Why aren't more people building like this...

Another article in the star, about better designed houses to reduce the need for air-conditioning, even on the hottest days.

One of which refers to passive cooling, quite a few different people advertising this when you google it - another similar term is passive solar gain. The theory is that you use a bit of common sense in the design of your house - seems a bit of a luxury in most mass builds. So you get the warmth of the sun in the winter months, and block it out in the summer, also using shade, movement of air to exhaust the hot air, and circulate cool air. We first saw this in the BedZed carbon neutral development in the UK.

Home efficiency show

Just looking through a really good write-up on the show last week in BD architects review of the BRE Offsite - as below. There are also some presentations available from BRE which look interesting - you need to sign in with an email address.

Whilst reading the BD article, I found myself looking up the following:

• The UK/British governments "code for sustainable homes" referred to in the article (wonder if there is a North American version of this). Seems to be quite a bit of info (for a change with government docs - why would you use a table instead of random progressive number series)... level 6 is essentially carbon neutral... Date 2010, 25% carbon reduction - level3; 2013, 40% carbon reduction - level4; 2016 - carbon neutral - level6. Energy/carbon improvement as compared to Part L (Building Regulations 2006).
• U-value - from a diypage, wikipedia - "Simply put, it is the number of watts that will be lost per square metre, at a given temperature difference in kelvin. For a simple example, if the interior of your home is at 20 °C, and the roof cavity is at 10 °C, that gives a temperature difference of 10 K. Assuming a ceiling insulated to R–2, energy will be lost at a rate of 10 K / 2 K·m²/W = 5 watts for every square metre of ceiling." or 0.5 U in this case.... So the examples for these houses of 0.15W per sq m looks pretty good.
• Heat exchange - stack effect
  
• solar gain
• passive ventilation
  
• Du Pont’s innovative Energain phase change panel
• rainwater harvesting and greywater recycling