Mark Brinkley (aka House 2.0)

Should we re-nationalise the utility companies?

2012-05-18T11:04:00.000+01:00

I've done the conservatory tax to death. On its own, it's perhaps not the biggest of stories and doesn't rate more than a footnote in the annals of the political machinations of the Coalition. But the problem is that it's not on its own. It's symptomatic of a whole raft of fudged decisions and misunderstanding which are beginning to taste of a deep rooted crisis in our energy policies. On the

Conservatory Tax: what happens next?

2012-04-20T12:58:00.000+01:00

The press story about the Conservatory Tax seems to have died down. It was perhaps a ten day wonder and it appears to be game set and match to the Daily Mail. There may be a few further rumbles along the way, but the way press fever works in this country there is a good chance that none of the Sunday's will run with it and by this time next week everyone will have forgotten about it and will be

Conservatory Tax: Day 10, the plot thickens

2012-04-18T23:02:00.006+01:00

The Conservatory Tax story broke on Easter Monday in the Daily Mail. That's 10 days ago. If you need to catch up, check out the last three blog posts on this site. By the weekend, both the Mail and the Telegraph were full of rumours of a "large Tory revolt" against Part L's consequential improvement proposals. No one was directly quoted. Then on Monday 16 April, exactly one week after the

The Case for Consequential Improvements

2012-04-17T06:28:00.003+01:00

From the debate so far, you'd think that consequential improvements were designed purely and simply to get up the noses of aspirational, squeezed-middle, Daily Mail reading home improvers. They weren't. There is a good case for them and it's not being heard. At the heart of the matter is the question of energy saving and the law of diminishing returns. It states that the first inch of so of

The Green Conservatory Tax: Part 2

2012-04-16T09:21:00.002+01:00

It's been an interesting few days since the Daily Mail "broke" the story of the "Green Conservatory Tax" a week ago. The right wing press has laid into the story with predictable glee, having discovered yet another front on which to wage war with the green conspiracy. The Green Deal has also come under fire and the Telegraph in particular is keen to promote the idea that there is now a split

On the "Green Tax on Conservatories"

2012-04-11T09:29:00.004+01:00

Consultations on Part L, the Energy Efficiency Regs for England & Wales, don't normally gather much in the way of newspaper coverage. They are very technical, very nerdy and usually only read by people within the industry. Just about the most contentious issue for Part L for the past two iterations has been whether or not to include so-called consequential improvements which would require

The Future of Heating?

2012-04-03T21:29:00.002+01:00

DECC (the Department of Energy and Climate Change) have published a document called The Future of Heating. It's what you might call a partial roadmap (yes, another one) describing how we might heat our homes and fire up what's left of our industry by 2050. I've spent a day immersed in it and have come away with some strange feelings. It strikes me as a very strange document. It wings its way

Coming to Terms with the N word

2012-03-13T22:29:00.001Z

N is for nuclear. Press that button and it changes everything. You enter a possible age of abundance and everything you have previously held dear becomes vaguely pointless. I suddenly feel myself turning a very pale green indeed, a milky eau-de-nil at best. And I wonder whether the main gist of what I have been writing about for the past twenty years has any relevance anymore. It all comes

Middle class paint

2012-02-20T11:14:00.007Z

Great article here by Amie Tsang in the weekend's FT on Heritage Paints. It all started when Farrow & Ball launched a National Trust range in 1991. F&B have grown from strength to strength on the back of this and last year had a turnover of £42m, and they now export to France, USA, Germany and Holland. Then along came Patrick Baty who runs Paper & Paints and who started Little Greene, a me-too

Pathways to Darkness?

2012-02-16T09:50:00.012Z

My interest in the energy debate knows no bounds. I have recently dedicated at least four lengthy train journeys, pouring over my trusty iPad, to reading two newly published pathways and trying to make sense of them. I feel I deserve a medal. This stuff is not easy going and, as I look around the carriage at other people reading novels or magazines, or staring vacantly at the passing countryside

Problems with cavity wall insulation

2012-02-13T13:44:00.001Z

One of the first blog pieces I ever wrote, in November 2005, concerned cavity wall insulation (CWI), and examined the likelihood of there being problems. At that time, my blog got published in two different places which wasn't the cleverest idea I ever came up with as my own blog piece on this topic never got a single comment, whereas the other one gleaned no less than 85. If you Google cavity

2050 calculator: the limits of arithmetic exposed

2012-01-31T11:12:00.002Z

Regular readers will be aware of Prof David Mackay and his book Sustainability Without the Hot Air, which was published to rave reviews at 2008. It's also available free online as a pdf. In it, he runs through the numbers needed to get the UK off fossil fuel and in one chapter (27) he outlines five different plans which would enable us to do this. Now, David is very careful not to stick his

HS2: bonkers?

