The Casino Economy

This morning I received an email from Eva Morrison who is a Business Development Manager at Axis Corporate Finance, located in Canary Wharf in London. At Axis, she writes, we assist our clients to find a high yield property, find them suitable finance to complete the purchase and find them professional and corporate tenants to rent the property through professional estate agents who manage the property.

She goes on to state that they have properties for sale from as little as £200k and up to £2m. The yields are 5-8%, the LTV on the mortgage is 75-80% at an interest rate of 3%. Tenants are already waiting.

So let's work out how I could benefit financially from such a deal. I'd need some cash to invest, but in fact it's surprisingly little, only around 20% of the amount the property value. Say I had got £50k to invest from somewhere - I might even have been able to borrow this, but that's another story. I could use this to purchase a £250k property (£50k÷20x100), charge a rent of £16k a year (£250k x 6.5%) and pay interest of £6k (£200k borrowed x 3%). I've no doubt there will be a few charges along the way such as stamp duty, legals fees and management fees, but the bald facts of the deal suggest that, for my £50k investment, I can get a return of £10k per annum, a 20% yield. With a return like that, any uplift in property value is a bonus.

I'm sure it's the way that Buy-To-Let experts tell it and there is no doubt that fortunes have been made doing this. But is it too good to be true? What are the downsides?

The major one is that a borrowing boom like this serves mainly to fuel house price rises. So that whilst I may be happy to pay £250k for a small flat, it's only worth that because the price is being driven higher and higher by other investors trying to latch onto deals like this. Without this great surge of investors, the price would probably be far, far less. The flat itself probably only costs around £80k to build: the rest of the value is quite simply land speculation driven by the market.

Were interest rates to rise (and they have been rock bottom for five years now) or rents to fall, or indeed both happen at the same time, then the squeeze would be on big time.

This sort of property boom-bust is pretty endemic in the UK economy. We have been through three major busts in my life (1974, 1988, 2007) and after each one a period of self-imposed property austerity seems to ensue. But it doesn't last. The animal spirits, or just plain greed, eventually get the upper hand and the up-cycle kicks off again, always fuelled by excessive borrowing. This time it's being fuelled by interest rates which are the lowest ever recorded, making the deals more tempting than normal. Which in itself can only drive prices higher and higher. It's a classic bubble, but it could go on for another ten years — no one knows when it will burst. When the LTVs get above 90%, it's a surefire sign that it's getting too hot. That's when hot money starts chasing gullible borrowers. It's not quite there yet but I don't think it will be far off now.

But there is another social cost which is much less discussed. The people with the £50k to invest are, by and large, the old and the rich. The flats are, by and large, for the young and the poor. Traditionally in the UK, the property ladder has helped the young and poor establish themselves and put roots down into the community. This was one of the cornerstones of Thatcherism.

Although Thatcher oversaw the first wave of council house sales (partly to turn Labour-voting council house renters into Tory-voting ex-council house owners), the Buy-To-Let boom didn't kick off until the Blair years and it's effect has been to reverse the growth of home ownership (down from 70% at its peak in the late 80s to 62% today). Our politicians keep telling us that there is a housing shortage which is stopping the young being able to buy a home of their own. In reality, most of the new homes in the UK today designed to cater for the young are being advertised as investment opportunities sold to older investors who can invariably outbid the young. It's not really a very healthy state of affairs.

Which is a long way of saying to Eva that I won't be taking up her offer to help me find a high-yielding property. I'm sure they are out there and I'm sure that some people will make money out of these deals. But at my age, I don't really need the aggro or the exposure to the risk. And I'd rather my children were able to buy property at sensible prices rather than me buying property at ridiculous prices only to charge them rent in order to live in it. That, to my mind, is bonkers.

The Gas Saver

Condensing boilers are no longer news. They first appeared in the 1980s and for years were known as energy-saving boilers. They work by having a secondary heat exchanger which is used to take a load of heat out of the flue gases from the main boiler. This makes them more expensive to build and a little more expensive to install. Hence, they were seen as something of a green curio, an expensive option for those who cared about the planet, or the size of their gas bills. By 2004, they had achieved a market penetration of just 3%. Although a condensing boiler could be shown to have a very short payback (less than 5 years), people didn't want to spend an extra £250 for a condenser.

But then the building regs changed. In April 2005, Part L (England & Wales) was amended to make condensing boilers all but compulsory. Today, condensing boilers have over 95% of the new boiler market. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a prime example of government intervention raising the bar. What is more, you can source an A-rated Baxi Solo condensing boiler for just £450 (plus VAT). We were paying that much for ordinary boilers back in the 1990s. So competition and economies of scale have eroded the price differential (though some cynics will argue that quality has also been engineered out).

All in all, it makes a powerful argument in favour of legislation as the best way of increasing energy efficiency. If condensers hadn't been made compulsory, I bet that they would still cost £250 more and that market penetration would be sticky at around 3%.

