moderne heizkörper im wohnzimmer
this is a normal british terraced house. it was built around the turn of the 20th century out of bricks, mortar and a lot of manuallabour. kitchen, living room and a set of stairs inthe middle that lead up to two bedrooms and a bathroom. and although the exact details might be different, about one in five houses in britain look roughlylike this, all built in a row. the trouble is, houses like this weren’tbuilt to save energy
or to keep the heat in on a cold winter’sday. energy efficiency wasn’t really a thinga century ago and while there are all sorts of plans tomodernise and retrofit houses: how do you know which plans will work? how do you do a controlled experiment when every house is different and the weatherconstantly changes? it would be great if you could just, you know... tell the sun what to do. we are in the salford energy house
which is the only whole building in a climatecontrolled chamber. the idea really was to take a victorian house and look at different ways that we can makeit more energy efficient. when you test something on its own, like aboiler, you sit it in a lab and you test it and itwill be x% efficient. when you actually put that in a whole houseor a whole system it then interacts with all sorts of otherthings like the fabric, the radiators, the controls, so understanding how things fit together asa whole house
is really, really important. this isn’t some close approximation of anold terraced house made with modern techniques. this was a genuine end of terrace house fromout in manchester. it was taken apart and then rebuilt pieceby piece here in an environmental test chamber at the universityof salford. we had to get a bricklayer, the bricklayerwas like 70 years old, because actually the way that the bricks werelaid in victorian times, nobody does it like that anymore. he said he'd not laid bricks like that sincehe was a trainee.
we’ve got, i would say, hundreds of sensors. every single appliance is monitored individually. what we can do here is also simulate humanactivity. we have actuators, so robotic arms which will replicate the opening and closingof doors, fridges, windows. we can turn appliances on and off. here we control the weather. we have a space next door with a big watertank and there are layers of piping that run round
that will push rain onto the side of the building because rain never falls down, it always comessideways. and then we also have a snow machine, and we also have wind machines, and we have a lighting system. so that’s just radiant heating lamps connectedto a theatre lighting control system so the sun can pass round the building. all of those things can make a huge differenceto the way a building performs. the first really big test we did, which wasa whole house retrofit,
we attached wall insulation, we improved thedoors and the windows and we improved the floor and we reduced the heating energy by morethan 60%. there’s always a trade off with experimentslike this. yes, heating and cooling a large building that is inside another building is not massively energy efficient in itself, but compared to other industrial processes, it’s not that bad.
and if spending a little energy here savesa lot elsewhere, well that’s probably worth it. thank you very much to everyone at the energyhouse and the university of salford school of builtenvironment. you can see their youtube channel here or pull down the description for more aboutthem and about the house.