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
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