Which brings me on to Zenex's Gas Saver. This is a new(ish) device which you attach to a condensing gas boiler and it draws even more heat from the flue gases and uses it to pre-heat the water going into the boiler. It is, if you like, a tertiary heat exchanger. The generic name for this is Passive Flue Gas Heat Recovery Devices (PFGHRDs) and the inventor, Chris Farrell, started Zenex to develop and market it.

In some ways, it's been a splendid success. Fitting a PFGHRD to a boiler has been demonstrated to bring about gas savings of up to 40% for hot water generation and consequently PFGHRDs are a ground-breaking British technology, recognised in Building Regulations, recommended by the Energy Saving Trust and recognised in the Green Deal.

Better still, two of our major boiler manufacturers, Baxi and Alpha, now market Zenex's Gas Saver with their own offerings. Indeed Alpha have a built-in version (The In Tec GS) so that you can install the boiler and the Gas saver in just one box.

But the Gas Saver costs. On it's own, it's over £600 to buy. Coupled with an Alpha boiler, it doubles the price of the boiler. And just like the condensing boiler pre 2005, it has a tiny market penetration. There are around 1.5million new boilers fitted in the UK each year (about 90% of these are replacements) and only a tiny fraction have Gas Savers fitted to them.

How best to change this situation? Though the savings appear to be real enough, and the payback period is again probably less than five years, the uplift in price between a condensing boiler and a condensing boiler plus Gas Saver is enough to put most casual buyers off — that's if they ever get to hear about it in the first place. Maybe the Green Deal will come into its own here, as PFGHRDs appear to meet the Golden Rule. But I can't help feeling that the answer lies in building regs enforcement.

How do you assess a product like Oxyvent?

Here's an interesting press release that just landed on my desk. It's for a new plumbing product called Oxyvent. It's a box that you add onto your radiator or underfloor heating system that helps it run better, and it promises huge savings in fuel burned.

According to the PR lady, Paul Worswick, director of Oxyvent, is "very keen that Oxyvent isn't seen as some magic box of tricks as the physics behind the product is straight forward when explained." There's lots of information about on the website and a YouTube video sequence showing Paul himself with a Pimlico Plumber who is busy installing Oxyvent in someone's house. There's an FAQ and there is a brief summary of some tests carried out by Dr Tony Robinson, a lecturer at Trinity College, Dublin (the kit hails from Ireland). And there are some ringing endorsements from satisfied customers.

But what there isn't is any simple to understand explanation of what makes Oxyvent so special. It seems to turbo charge the flow rates of water through the radiators, which enables them to run cooler, but to my mind that doesn't equate to making them more energy efficient. Some where in this system there must be a trade off - an extra pump or two, another heat exchanger, something unexplained.

I'm quite prepared to accept the claims at face value, but only if there is a coherent explanation of how it all works. As it stands, the publicity poses more questions than it answers. Installing one of these is going to set you back the best part of a grand: that's an awful lot of money for something being sold on trust.

So I looked up Tony Robinson, the Dublin academic who has been testing Oxyvent. He was easy to track down so I emailed him. He got back to me in a couple of hours and what he wrote was very illuminating.

The simple answer is that under the conditions that we tested in my lab the Oxyvent system did something useful; and there is no questioning this because our experiments were well thought out, they were accurate and we are experts in this field.

We observed two things: (i) when the radiators were balanced (to give approximately 11°C temperature drop at around 75°C boiler setting) the radiators we tested showed major non-uniform distribution in temperature, i.e. very large cold regions, due to the low water flow rates, and (ii) there were large fluctuations in the radiator temperatures and power outputs due to the boiler switching on and off which caused the inlet water temperature to cycle hot and cold.

He went on. For this scenario the Oxyvent system made a difference by smoothing out the fluctuations in the main inlet water temperature and thus the power output of the radiators. It basically added thermal inertia to the system so that the radiators did not react to the switching of the boiler. Now, the water flow rate can be increased i.e. unbalancing the radiators, without large excursions in the power output, so that for a given water set point temperature the radiator power output is nearly constant with time. The knock-on effect is that with the higher flow rate the temperature distribution of the radiator is much more uniform (we used thermal imaging to show this) so that, for a given inlet temperature, the unbalanced radiator would output more power since it would be, on average, hotter. Thus, the even temperature over the radiator provides more heat (for a given water temperature) and the Oxyvent tank ensuring that there are no severe cycling of this heat combine nicely, in the sense that the boiler water temperature can be reduced, which reduces fuel consumption, whilst still outputting adequate heat that is not pulsing over time.

One might ask then why use the Oxyvent tank for this; why not just reduce the water temperature (thus saving on fuel) and turn up the flow rate (thus improving the heat spreading on the radiators and thus the power output)? The answer is that for this case, the water inlet temperature is still cycling due to the on-off nature of the boiler so that the radiators may well reach the same peak power output but will also drop to a very low one, so that on average over time the power output is much lower than the case with the Oxyvent tank which provides a much more constant inlet water temperature to the radiators, even though the boiler is cycling.

