Welcome to the eco-home that costs £15 a year to run
TO passers-by, it might seem a new-build house like any other.
But the simple white-washed exterior hides a wealth of clever design and technology that make this home so efficient it costs only £15 a year to run.
Architect Colin Usher, 62, has spent around 35 years developing low- energy homes – and wanted to build a house for himself and his wife Jenny, 58, that cost almost nothing in energy bills.
He spent £192,500 on an existing property in West Kirby on the Wirral and promptly knocked it down, before building the four-bedroom home in its place for £240,000. The total cost was £440,500.
The house’s extraordinary features mean it uses about the same energy in a year as the average 40-watt light bulb, saving the couple an annual £2,500 in bills.
Unlike traditional homes, the property has no foundations. Instead, it sits on a concrete raft over 8in of insulation. Because the building does not touch the ground, no heat is lost downwards.
The walls are made of concrete blocks, with insulation wrapped around the out
‘Testing out a few theories’
side, in front of the triple-glazed windows and doors and into the roof, creating what Mr Usher describes as a ‘very, very well insulated envelope’. The house was built so precisely that it is almost completely air-tight. But it also has a large central stairwell, rising 30ft from the ground floor, which acts as a chimney removing hot air to stop the house overheating in summer.
‘A lot of modern houses are quite well insulated, but not very air-tight,’ Mr Usher, a director at Liverpool-based John McCall Architects, said. ‘They lose a huge amount of heat with air being blown through the house. My new home, however, is like a hermetically sealed box. Even in this wintry weather we’ve been having lately you don’t get any draughts.’
A heat recovery ventilation system is used in winter to stop the house becoming stale and damp. It pulls wetter, warm air from the bathrooms through a heat exchanger, which retains the heat and uses it to warm colder, fresher air from outside before blowing it back indoors.
An air source heat pump – working like a fridge in reverse – sits outside, sucking warmer air from the atmosphere and using it to heat water which heats the house. There are no radiators, though, only underfloor heating at ground level and in the two upstairs bathrooms.
The house is powered entirely by 18 south-facing solar panels on the roof which generate 3,338 kilowatt hours of electricity per year.
Father-of-four Mr Usher, who has nine grandchildren, said: ‘I obviously sell electricity back to the grid from the panels, but we’ve lived in the house for two years … last year it cost us about £15 in electricity bills. I suppose you could say that it’s what I’ve been working on for my whole career. I’ve always had a huge interest in energy efficiency and because I was building it for myself and my wife … it gave me the chance to test out a few theories I had, which thankfully paid off.
He added: ‘The house cost around the same as other private houses we’ve built … It dispels the myth that an eco-driven home needs to be expensive and radically different in appearance.
‘It can be done with careful design and consideration for the build.’