Refurb Projects interviews Grand Designs Kevin McCloud

Refurb Projects: How important is Energy Efficiency in the build environment?

Kevin McCloud: ” Hugely. For every tonne of cement, a tonne of carbon dioxide is produced. It’s immensely important if you ever build anything. Buildings gobble up materials and resources in vast quantities. You find newfound respect for the value of resources, add to that, they say that on most building sites that for every 3 houses that are built the 4th one goes into the skip. We don’t manage waste well in construction. It therefore behoves us to design buildings with the lowest possible carbon and resource impact and to build homes which have the lowest possible carbon and resource use, so a house which doesn’t gobble energy, but instead generates energy, which recycles its rainwater or grey water, these are things which if you are approaching a new build are absolutely no-brainers.

With existing buildings, they’re harder to get right.  Nevertheless, there are technologies that with thought and care, and a little expense can minimise our own carbon footprint through to the resources that we put into our homes.  Half of our environmental impact comes as a result of driving cars around and the other half is heating water and heating space. If you think about the way that you heat a building, they then cool down not because it disappears, it doesn’t vanish, it leaves through the walls and windows, through the gaps, and it heats the air above our homes. It seems to be a remarkably foolish and expensive thing to carry on heating air when we could be building and retrofitting our home to make them comfortable with a minimal carbon impact”.

Refurb Projects: What are your favourite solutions to these problems that we will see at this years Grand Designs Live?

Kevin McCloud: “As you are probably aware, we have always split the exhibition into a number of shows, so Kitchens & Bathrooms, Gardens, Interiors, Build, Design Arcade and Technology, and its the Technology sector that has moved over the past ten years from being very much about about hi-fi and lighting systems to where we are now,  where you can buy all kinds of clever ways to monitor and control your energy consumption and your space heating. I think that the Tech side of a building has really come on leaps and bounds in the last four or five years. We have a ‘Tech Trail’ around the exhibition which you can take, where there is conceptual Lighting through to Energy Management through to Security to Building Management – a Trail through all the elements of the Tech show.  Also you’ll also find all the latest innovators in solar and renewables, rainwater storage, resource management systems as well – its diverse”.

Refurb Projects: Is there a trepidation on the part of consumers (home builders or renovators) at the moment because of competing formats presented by the Tech companies? I’m thinking as an example Apple’s ‘HomeKit’ vs Google’s ‘Home’.

Kevin McCloud: “I’m a big fan of keeping things really simple and really easy to understand, and buying products that you get out of the box, you plug in – they light up, they start themselves, say “hello” and away you go. There’s a new breed of products; Thermostat Controls, Air Quality Monitors etc, that are really simple to use devices which cost £100 or £150, and these are the “Internet of Things” that we are beginning to see emerge, that are smaller, that speak to each other, and aren’t part of some hugely overburdening, complex, wired system with a big server in a room somewhere, (which frankly I’ve seen enough of over the years) and this approach is much simpler, and much easier for people to understand and to buy into.

We’re not far off of the fridge freezer which monitors its contents and orders replacements from the supermarket AND at the same time checks the energy level of the grid and makes sure its using as much off-peak cheap electricity as possible in order to minimise peaks times.

That’s just one example – its already happening.  The Powerwall from Tesla, who are incidentally sponsoring part of the show this year, it’s exactly that kind of technology that will take energy either from the mains when its cheapest at night, or taking solar energy from rooftops and storing it, monitoring the grid and intelligently adapting its own behaviour for more efficiency – that’s the next ‘Big Thing’ I think to hit our lives. Our cookers, our fridges and our freezers will have the potential to do this. Rather than becoming the big, clumsy drinkers of fossil fuel to become ‘lean sippers’ without us becoming too involved”.