Are you any the wiser? I'm not sure I am. It makes it look like it does something, but what exactly is still hard to tell. Other experts I know had reservations, but perhaps the best comment I got was from Michael Holmes of Homebuilding & Renovating magazine. He wrote I suspect that this product is a large heat exchanger/store, so the boiler flow and return go direct from this box, which acts as a thermal flywheel. Any benefit in terms of energy saving is likely to come from increasing the amount of time the boiler is in condensing mode, and by setting the boiler to a lower output temperature so it gradually heats up this thermal store. It is not clear whether it offers direct DHW too.

I suspect there are ways to achieve the same using controls. A boiler with a modulating burner that has a second low temp output for UFH etc. might achieve the same results without the expense. A thermal store cylinder can also work as a thermal flywheel, and provide DHW on demand.

So there you have it. A product that does something but we are not really sure what. It doesn't come with any 3rd party accreditation, like a BBA certificate, so we are left with lots of customer feedback and the observations of a Dublin academic. My hunch is that there are some installations where Oxyvent may make a huge difference, but others where it may do very little. And I realise that's not very helpful either.

The Kitchen Queen

When I started writing the Housebuilder's Bible in 1993, I had in mind to produce a long, rambly tract, the sort of thing that you might hear from someone who just happened to be propping up the bar at the Pig and Whistle. I figured that there were loads of little things that builders knew and ordinary members of the public didn't, and I set out to lift the lid on the builder's secrets.

But over the years, the tract got ever-longer and more rambly, and I found out that there were masses of stuff that builders didn't know and neither, for that matter, did I. My book seemed to enter a new phase of explaining how all these new technologies worked, and how Part X and Part Y had suddenly changed everything anyway. What started out as a piece of timeless folklore turned into a grumpy discussion paper, as I tried to figure out where exactly you stuck a heat pump or a pellet boiler when you were at home.

The internet should have taken over where my book left off but, by and large, it hasn't. Instead it appears to be mostly populated by salesmen and apparatchiks, intent on pumping out a line, and not really concerned with both the pros and the cons. Independent advice is very thin on the ground.

In the homebuilding arena, there is very little that makes me think "Wow, that's useful." There's Tony McCormick's excellent Paving Expert site which goes from strength to strength. There's an interesting site run by Mike The Boilerman which will covers many modern plumbing and heating issues, and tells a few tales. And there's a new one I have recently come across, run by Marion of Advanced Kitchen Design in Nottingham, called Majjie's Blog.

Majjie takes on a writing form that I instantly identify with. It's that bloke (or, in this case, blokette) down at the bar of the Pig and Whistle again, mixing up facts with opinions, and generally being extremely entertaining whilst also being a fund of good, hard information. Priceless.

Here's a flavour of what she writes, explaining to kitchen muppets what the difference is between solid surface and quartz composite worktops. Bloody useful if you are thinking about getting a new kitchen.

There's a lot of confusion about the man-made worktops and - to be fair - the distinctions between the different types is getting blurred now - but basically:

SOLID SURFACES

• the surface material, of solid surface worktops, varies from 2mm to 13mm thick and is fabricated onto timber or chipboard boards - or cores - to form a worktop of the desired thickness (often with, for the very thin materials, a thicker surface on the front edge)

• the surface material is softer than other types of worktop - easy to scratch - and not very heat resistant (even to the point that some of them tell you not to pour boiling water straight into the integral sinks!)

• glossy solid surfaces (presumably developed to compete with polished granite) are a nightmare to keep looking good - very easy to scratch - I wouldn't recommend them at all

• matt finish solid surfaces are warm to the touch, can have virtually invisible joins (better on some colours than others), scratches are relatively easy to remove (see latest blog!) and more serious damage can be repaired (but pure white and black colours will mark more easily than the browny, beigy mottled colours)

• for the thicker surfaces, integral sinks can be made in the same material (although not necessarily the same colour)

• solid surfaces are very hygienic (including where joined) and non-absorbent so, although they will mark and scratch, they shouldn't stain (they're often used in toilets and laboratories ... uhmm, perhaps that's not a great point to mention in their favour!). The integral sinks can also be seamlessly joined to the worktop.

• the thinner, cheaper, solid surface worktops need to be fitted to strict guidelines - otherwise they're prone to cracking - and they can't be used for unsupported breakfast bars ... but they're available as blanks, don't need templating and can be fitted on-site - so they're much cheaper (Maia, Minerelle, GetaCore, Encore etc.)

• solid surface materials - at least the more expensive, thicker, acrylic based ones, like Corian, Avonite, Hanex and LG Hi-Macs - are thermoformable and can be made into great curves in almost any dimension - you can have curvy worktops, with bull-nosed front edges, swooping down to the ground and rolling up again ... if you want to!

