“You still need to put electricity into it, but it’s really efficient,” says Perring, “so with every unit of electricity you put into it, you get about four out of it.” The space and water heating are via a ground-source heat pump, which uses a heat exchanger to take energy from the ground.
The fact that it was only slightly cooler inside than we wanted it to be, even on the frost setting, was incredible.” It turned out our thermostat was on the frost setting. This was a significant investment (triple-glazing can cost up to 20 per cent more than double-glazing), but, says Raine, “it really does make a difference”.Ĭharlotte agrees: “During our first winter here, it snowed at one point and I said to Graham that I thought it felt a little bit on the chilly side in the house.
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The couple are now paying about 80 per cent less on energy bills than they were in their former home, which Charlotte attributes in large part to the efficient insulation installed in the house, and the fact that the windows are triple-glazed. “Nobody should be using air conditioning.” Passive ventilation via high-level windows, which the Thompsons usually have open, also helps to cool the house in the warmer months: “In the summer, with the doors open onto the terrace and the high windows open at the back, you get this lovely cool breeze coming through the house, which works really well,” says Perring. “A lot of people say it looks quite Frank Lloyd Wright,” says Perring, referring to the American architect whose Prairie Style buildings featured flat roofs and overhanging eaves, “but what it’s actually doing is shading the windows in the summer, when the sun is higher in the sky, while allowing it in to warm the house in winter, when the angle of the sun is a lot lower in the sky.” To help keep the house cool in the summer, they designed an overhang that runs around the building’s exterior. There’s much less fluctuation in temperature, so you’ve got a very comfortable internal environment and you don’t need to boost the heating in the evening, which is really energy intensive.”
“A lightweight building, such as one with a timber frame, will heat up and cool down very quickly,” says Perring, “whereas a house with thermal mass, made from concrete or brick, will absorb the sun’s energy during the day and, when the temperature drops at night, release the energy back out. In the case of this house, they chose materials specifically to meet those requirements, with a brick exterior and plenty of exposed brickwork on the inside, too. “It’s about clever design: maximising the solar gain in winter and minimising it in summer, and making the envelope of the house work really hard for you.” “We always work from a fabric-first approach, making the envelope of the building as energy-efficient as we can,” says Perring. They engaged Wendy Perring and Collette Raine of PAD Studio because of their knowledge of the local area and its planning laws, and their experience in designing energy-efficient buildings. So they came to the decision to build a new, three-bedroom home on the footprint of a red-brick cottage that stood in the grounds of their house, borrowing against the house to fund the project. Wanting to stay in the area, they set about looking for a house but “couldn’t find anything that floated our boat”. We wanted a home that would rest very lightly on the land, both from an environmental and a financial point of view.” “Even with children and grandchildren visiting, it felt wrong for us to carry on living somewhere that needed a family in it. “We’d lived there for 26 years it was where we brought up our children, and we loved it very much, but it was just getting too big for us,” she says. Compounded by rising prices on everything from groceries and fuel to furniture, this has created a perfect storm when it comes to household finances.īut there are ways to reduce energy usage and cut down significantly on the cost of running your home, such as using more energy-efficient appliances, or installing devices such as heat pumps and solar panels to transform the way you power your home.įor Charlotte Thompson and her husband Graham, living a more energy-efficient lifestyle was key to their decision to downsize from their six-bedroom family home in the New Forest six years ago. The energy price cap went up by 54 per cent at the beginning of this month, adding hundreds of pounds to the annual energy bills of the average household. As the cost-of-living crisis begins to bite, never has the need to create more energy-efficient, sustainable homes been more urgent.
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