CC4201

COMMENT
Editor:
David Chadwick
(cad.user@btc.co.uk)
News Editor:
Mark Lyward
(mark.lyward@btc.co.uk)
Advertising Sales:
Josh Boulton
(josh.boulton@btc.co.uk)
Production Manager:
Abby Penn
(abby.penn@btc.co.uk)
Design/Layout:
Ian Collis
ian.collis@btc.co.uk
Circulation/Subscriptions:
Christina Willis
(christina.willis@btc.co.uk)
Publisher:
John Jageurs
john.jageurs@btc.co.uk
Published by Barrow &
Thompkins Connexion Ltd.
35 Station Square, Petts Wood,
Kent BR5 1LZ
Tel: +44 (0) 1689 616 000
Fax: +44 (0) 1689 82 66 22
SUBSCRIPTIONS:
UK £35/year, £60/two years,
£80/three years;
Europe:
£48/year, £85 two years,
£127/three years;
R.O.W. £62/year
£115/two years, £168/three years.
Single copies can be bought for £8.50
(includes postage & packaging).
Published 6 times a year.
© 2024 Barrow & Thompkins
Connexion Ltd.
All rights reserved.
No part of the magazine may be
reproduced, without prior consent
in writing, from the publisher
For more magazines from BTC, please visit:
www.btc.co.uk
Articles published reflect the opinions of
the authors and are not necessarily those
of the publisher or his employees. While
every reasonable effort is made to ensure
that the contents of editorial and advertising
are accurate, no responsibility can be
accepted by the publisher for errors, misrepresentations
or any resulting effects
Comment
The costs of sustainability
by David Chadwick
Iam sure you already know about the
ongoing consultation on improving
energy efficiency and reducing carbon
emissions of new homes and nondomestic
buildings, and inevitable
changes to Part L (Conservation of Fuel
and Power) and Part 6 of the Building
Regulations 2010 ("the Building
Regulations") as the government sets out
Future Homes and Buildings Standards.
Various organisations within the industry
are weighing in with their take on the subject,
the most interesting of them about solar
panels. The National Federation of Builders
stated recently that if they are merely an addon,
instead of being installed during
construction, then they are an extremely
expensive proposition compared to other
sustainable measures such as building
warmer and draught-free houses, and wider
use of heat pumps. The UK Green Building
Council also argues that it is unconscionable
that the UK government is considering
scrapping the need for new roofs to have
solar panels, opting instead for 'the least
ambitious option possible'.
Thankfully, various schemes already
underway are pioneering more sustainable
building methods - one of them local to me,
where the council is building a small
development of council houses with solar
panels as an integral part of the roof, installed
with heat pumps and using more efficient
Porotherm multi-cellular clay blocks instead of
traditional bricks or concrete blocks, enabling
builders to dispense with cavity walls.
I spoke to the builders behind the project -
which can't be named yet, the council being
shy about unofficial publicity. They said that
the solar panels required specialised installers
while the rest of the roof used traditional
roofing subcontractors, and the Porotherm
blocks weren't up to their normal standard, so
were supplemented with internal insulation -
pointing to the use of building performance
calculations to enable the project to comply
with the government's required decrease in
embedded carbon. They also told me that
heat pumps are considerably more expensive
to buy and install than gas-fired boilers and
were rather impractical if the buildings aren't
well enough insulated.
And then we have Part L Photographic
Evidence requirements, whereby project
managers need to produce compliant and
well organised photographic proof throughout
a construction to assure that it also meets the
required building standards, as detailed in the
case study from Zutec in this issue.
The inevitable result is that construction
projects are become more complex, and
therefore expensive. Should the need for
substantially increased house building ever
be met, the complexity and costs will
increase. The demand for sustainable
building materials will become critical -
Porotherm is made in Germany and shipped
to suppliers in this country, for instance - with
scarcities and competition from ecoconscious
builders throughout Europe. We
will need more heat pumps and engineers
who can install them, and to find and employ
higher skilled workers from a shrinking pool,
and as a sideline use improved building
performance and related software to comply
with the new standards.
Construction management software
therefore needs to be equally adept and
flexible enough to react rapidly in finding and
choosing alternative suppliers, calculating the
cost of late deliveries and fluctuating prices,
regulating the workforce and so much more.
With such a dramatic increase in the
complexity of even small housebuilding
projects, you need to use an integrated
single source of truth like the Access COINS
ERP system, built specifically for the
construction industry. And to maintain proper
records of the photos you take during
construction, you can use Zutec's Part L
Photographic Evidence suite within their
Quality Management solution.
4 January/February 2023