• the more expensive solid surfaces come in a HUGE range of colours

• solid surface material is translucent - so lends itself to creative lighting effects (especially for splashbacks)

• they're all made from mineral powders and bits, mixed with acrylic or occassionally polyester resin (the latter is nastier to work with, even less heat resistant, less thermoformable and small radius curves can be a problem - but it produces much brighter colours, is actually easier to work with and more fire resistant - the two can be mixed) ... I think! It's difficult to get definitive info. (I believe Minerelle has polyester in the mix.)

QUARTZ COMPOSITES

• quartz composite worktops are basically artificial stone - made in big 30mm thick slabs - and treated in exactly the same way as granite worktops

• they're made from 93 - 95% quartz/stone particles - just stuck together (so to speak) with acrylic resin (and pigments, pieces of mirror etc. are also added)

• they're much harder than solid surface worktops and stronger (because they're slightly more flexible) than granite ... so less likely to crack and can be cut into more complicated shapes than granite

• the big advantage of quartz composites is that they (like solid surfaces) are completely non-absorbent and hygienic (they don't need sealing like granite, to protect from curry sauce, coffee, red wine and the like) but they're VERY much more scratch and heat resistant than solid surfaces

• the disadvantage - compared to solid surfaces - is that joins are just like granite; the two ends are just butted up and any gap filled with resin/silicon. The neatness depends on the fitter.

• sinks can't be seamlessly joined (apart from a newly introduced integral sink in Silestone) - but are usually undermounted (or you can just use standard inset sinks)

• all good quality, 30mm thick, quartz composite materials are made on one type of huge (Italian-made) Breton machine, reportedly costing 12 million Euro - so there aren't that many about - and the manufacturer also provides the resin material. There isn't usually room for more than one manufacturer per country and all are keen to export, As far as I know there isn't one in the UK. Quality is governed by the quartz/stone mix, small variations in additives and the rigour of the quality control in the factory. The market leader is Silestone (made by Cosentino, Spain) - which is the only one that includes anti-bacterial Microban in the mixture - and they're very innovative with colours and using re-cycled material in their stone mixture. It's also the most expensive. The other main players are: Quarella/Pianoforte - Italy; Caesarstone - Israel; DuPont Zodiaq - USA; Compac - Portugal (but Spanish company); Cimstone - Turkey; Technistone - Czech Republic. The waters are muddied slightly, though, by own-brand names (most of which will be from one of the manufacturers already listed). Rumour has it that there are cheaper and inferior materials on the market, from China and India - not made on a Breton machine - which are not as strong and stain easily. I don't know how true that is. There is certainly a Breton machine in China and one bought in India (although I don't know if the latter is in production).

You can see now, why I write blogs - naturally garrulous when it comes to writing! (I shall now turn this into a blog, of course). The distinction between the two types of worktop is being blurred because manufacturers are bringing out thin layer quartz composites fitted to boards - in the same way as the thin, solid surface materials are - and there are also some 30mm thick, solid, solid surfaces, such as Apollo Slab Tech and Velstone . I don't know whether or not the thin quartz surfaces are still made on Breton machines ... I suspect some aren't ... and they don't have a track record yet, to see if they have problems - with cracking - or with the join between the top surface and the 30-40mm upstand at the front.

You wish you hadn't asked now, don't you!


Great stuff, Majjii. If anyone knows of anymore sites or blogs like hers, let me know and I'll pin them up in my blog roll.

What I learned at the BBA

Yesterday, I made good a promise to visit the BBA where I was the guest of Alan Thomas, the Sales & Communications Director, a stalwart of 25 years standing and, for many, the public face of the BBA.

The BBA is the largest and most important of our Third Party Accreditation bodies. It began life in 1966 (as the Agrément Board), a time when a lot of new (mostly plastic) materials were appearing in the construction industry and there was a perceived need to establish which of them were fit for purpose. It changed name to the British Board of Agrément in 1982 and today employs around 140 people, based at the same site near Watford that plays host to the BRE.

What did I learn?

• Relations between the BRE and the BBA have never been as close as was originally envisaged when they came to share the same site. They got distinctly frosty a few years back when the BRE bought WIMLAS, Wimpey’s accreditation body, and began offering a rival service. But recently, the BRE have chosen to pull out of this market and to concentrate on other things, so perhaps a thaw can take place.

• One of the things that Alan was keen to talk about was the Microgeneration Certification Scheme (MCS) which underpins the Feed-in-Tariffs and the Renewable Heat Incentive. It’s being run by Gemserv and, by all accounts, it’s becoming a bit of a rubber-stamping exercise, as there is so much kit out there that it is simply impossible to test it all thoroughly.

Hence the BBA sees a gap in the market for manufacturers and installers wanting to differentiate their products from the rest, by offering the additional security of BBA approval. The BBA have a team of inspectors out there who take the trouble to visit the Chinese factories where much of the PV is coming from and their aim is to sort the wheat from the chaff. Alan said to me: “We’ve been testing some of the PV systems coming into the UK and finding that there are issues: for instance, flashings that won’t last five years. We found one that can actually catch fire.”

