32 NET ZERO READY HOMES: DELIVERING THE FUTURE HOMES STANDARD ROUND TABLE REVIEW
2023, made some interesting injections around how technologies could and should work together to reduce carbon while maintaining performance. He asked the group how suppliers could “better support” housebuilders in order to integrate hot water demand reduction and water effi ciency into designs without compromising on cost, build plans or consumer experience. He reiterated the point made earlier by Craig Dolan that heating demand has come down drastically, but that hot water demand “sits at the same level it always has done.” He added: “Rather than keep looking at diminishing returns on heating, there are ways for hot water to be drastically reduced; we talk about making sure the fabric is right, but with showering we have a massive hole where we dump out energy.”
Steward mentioned a Labour policy document in 2017 which, based on research by Arup and others, found that using in million homes would reduce UK energy consumption by 8 Terawatt hours per year. He cautioned against an overt focus on lower fl ow rates at the expense of user experience – “we need to be careful that we don’t lose that customer experience because people will change showers.”
Steward also referred to how heat pumps can wor with , and achieving the balance on legionella control with lower fl ow temperatures, and said e should be looing at how these technologies work together and not using HEM as a tool that pits them against each other; there are synergies that will help the grid as well as housebuilders.”
Craig Dolan supported this, adding that HEM was potentially going to have unintended consequences, from a laser-lie focus on effi ciency which can come back and burn you.” He explained that HEM, in its consultation form, “was pushing quite heavily to have hot water tanks as small as possible, but if somebody buys a new house and they don’t like the shower and change their shower head, suddenly they have a fi ve minute shower and then theyve completely drained a 125 litre tank. It’s compliant, but completely useless in reality.”
Jamie Bursnell said that Bellway would not be going below 6 litres per minute, for the customer experience – “we will get to 80 or 90 litres per day, but we wont be reducing fl ows any further, we’ll do it by other means, like rainwater harvesting.” He also suggested that MCS sizing methods for cylinders was overengineered, as it was “based around the number of bedrooms, so we might be designing hot water capacity for demand
“THE HEM MODEL MIGHT RESTRICT HOW WE CAN MEET COMPLIANCE; THAT HAS A KNOCK-ON EFFECT ON OUR SUPPLY CHAIN”
DANIELLE MICHALSKA-MORRIS, BARRATT REDROW
that never exists.” Dolan added that the Future Homes Standard needed to focus on the “available hot water,” not the size of the cylinder.
MISSED OPPORTUNITY? nderfl oor eatings ee pence and Jon Ducker of Kingspan’s questions centred around whether the Future Homes Standard goes far enough, in pences case on whether fl ow temperatures of around 55°C could be dropped signifi cantly bringing signifi cant performance gains.”
Craig Dolan of len Dimple who is also chair of the eat ump ssociation said that the HVAC industry “had been a bit lazy on this point, because condensing boilers came in 20 years ago, and we should have mandated low temperature heat systems then imon yatt said that CIBSE guidance is for “much lower temperatures than 55°,” for systems which separate water for heating and domestic hot water.
User expectations were crucial, with, as Spence emphasised, UK homes having traditionally been designed with water fl ow temperatures of -
He explained why educating consumers on the new approaches was essential for success: “If the homeowner doesn’t know how to use the system, it doesn’t mean very much e also need to tae that into consideration as well, with regards to handovers, which we do do, but it needs to go across the whole industry.” Finally, Kingspan Insulation’s question revolved around building fabric, but touched on a key issue, namely that the Future Homes Standard consultation did not raise fabric U-values on those of the
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