Are our buildings sustainable?
Our entire mission is to try to change the traditional construction approach based on the urgent need to change the way we use energy in our homes.
Over 40% of our CO2 emissions globally stem from the heating and cooling of buildings.
In the UK and Ireland, we have some of the poorest performing buildings compared to other European and developed nations globally.
These facts are massively underreported.
No one today should live in fuel poverty and be unable to heat their homes
This has to be addressed.
Buildings which are highly insulated and designed in line with the passive house principles primarily gain the vast majority of their energy needs from passive solar gains (the free energy and heat coming through the building’s windows)
Window size and location are also optimised to avoid overheating in the summer.
Another fact to consider when choosing which way to build your home is to consider the embodied energy or CO2 generated in producing the materials with which your home is built
Steel manufacturing accounts for 7% of global CO2 emissions
The manufacture of cement and concrete products accounts for around 9% of global CO2 emissions.
This is because both processes require very high temperatures and, as a result, very high amounts of energy, which is almost all derived from fossil fuels.
Timber not only produces no net CO2, it also actively stores carbon and absorbs it as it is grown.
Timber is a renewable resource. All the timber used in our buildings comes from FSC—and PEFC-certified sustainably managed forests.
There are some aspects of construction where steel and concrete are unavoidable—such as large infrastructure, foundations, etc. Even our own chassis are galvanised or painted steel where our buildings contact the ground. However, where there is a better alternative, sustainable materials like timber should also be the first choice.
From a lifecycle cost and building end-of-life perspective, timber is a much more sensible choice. Timber can be chipped, recycled, and incorporated into new construction products such as OSB board or chipboard, packaging, or pulp for the paper industry.
Our sister company, Quinn Chip, also manufactures wood chips for animal bedding, landscaping, and biomass heating. These solutions provide sustainable solutions for ultimately reincorporating the timber back into nature / the soil after use. They are a much more eco-friendly solution than bricks and mortar, concrete, or steel.
What is a ‘thermal building envelope’?
Simply put, it’s like a duvet wrapped right around the heated interior living space of your home—the insulation within the walls, the roof, and the floor.
In simple terms the better this ‘duvet’ is at insulating, the less energy required (cost) to heat your home.
A thermal bridge is like a break in this duvet allowing the cold outside air in.
Typically, thermal bridges are areas where insulation has failed to be installed or a metal object spanning across the insulation layer transferring cold from external to internal.
Why use timber in your building?
This is why we primarily use timber as our structural material.
Not only is timber an obvious environmentally conscious choice, a renewable resource with low embodied energy (more below), but it is also an excellent insulating material in itself.
Thermal conductivity (sometimes referred to as k-value or lambda value (λ)) measures the rate at which temperature differences transmit through a material. The lower the thermal conductivity of a material, the slower the rate at which temperature differences transmit through it, and so the more effective it is as an insulator.
The lower a building’s fabric’s thermal conductivity, the less energy is required to maintain comfortable conditions inside.
The timber we use in our buildings has quite a low thermal conductivity of 0.14 W/mK
Steel, by comparison, has a thermal conductivity of 40-80W/mK.
A steel-framed modular building, by its very design, will be much less energy efficient as the entire structure, or skeleton, of the building is made of a material that constantly pulls cool external temperatures towards the interior of the building.
This is why we do not use light gauge steel in our buildings.
We also typically use 200 or 222mm thick timbers in all our buildings (8” or 9”, respectively).
Not only does this strengthen the building structurally, but it also provides a far greater depth of insulation within the walls, floors, and roofs of our buildings.
Call us today for advice backed up by experience on +44 (0) 28 8673 7655