• As well as microgeneration kit, they are currently testing dozens of new insulation materials. The BBA are one of only two places in the UK with a guarded hot box (the other is the National Physical Laboratory) and they are able to test the U value claims of various materials using it. Here is Alan Thomas pictured outside one of the BBA hot boxes. But U values are but one aspect of the tests. For instance, sheep’s wool has to be tested to see if it’s insect repellent and whether it reacts with metal fasteners which it might come into contact with.

• There seems to be a marked reluctance for window manufacturers to use the hot box testing to evaluate thermal performance. Most windows coming onto the market today in the UK publish performance U values which are therefore untested. Contrast this with Germany and Austria where testing is far more common. “There are 8 hot boxes in Vienna alone,” I was told. Sounds like a great opening line for a new Katie Melua song.

• Harmonised European testing remains as far away as ever. I must admit I quickly got lost in the alphabet-soup of CE markings, EOTA and ETA and BS EN nos. In theory, we should be getting pan-European standards, but in practice it seems that the member states have a long way to go to agree on this and it only applies to a very few areas so far.

• Which brings us onto another issue, Technical Barriers to Trade. Or to put it another way, is all this testing and certification there to protect consumers, or to create expensive obstacles for foreign competitors? This came to the fore recently when the revision to Part G of the building regs was held up for several months because a number of cylinder makers felt that the safety requirements being introduced were in excess of anything called for elsewhere in the EC, and the government was challenged in the European courts over this. Our govt won the day and now we have some very restrictive safety requirements for our cylinders (look at G3).

To be fair to the BBA, it’s an argument that they can’t win, as every safety inspection ever made could be said to be a “restraint of trade” by someone or other. All they can do is to carry on testing as well as they can, and hope that both manufacturers and consumers value their acumen.

• I asked Alan if the BBA had ever been successfully sued. His brow furrowed a little and he sucked his teeth and thought about it, and then replied thus: “It’s not a question I’ve been asked before but I think I can honestly say that we haven’t.” I must admit to being rather impressed at this point. He added that they didn’t exactly want to crow about it because to do so would be to invite some litigious sole to take them on, but even so it does rather suggest that they may be quite good at what they claim to be doing.

• And the BBA is not short of customers. They currently certify something like 1300 products and charge anywhere from £10k to £50k for approvals, which take anywhere from 3 months to 15 months to research and test. A BBA Certificate provides a route to market for manufacturers which might otherwise prove difficult: a building inspector or an insurance company will happily play ball with a BBA-approved product or system, whereas they may baulk at allowing something new and untested. Which is exactly what the idea was in the first place, back in 1966 when it all started.

• What’s just as interesting is that many companies succeed with new products without getting BBA approval (or any other 3rd party accreditation). There is no compulsion to get innovative products certified so it becomes a purely commercial decision for them. They have to weigh up whether the widely recognised acceptability of a BBA certificate is worth the time and expense. Some very well known names do: others don’t. Subject for further investigation, methinks.

• I asked at what point do products become so accepted that they no longer require certification. There is no hard and fast answer to this but Alan pointed out that, back in the 60s, timber frame was seen as so new that many manufacturers sought accreditation. Today, it’s become generally accepted. We discussed whether the same might happen with SIPS: Alan thought it might, but not yet, as the systems available all appear to be subtly different. He also suggested that many SIPS manufacturers were investigating whether to switch away from OSB to using Magnesium Oxide boards instead.

• The multifoil debate still bubbles away in the background. There is no doubt that TRADA’s approval of Actis, back in 1997 (was it really that long ago?) remains controversial and damaging to the whole certification business because it involved a very public falling out over how products should be assessed. The BBA has sided with the hot-box theorists (aka the BR 443 establishment viewpoint) and won’t approve multifoils for use on their own – though it accepts an increasing number to be used in conjunction with more conventional insulation products, and there was plenty of evidence of multifoils going through the testing processes at their labs.

• You can search for current BBA certificates here.

Whither the Wood Burning Stove?

On Wednesday this week I travelled down to Exeter to meet Stovax, making good a promise I made to them six weeks ago. I really new sweet FA about Stovax, other than they made wood burning stoves, and I quite expected a couple of beardies wielding hammers and tongs. How wrong I was. It's now a substantial concern. The business started in 1981 when Guy Brook and his friend Miles Jennings began firstly importing and distributing stoves and then making Victorian fireplaces and surrounds. It's been been expanding ever since, some of it by starting up new companies to produce fireplace products, some by acquisition of related businesses. Stovax Holdings now employs 450 people and has become the largest stove maker in the UK. The business includes several brands: Stovax, Yeoman, Gazco (makes gas fires - does well), Redfyre (ranges) and there is another, now separate, holding company which contains a tiles business called Original Style. "In fact everything to do with fires except hearths," explained Greg Taylor, the technical director.

