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Barratt Build Green Show Homes

Posted: 26/06/2006

Barratt has unveiled a cluster of new homes packed with the latest in energy-efficient and 'green' technologies. Said to be the first project of its kind by a major UK housebuilder, Barratt's EcoSmart Show Village at Chorley, Lancashire, comprises seven family houses using various combinations of wind, solar and geothermal power as well as micro Combined Heat and Power (CHP) units, and a host of environmentally-friendly features such as rainwater harvesting and energy-saving measures.

The homes will now spend up to 18 months being independently assessed by the University of Manchester, while the EcoSmart Village as a whole will be open to homebuyers, schools and others who are interested in seeing how Britain’s leading large-scale housebuilder is confronting the challenge of climate change.

As test-bed properties, the houses will not be sold until after the assessment period, although experts already predict that – when compared to traditionally-powered homes – harmful carbon emissions from the seven homes could be reduced by over 16 tonnes per year and annual fuel bills cut by up to a third.

Barratt Group Chief Executive David Pretty said: “Energy underpins every aspect of our day-to-day lives and our economy, but there is now consensus that climate change is real and poses a serious threat to our world.

“The key issue for us, is how to harness renewable energy as effectively as possible. Our EcoSmart Show Village will help us assess and evaluate a wide range of state-of-the-art technologies in a variety of permutations.

“Everyone is attracted to green features but there’s very little information available about the actual costs and benefits involved in buying and installing them in conventional housing. The show village will enable us to accurately assess those costs and benefits and also find out what potential homebuyers really think. The challenge for us is to find out which environmental features we can incorporate in future and continue to keep our homes affordable for our buyers.

“Our partners at Manchester University will examine how much each energy-saving or ‘green’ feature costs to install, what exactly it can and cannot do, what combinations work best, what they will save in terms of carbon emissions and other waste, and what cost savings householders might expect to make as a result of living with them. We already have predictive models, but I expect a few surprises and challenges.”

He added: “As we currently build almost 15,000 homes a year, the sustainability lessons from EcoSmart will be important, and the potential immense.”

Monitoring of the Barratt EcoSmart Show Village will be led by Dr Tony Sung, Chairman of CIBSE Electrical Services Group, Lecturer at the School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering, University of Manchester. The team’s findings will be published for the benefit of homebuyers and the housebuilding industry as a whole.

And while the homes will not be lived in, they will be in constant use. The EcoSmart Show Village will be open to the public throughout the trial period, and schools, colleges and other groups will be welcomed by arrangement.

The EcoSmart Show Village has been built on land set aside at award-winning Buckshaw Village, a large and highly-successful new homes project already well advanced on a former Ministry of Defence site near Chorley. The seven EcoSmart homes are all built to traditional family house designs, ranging from a typical first-time buyers’ 2-bedroom terraced/semi-detached house to a large, detached 5-bedroom family property.

Said David Pretty: “This was a deliberate choice. We could have chosen to build really futuristic designs, but we were keen to show that environmental measures can be accommodated in conventional housing still strongly favoured by the majority of British homebuyers.”

Across the seven houses, the various permutations of environmentally-friendly measures include renewable energy from wind turbines, photovoltaics, solar thermal collectors, and geo-thermal ground sources, plus water harvesting and a wide range of eco-rated building products and methods.

Gardens include cycle storage and recycling bins, and measures to encourage biodiversity such as nesting boxes and wildlife habitats.

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