay windows, and cutting the stuff neatly will be half the battle.

The walls have been prepared now, and the actual fixing is due to get underway next week.

The plumbing is ongoing, with domestic hot and cold water and most of the waste pipes in now, we're moving on to the rainwater system and radiator circuits next week. Although the on-site work is progressing slowly, the bigger difficulty is that I've had to pretty much abandon the original idea of using a Baxi Ecogen MicroCHP unit in conjunction with a thermal store/buffer vessel. Although it's great in theory, the reality is that Baxi don't have a wide enough installer network for a one-off installation like ours to be achieved cost-effectively. So I am, reluctantly, looking at a condensing boiler system instead - will write more on this next week.

The plaster is pretty much dried out; the builders have fitted the new lintel over the front door, and the new kitchen door was delivered today; will be fitted next week.

United Utilities have promised us that they will be gone from outside the house by 2 October. Fingers crossed!

About road blocks, and burning gas

Robert — Mon, 19 Aug 2013 22:12:49 +0000

It's rather ironic given today's events in Balcombe that, as far as the Withington Co-operative Eco-house is concerned, roadblocks are bad news, and burning gas is good (well, less bad, at least).

Unitied Utilities have enlarged their fenced off area and moved about half their equipment into the new part; it remains to be seen whether they'll hit their latest self-imposed deadline of clearing the part in front of the house by the end of this week. I intend to get a clearer picture of this by the end of tomorrow. Back To Earth, the EWI supplier, are concerned about being able to gain access at the pre-agreed time, so to be on the safe side I have pushed back the EWI to September. As things stand though, the window delivery and fitting is still timetabled in for next week (and given the difficulties I've had with the window company, I really don't want to change this).

I've been to-ing and fro-ing with my contact at Baxi, regarding our proposed Ecogen installation. It seems that it is do-able, so I now need to get the company that will be doing the Ecogen install to agree to the specification from myself and Baxi - but my contact there is on holiday until next week.

It might seem paradoxical that burning gas is the most appropriate choice for an eco-house. I'll be writing a full article on this once the details are finalised, but in the meantime suffice to say that we did look into the issue, and gas-fired plant is very much the lesser of evils for a house of this type and location. What's actually more important than the choice of fuel is to minimise the amount of fuel burnt - hence the superinsulation. And according to our calculations, the size of boiler we need to heat our 6-person eco-house is smaller than what is typically installed into a one bed flat.

Speaking of which, the roof insulation is almost complete now, with Andrew on-site today and returning tomorrow to work with the builders to address a few detailing issues with the air-tightness tapes and sealing.

The challenges of a MicroCHP installation

Robert — Tue, 06 Aug 2013 22:41:13 +0000

Today I spoke to Newark Cylinders - a positive conversation, wherein I was told that they could build to order a bespoke thermal store copper cylinder to my specifications, and turn the order around within a week - and within my budget too!

Unfortunately, the conversation with Baxi regarding the Ecogen microCHP boiler didn't go quite so well. I'd spoken to someone from Baxi at Ecobuild earlier this year, explained to him what we wanted to do (ie run an Ecogen via a thermal store, so we could programme the CHP timing independently of the hot water and space heating demand), and he seemed to think this was all fine. Of course, it was just an initial conversation at that point. Now we're at the point of actually ordering one, I made a call to clarify some technical details, and was told by another Baxi representative that this type of installation was "not supported" (sounds like software, doesn't it?) and could quite possibly invalidate the warranty. I then tried to call the guy who I spoke to at the trade show (I still have his business card), but his voicemail indicated he's on holiday until next week.

I then re-investigated the only other microCHP option, Whispergen. E.On have the sole UK distrbution rights to this product (a factor that helped me in selecting the Ecogen previously), but there's little mention of it on their website. Some extensive Googling was required, eventually yielding a contact name and number - but the number didn't work. I tried an alternate number and eventually got through to this guy's voicemail; left a message.

So depending on what these two people say when they return my calls, the heating strategy for the Withington Co-operative Eco-house may be back on the drawing-board next week!

Meanwhile, some good progress with the PIR insulating on-site today.

Withington Co-operative Eco-house - ecogen

Spacetherm internal wall insulation (and a general update)

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About road blocks, and burning gas

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The challenges of a MicroCHP installation

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