Greg, it turned out, is in the middle of a selfbuild and he had spent much of the past few months buried in the Housebuilder's Bible. He brought along his copy and it was marked up with post-it notes. My first thought was that I was being ambushed, and that I would be forced to work in the foundry for the next six months until I saw the error of my ways. But of course he was sweetness and light, and actually very helpful as well. I learned a lot from him during our lengthy interview.

Like what exactly?

• The difference between a wood-only burning stove and a multifuel stove. Wood burns best when laid on a bed of ash with air being injected at it from above. In contrast, coal burns best in a grate with air coming from underneath. Wood will still burn in such a grate but not as well. So a multifuel is basically a coal grate, whilst the wood grates are rather different and would be hopeless for coal. Stovax have seen sales of wood-only stoves rise steadily over the years and now they sell pretty much 50/50 (wood v multifuel).

• Solid fuel stoves can get to around 80% efficiency, but anything beyond this is technically difficult because heat is needed to keep the flue operating well.

• Virtually no one burns straight coal anymore but there are any number of clean or smokeless coals. Anthracite is a naturally occurring coal that burns very clean, but it isn't widely used these days. Instead we usually use manufactured smokeless coal pellets, known as Ancit.

• The Clean Air Act is the legislation behind a number of Smoke Control Areas where it is not permitted to burn wood or coal. You can burn smokeless fuels such as ancit, but if you want to burn wood, you need to get a stove that meets the technically demanding PD 6434 standard, which DEFRA test for in Cheltenham. These "cleanburn" stoves are then passed for use in Smoke Control Areas. It's not an easy test to pass, the cost is around £8,700, and Stovax are currently putting a lot of their stoves through this test. The more efficient a stove is the less smoke there is. "Smoke is unburned fuel" I have noted down: QED the more efficient the stove is, the more of the wood it burns and the cleaner the resulting smoke is.

• One of the keys to getting the best out of a cleanburn stove is to burn dry wood, Greg recommended getting a moisture meter and making sure that you don't burn logs with a moisture content no greater than 20%, preferably 15%. He said in order to get a true reading, split the log open and apply the meter to the middle.

• We are not about to run out of wood as a fuel. There are currently around 285,000 domestic wood stoves installed into the UK, burning around one million tonnes of timber in total each year (that's nearly 4 tonnes each stove, which seems a lot). The Forestry Commission reckons we are have the potential to burn ten times as much timber before we run into capacity constraints. They have in place a "Woodfuel Strategy for England" which should release and additional 2 million tonnes each year by 2020. Which means we are going to have to buy an awful lot of woodstoves in the next ten years if we are going to consume all this extra timber. OK, I know a lot will end up being burned commercially, but still the domestic sector will have a significant role to play.

• Stovax spent three years trying to sell pellet boilers, but the interest was minimal. They have now abandoned the technology (for the time being) and are concentrating on wood-fueled boilers, like....

• The Stockton HB. These are designed to heat hot water for the cylinder and for a number of radiators, but they are still very much focal-point room fires, unlike the utilitarian pellet boilers which ideally need to be sited in a basement. I got shown the labs where they were testing a Stockton 14. At full pelt, it burns 6kg of dry wood an hour but this belts out 14kW to heat hot water for rads and 8kW out of the fire itself and into the room.

• Greg Taylor (pictured here with the Stovax Studio 2 in the test lab) was keen to emphasise "link up." Link up? It involves adding a woodburning boiler stove to an existing central heating boiler system. The system, through gravity and series of valves, is set up so that the gas or oil boiler switches off when the stove is lit and vice versa. “Link up” allows homeowners to maintain the convenience of a conventionally fuelled boiler whilst also dramatically reducing fossil fuel bills through the use of solid fuel as an extra source of heat and hot water.

“When you get up in the morning or come home from work in the evening, the conventionally fuelled boiler can have warmed your home and given you plenty of hot water. As soon as you have the stove lit, the boiler can switch off until it’s needed again. Add solar panels and your conventional gas or oil boiler will be used even less.”

• There was a sub-text going on here which we didn't really have time to explore, but which struck me afterwards. There is a subtle difference here between a boiler and a stove. You don't really want a boiler in your living room, something I know from personal observation, having stayed in a house with what claimed to be a "pellet-stove" in pride of place next to the TV. It was noisy, ugly and just plain mechanical. So anything which ranks as a "biomass boiler" is only ever going to be of interest to a rich minority who have utility rooms and/or basements, whereas a wood-burning boiler-stove appeals to a much larger grouping. What Stovax are aiming at doing is building kit which looks like a stove and yet acts like a boiler.

