Ecobuild Show

Hi Terry!

Very good to hear from you.  Yeah, I really enjoyed 2009's EcoBuild.  I was amazed at how HUGE the show was (they were using the entire of Earl's Court: both Earl's Court 1 and 2).  I walked around the show floor with my audio recorder and recorded quite a few interviews with exhibitors.  When I get a moment I'll edit the audio together and stick it on the web.

Thanks for telling us about the things that you liked at the show.

Highlights?  Gosh, lots of highlights! 

LED lights

I went into the show believing that LEDs were not quite ready for use in domestic properties.  But I saw some amazing LEDs at the show.  The exhibitor which stood out for me was a Chineese manufacturer called QuasarLED.  They will deliver single units to the UK.  The light produced by some of their LEDs was very pleasant (high colour rendering index and nice and warm colour temperature).  They had some 12v MR16 bulbs which will dim on a standard dimmer which I'm keen to try in our kitchen.

EcoFlap

Slightly nasty name but a really interesting product.  It's a letter box which does an excellent job of being air-tight (much better than the standard brushes found on most letter boxes).  I think it's due to retail at about £20 and can be bought from their website.  They're hoping to get distribution in some large retail stores.  http://www.theletterplate.com/about.htm

British Gas SpaceTherm

British Gas are offering financial support for folks who want to install SpaceTherm (a really high performance insulation based on Aerogel).  SpaceTherm performs very well (i.e. thin layers of SpaceTherm resists the flow of heat as well as thicker layers of other insulation products) but is usually quite expensive.  So if British Gas are offering financial support for SpaceTherm then that's excellent.  I must find out more.  I have a feeling that the British Gas financial support is only available to those on benefits but I must find out.

SpaceTherm has a conductivity of about 0.013 W/mK compared to about 0.024 for rigid foam insulation or 0.038 for mineral wool (in plain English: 34mm of SpaceTherm will insulate as well as 66mm of rigid foam or 100mm of mineral wool (or 1.3meters of brick! - yes brick really is that bad!))

ThinFilm PhotoVoltaics (electric solar panels)

There were quick a few exbitors showing thinfilm PV.  ThinFilm makes much more efficient use of silicon than traditional PV.  i.e. less silicon is required per unit area or per peak watt of capacity.  This keeps the financial costs down and also reduced the embodied energy (but thinfilm panels have a slightly lower conversion efficiency than standard PV).  But I'm not sure if any of the ThinFilm manufacturers were selling to end-users yet; I think they were all selling to large-scale installations.  But maybe if Peckham Power can get enough homeowners together then we could approach a ThinFilm manufacturer.

Denial

I attended quite a few of the seminars.  Most were excellent.   But I was somewhat dismayed to see that Nigel Lawson was still claiming that global warming isn't happening.  I came very close to raising my hand and sarcastically saying "I hope the arctic got the memo" (to quote ClimateProgress) but I didn't get a chance.  Also, I was somewhat surprised that Michael Portillo came very close to saying that anthropogenic climate change isn't happening.  Ho hum.

Post-occupancy data

One of the most fascinating seminars I attended was about refurbishing existing homes.   Several new bits of info I gained from this seminar:

• Studies have shown that about half of the properties tested (I think the study looked at new builds) do not actually perform as well as they were supposed to on paper.  Poor workmanship and building control officers who don't care about Part L (the energy efficiency section of the building regs) were mostly to blame.
• Estimates for refurbishing existing homes to reduce CO2 emissions from each home by 80% range from £20,000-£40,000!  And there are over 20 Million homes which need this work.  That's an estimated bill of at least £400 billion to refurbish all the existing homes in the UK!  Yikes.
• There are some really interesting projects to study the performance of refurbishments "post-occupancy".  E.g The Camden House (UCL, Kingspan, Camden Council) and the E.ON House (Nottingham Uni).

LED lights really are getting big because they last longer and they provide more light--not to mention that it will probably be less expensive to use them in the long run.