INSIGHTS SITE LINES The power to choose
An award-winning Passivhaus Plus in Buckinghamshire is being hailed as a game- changer in terms of showing how smart homes can function as green ‘power stations.’ Sarah Kassam of CIBSE explains the design behind the project
T
he winner of the residential category at this year’s CIBSE Building Performance Awards was also the UK’s first certified Passivhaus Plus project – meaning it also generates exportable amounts of energy. Designed by bere:architects, Lark Rise is a 175 m2
Design , detached; two-bedroom home situated on the edge
of the Chiltern Hills in Buckinghamshire. It incorporates a large (12.4 kW peak) PV solar array combined with a 13.8 kWh battery energy store. Two years of monitoring data show that the home generates twice the energy as it consumes in a year, and that it exports 10 times as much energy as it imports. The scheme’s energy performance is impressive, but what really makes the scheme notable is that it demonstrates the viability of the ‘buildings as a power station’ concept. Perhaps more significant is the fact that this 100 per cent electric house demonstrates that with the incorporation of a battery, smart homes have the potential to enable the UK grid to be fuelled entirely by renewable energy.
First and foremost, Lark Rise is an ultra-low energy contemporary home. The architects orientated the house to face north-west to take advantage of the views, its north-westerly elevation is fully glazed, while the rear of the house is part-buried into the sloping site to minimise its building’s impact. It being a Passivhaus, the architect took a fabric-first approach to the home’s design. This meant a highly insulated outer shell, resulting in a building that is comfortable all year round but which requires only a tiny fraction of the total energy used by a similar sized Building Regulations-compliant home (including for heating). An air source heat pump (ASHP) supplies heat for the underfloor heating and for domestic hot water.
The temperature in the house stays at 20-21 °C year round, with summer overheating is kept to a minimum (overheating >25 °C only 2.8 per cent of the time) using night time purge ventilation, high-performance glazing, and exposed thermal mass.
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LARK RISE – ‘HOUSE AS POWER STATION’ Two years of monitoring data since the house was completed shows that it generates twice the energy it consumes in a year
ADF JULY 2019
WWW.ARCHITECTSDATAFILE.CO.UK
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