• Which brings us back to the Renewable Heat Incentive which is proposing to exclude wood burning stoves but to include pellet boilers at a deemed tariff of 9p per kWh for 15 years. The worked example (on page 50) suggests that this subsidy would be worth over £1,000 a year, £15,000 in total. The logic behind excluding wood stoves is explained on page 31: These present difficulties as it is extremely difficult to monitor how much they are used (they are usually a secondary source of heat, the use of which will be optional), and to what extent they are used with renewable fuel rather than, for instance, coal. Now this second objection could be addressed by making the Stockton and its ilk wood-only rather than multifuel, but the first objection is much harder to address, especially if Greg's linking theory is put into place. Whereas the consumer seems to be saying "we want stoves, not boilers" the subsidies are going to go to the boilers. But, as we have already established, pellet boilers are really only ever going to be of interest to people with relatively large houses.

• In fact exactly the same thing can be said about ground source heat pumps which generally require large gardens. The RHI would seem to be a very generous subsidy for already wealthy people. Next week, I am booked into the government's Renewable Heat Incentive workshop, and I expect some heated exchanges on this very topic. But I digress. the subject of this ramble is wood burning stoves, and this leads us onto...

AIRTIGHTNESS
• We discussed airtight houses and how wood-burning stoves might cope. In theory, it is possible to create room-sealed wood-burning appliances (just as balanced-flue gas-fires and gas-boilers are). In practice, it hasn't happened yet, although Stovax sells optional kits for many of their stoves to take external combustion air directly to the appliance. Current UK regulations (Part J) require that there must be an additional supply of air from inside the house for any stove over 5kW but as houses become tighter this regulation will need to change for new houses. Wood burning stoves do not yet have an agreed technology to make them fully room-sealed. There are some room-sealed prototypes being made in Germany but nothing yet in commercial production. So the future of wood-burning appliances in near-Passive House standard homes is as yet uncertain, but at the moment, if you aspire to build a Passive House, you can't have a stove in your living room.

• We touched on the issue of ventilation and just how complicated it is becoming. Apparently, wood stoves tend to work fine when the house is under positive pressure, but react badly to negative pressure. This makes sense, doesn't it? So designers of ventilation systems need to be aware if a wood-stove is planned.

I hope this is a helpful guide to where things stand re: woodburning stoves. It's not a topic I have any great expertise in, and I welcome feedback from anyone with something useful to add.

36 hours in Switzerland

Last week I went to Switzerland on a big shiny Airbus as a guest of Just Swiss. I went with two esteemed architects, Meredith Bowles and Roger Zogolovitch (pictured here in the snow, Roger on the left) and we were shown round a site of ultra low energy apartments called Silence, a window factory, two houses under construction and a very state-of-the-art factory timber frame housebuilder called Schoeb. All very interesting stuff, and the Swiss we met were incredibly enthusiastic and, well, just plain nice. It snowed heavily and it all looked like a winter fairy land. Great trip, great way to spend 36 hours in January.

Meredith and Roger were looking at potential partnering arrangements with Schoeb and had a couple of rather more detailed discussions than me. I got a more personal tour, showing how this business had grown from a joinery workshop in Walter Schoeb's garage to become Switzerland's most successful factory house builder, completing around 60 units a year. That's still small by German standards, but compares in scale with UK housebuilders like Oakwrights. Their semi-automated production lines were humming away with Hundeggers and Weinmanns beavering away — I have seen a few of these operations now — with just two or three people overseeing the construction of walls, floors and roof panels. Schoeb are interested in building in the UK and have set up an office in London. They will also be at EcoBuild as part of the Just Swiss stand, so if you want to find out more, check them out there. My impression was that their system is very robust, very well thought out, but may prove to be rather too expensive for the typical UK client. Only those wanting quality — or perhaps a Passive House solution out of a box — need apply. Interestingly, the cost of shipping from Switzerland to the UK only adds around 5% to the factory gate prices: the heaviest component is the timber which has to be imported into the UK in any event.

Some random points of interest. The Swiss have their own energy saving performance standard called Minergie. It comes in various format. Standard Minergie, Minergie P (roughly equivalent to PassivHaus), Minergie P Eco (with other sustainability features like water saving) and Minergie P Eco Plus (with added renewables). Obviously, this system is never going to be of interest to anyone other than the Swiss; it's all rather like the Code for Sustainable Homes in this respect. Yet another reminder as to how good it would be to have a supra-national standard that everyone could understand.

Switzerland seems to be in love with heat pumps. But then their electricity is relatively low carbon, with a mix of nuclear and hydro, including some pumped storage schemes — they do seem to have rather more hills than we do here in East Anglia.

The low energy apartments, called Silence, featured something I hadn't seen before. Phase change glass. GlassX is the name. Apparently, the architect of the apartment scheme, Dietrich Schwarz, happens to be the CEO of GlassX, and therefore has the wherewithal to specify his product because he is the architect. Does this strike you as a little bit unusual? Or maybe that’s usual in Switzerland.