2012-01-10T18:23:00.002Z

I've just been listening to Transport Minister Justine Greening announcing the go-ahead for HS2, the high speed line to connect London with Brum, Manchester and Leeds. She's sounded so upbeat, so full of promise. But every time I hear about this project, my own heart sinks. There have been hundreds of thousands of words expended on this subject already, mostly by people with a far better grasp on

The God Species

2012-01-09T11:56:00.000Z

Mark Lynas has a not-so-new book out, the God Species, and I've been taking post-Xmas read. Lynas is now identified as one of the leaders of the new wave of techno-greens who have turned their backs on traditional environmental thinking and embraced science and technology as the way forward. Bring on more nukes, lots of them please, and don't get hung up about GM foods or, for that matter,

How accurate are QSs?

2011-12-15T13:29:00.000Z

Mark, I have a number of editions of your book and am now on the brink of my first self build. We have planning permission and detailed designs, and have had a couple of builders tender for the work, which was a condition from the bank in order that they would fund the project. However the costs are more expensive than I planned (surprise surprise I hear you say), and when I costed some of the

Are empty homes really a scandal?

2011-12-09T10:54:00.003Z

This week we've been treated to a new housing campaign, launched on Channel 4. The problem — no, let's get this in perspective — the scandal of empty homes. George Clarke has been bestriding our screens examining what has been going down. From the bits I've seen, he has mostly been laying into the now discredited Pathfinder Policy of the last government, which sought to rip up old terraced

Does Passiv mean Massive?

2011-11-14T12:54:00.000Z

Ken Neal makes some interesting points on my last but one post. • I do prefer to design passive houses rather than a PassivHaus, which are really active houses with all the kit and controls required. I do use and agree with all the standards, especially the airtightness but prefer to use passive stack ventilation. The additional heating load is about 1kW on a reasonably sized house which can be

Half FIT

2011-11-01T22:28:00.004Z

One morning two weeks ago, I was awoken by some banging coming from a neighbour's roof. Draw back curtains and, lo and behold, across the street, some guys are up on the roof, seating some PV panels. Now this is a street running North-South, which means the panels are facing due east, so the amount of power they will create will be well down on their designed output. To me, this was a sure fire

On 2011 UK Passivhaus Conference

2011-10-27T10:49:00.001+01:00

Monday and Tuesday this week saw me at the 2nd UK Passivhaus Conference at the Barbican Centre in London. There were around 250 attendees consisting of a fair smattering of old AECB-heads, a fair few BRE types, a sprinkling of academics and a good gaggle of "people who had come to learn." Consequently, the conversations ranged from the basic "This is what a Passivhaus is" through to the arcana

Brownfields, no gardens

2011-10-03T09:57:00.001+01:00

Last Wednesday evening (actually Sep 21, the day before I locked horns with the National Trust), I attended a talk put on by Cambridge Architectural Research and presented by David Birkbeck, who runs Design for Homes, and, incidentally, someone I have known for many years, having once written for Building Homes which David once edited. David is also a selfbuilder and I have written about his

The National Trust plays its hand

2011-09-29T10:53:00.000+01:00

Following on from last week's blogger's briefing, The National Trust has now published its promised Planning for People manifesto which sets out an alternative vision for NPPF. I wish I had had this to hand before attending their meeting because they all knew what was in it and I was shooting in the dark. First of all it's short. Even shorter than the NPPF (which if nothing else is winning

Is NPPF really a "developer's charter?"

2011-09-26T11:01:00.010+01:00

On Thursday, I was invited to a blogger's briefing the offices of the National Trust in London, from where they are masterminding the campaign against the government's planning reforms. I'd never been to a blogger's briefing before and I was curious enough to take the bait. "It's Day 57 of our campaign and we've only failed to get on the front page of a national daily twice" announced Andrew

The Portuguese Approach to Planning

2011-09-09T10:58:00.004+01:00

I've just returned from a week in Portugal, staying with friends in a piece of the Western Algarve which has seen a lot of haphazard development over the past twenty years. It's pertinent to our ongoing debate about NPPF because the Algarve is a good example of what the National Trust/CPRE fear might happen to England if the new planning regime comes into force. It's not that there is no

Cash for Sprawl

2011-08-16T07:56:00.004+01:00

I last wrote about the Green Belt on June 2nd, before the Draft National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) had been published. I identified it then as a very Tory problem because the Tories in the government want it loosened, whilst the Tories in the shire counties want it maintained - strengthened even. The NPPF appeared at the end of July, and most of the mainstream press coverage since then

Confusion over roofing underlays

2011-08-10T10:26:00.004+01:00

Back in the 1980s when I was working as a general builder, if we had a re-roofing job we always used a product called Zylex, a bitumen roofing felt produced by Ruberoid. It was heavy, came in 16m rolls and above all it was cheap. I can remember the first time I ever saw Tyvek which was said to be the future. Tyvek was that magic thing, a vapour permeable underlay (VPU), which would allow roofs to