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Name: ecoDepot
Age: 6 months
Class: council buildings, York

ecoDepot has settled in well with the rest of the class, and is a lively and energetic contributor to the group.

While some of its windows got into a bit of a flap in the first few weeks, it is clear ecoDepot was simply a little over-excited. Following a little one-to-one attention, it is now showing itself to be very aware of its new environment and performing more appropriately.

Time to stop the metaphor before I drive us all nuts, but you get the picture! It’s a progress report moment.

I had a meeting a few weeks ago with Haydn Scarborough to discuss heating and energy. Haydn and Craig White were the architects who designed the ecoDepot. In previous blogs you will have glimpses of how the building is powered. Now for some detail.

If I am organising a day trip and want to have access to a hot drink at any point through the day I take a thermos flask. By insulating my drink, I have hot coffee all day. Taking a stack of solar panels or wind turbines with me in order to boil hot water for my coffee whenever I need it, instead taking a thermos flask, doesn’t make me an environmental green guru - it makes me an idiot.

The straw walls of the ecoDepot, discussed in previous blogs, are the building’s thermos flask. Without them most of what follows would be of little value.

How do you power an environmentally sustainable building? There are dozens of answers. What we have in the ecoDepot is just one solution - a mixture of energy sources and technologies: gas powered under floor heating, solar panels, intelligent climate control, and, as soon as funding bodies get their act together, a wind turbine. Boy, am I tired of waiting for that one to be sorted!

The heart of the heating system is a condensing gas boiler that feeds a huge snake of under floor heating pipes embedded in the concrete floor. Nearly five kilometres of thick red hose carries hot water via a series of manifolds into six zones, three on each floor. Why concrete? Because it acts like a storage heater, slowly releasing energy through the day.

In blog 14 I mentioned windows suddenly opening and closing. The ecoDepot is controlled by a building management system which keeps tabs on room temperature and internal lighting, as well as monitoring temperature outside, and whether it is raining, and how much wind there is. It uses all this information to control ventilation through the building.

Initially the windows were set with only two states: open and closed, which is why they were opening fully for a couple of minutes then closing then opening again twenty minutes later. Adjustments now provide the windows with four increments of opening with the result that the building is in less of a flap.

We are still working to make all the monitoring data available via the internet. I am also keen to see the information on energy use displayed in realtime within the building itself, in pounds and pence per hour, as biofeedback is essential to changing behaviour.Ìý

I have just such a device at home, a little box that attaches to the electricity meter and a remote display on the dining table. With the kids, we switched everything on in the house then switched everything off, then just the lights, just the kettle … In the space of two hours we knew how much everything costs to run in the house.

The cherry on the cake was that I told the kids that if we reduce the number of units of electricity we consume over the year I’ll split the savings 50:50 between the kids and the house.
Ba da boom – energy conscious kids!

Next time – how the solar panels fit into the picture.

Christian Vassie, 7th June 2007