Sustainability stories - New Milton LM

Anthony Woolhouse, New Milton LM

Life in a new eco-home is not so different to life in other houses. The process of living – of eating, washing, entertaining and sleeping is the same. In winter more heat is needed to make the home comfortable.
The differences come from a state of mind that knows that consumption of the earth’s precious resources needs to be reduced if life is to be sustainable.

So the aim is to use less energy and a smaller impact on the environment.

Our eco-house is built with insulation as the first priority. The house is so airtight that we have a whole house ventilation system that refreshes the air inside and moves heat from the kitchens and bathrooms to colder parts of the house.

In the middle of the ground floor sits a large wood burning stove. We burn recycled timber form building sites that would otherwise have gone to landfill. We are maturing a large quantity of logs obtained from local tree surgeons to burn in the future. You have to like splitting logs! It is immensely satisfying to have a source of heat from sustainable sources.

Hot water is produced from solar water heating panels on the roof. These sit quietly and efficiently heating the hot water tank for the most of the year.

For the colder and darker parts of the year we have a ground heat source pump rather than a gas boiler. This extracts some heat from the garden via pipes buried two metres down, and is raised in temperature in a compressor in the house. This of course uses electricity. A heat exchanger takes the heat to where it is needed – in either the under floor heating or the hot water tank, or both.

We have solar panels on the roof that generate electricity – more than enough to power the ground heat source pump. We are striving to reduce the other electricity we use – every light is low energy, nothing is left on standby.

We buy the electricity we need from Ecotricity and they buy any surplus electricity we produce. Under the new feed in tariff we will earn a little more. Not much as we installed our solar PV just before the feed in tariff was introduced. 

There are downsides to being an early adopter of new energy saving technology. The installation standards are not as good as they should be as contractors do not have much experience of the new technologies and are learning as they complete new projects. Systems to integrate of technologies and optimise the balance of hot water heating with the contribution from the solar water heating and from the ground heat source cannot be bought in B&Q for example.

We recycle rainwater. The main gutters empty into a large tank buried under the back garden. The water is pumped into the house and used by the toilets, the washing machine and the outside taps. We have also installed rainwater tanks everywhere possible - on the greenhouse, the garden shed and so on. Water is a scarce resource. Rainwater is much better for vegetables than tap water.

It is a pleasure to share our experience. The electricity we use is either self generated or produced by Ecotricity, who generate renewable electricity form their own wind turbines. Ecotricity also supply the tiny amount of gas we use from their anaerobic digesters.

We hope that the houses built in the future will be like ours. We hope our experience will be of value to other moving to a more sustainable future.

It is of course relatively easy to build an eco-house.

What of the future? A project to use the experience we have gained to convert an existing house to the same energy efficiency and resource minimisation?

We’d love to hear the story of you or your meeting too. Just email sunnivat@quaker.org.uk and tell us about it.