And on the visit to window manufacturer, Scheiwiller, I saw my first bit of quadruple glazing. Here's my picture. No drooling over the 0.2 U value glass please. The Swiss really seem to be having a love affair with huge patio doors and in the Scheiwiller workshop, there was a beast that was 5m long and 2.3m high, triple glazed and weighing in at 400kg when glazed. It is so big that it will have to be re-glazed on site because it won't be possible to lift in into place with the glass in. I'm not sure such enormous glazing units are really such a good idea. The MD of Scheiwiller told me that triple glazing first appeared in his workshop in around 2004 and it has grown steadily since then. Now around half of all his work is triple glazed, and he sort of expects it all to go to triple before long. Hence the appearance of quadruple glazing.

Schoeb the housebuilders rather confirmed this trend too. Generally, their basic spec involves double glazing and no ventilation at all (they open the windows instead when things get stuffy). But the green spec almost always involves triple glazing and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery. It seems that triple glazing is almost a marker for a mechanical ventilation — where you have one, you have the other.

On Scaling Everest

I last wrote about Everest double glazing in June 07, and I was just a tad disparaging. The piece got some interesting feedback including one comment from someone who sounded suspiciously like an Everest salesman.

Last night in the gym I found an interesting article in Monday’s Telegraph, profiling Simon Jarman who is the MD of Everest. OK, I know I shouldn’t have been reading papers in the gym, I should have been listening to something bracing on my iPod, but age sometimes withers the urge for self-improvement and it’s just about then that one finds oneself reaching out for the Telegraph.

Just why would one find such a piece interesting? Well, sometime soon we have to clean up the mess that is our existing housing stock and Everest is a firm that is well versed in the black arts of home improvement. Could they become a force for the good, instead of covering the streetscapes of Britain with ugly plastic windows? Simon Jarman doesn’t exactly suggest they will but he is certainly moving the business away from its roots. Here are some of the points I picked out.

• Average age of customer is 55. 80% don’t have a mortgage. They are rich. (Cynics would say they have to be to be able to afford the prices.)

• There are over 3,000 double glazing companies in the UK. Anglian is No 1. Everest is No2, and yet Everest only has a 2.5% market share.

• The backbone of the Everest business is its 1,000 strong sales force, all of whom work as franchisees. The route to market is up to the individual, but they don’t do cold calling over the phone.

• Installation is subbed out. The only things which Everest do is a) make the stuff (at two plants in Kent and Wales) and operate an after-sales team (to sort out the cock-ups?).

• Everest started in 1965. In 1999, Brian Kennedy brought the business off Caradon. Since then he has sold stakes to both management and private equity. Last year sales were £165m, and profit £15m.

• Everest have moved into selling solar panels and are also considering getting into call-out services like plumbing and locksmithery (is there such a word?). And maybe home insurance products like boiler breakdown. Just like the AA.

• Ted Moult shot himself after appearing in an Everest TV advert.

UK SIPS Association

Last week I made it across to Birmingham's Think Tank to take part in the launch event of the UK SIPS Association. SIPS as a building system has been around in the UK for nearly ten years and elsewhere, notably the States, for much longer. However, nowhere has it ever taken off and become mainstream and if you've wanted to build in SIPS you have had to deal with one of a small number of specialists dotted around the country.

Time for the SIPS industry to promote itself a little more effectively. The question for the SIPS boys (and they are almost all boys) was whether to tag along with the UK Timber Frame Association or to branch out on their own? It's not an easy call, because there are many similarities between the build systems and there are also hybrid walling systems around which are not easy to identify as either SIPS or Timber Frame. Google Supawall if you want to see what I'm on about. Largely at the prompting of John Tebbitt of the Construction Products Association, SIPS have decided to strike out on their own, hence this event.

Doubtless it will be the start of a long journey. SIPS doesn't have anything like a Quality mark or a generic type approval, so each individual system (and they all seem to vary a little) has to proceed down the lengthy and expensive path of 3rd party certification: not surprisingly, the BBA were there, in the shape of Alan Thomas, suggesting what a good idea this was, but I have my doubts. SIPS are inherently strong and if put together properly should be more than adequate for any low rise building, and the risks from fire and flood seems to be identical to conventional timber frame, which is no longer expected to prove itself fit for purpose because its been around so long.

Another issue facing SIPS is the perceived premium price. Just how much more expensive than blockwork or timber frame is hard to say, because its not a commodity product which can be easily costed on a spreadsheet line by line. Instead quotes are done on a supply and fix basis. It seems that SIPS are likely to be more cost effective when the roof is being utilised as living space, but to date most SIPS customers have been primarily interest in energy saving, not cost reduction.

The one company that perhaps gives the lie to this is Custom Homes who, back in 2006, started offering their houses in SIPS versions instead of conventional timber frame. As they didn't charge any extra for SIPS, their customers switched en masse to SIPS and now they do SIPS almost exclusively. That would seem to suggest that even if SIPS are more expensive, the cost differential is so small that it's meaningless. There is of course a lot of hope that code changes will make other systems comparatively more expensive and that over time SIPS may become cheaper than anything else, but that in turn may cause a whole new set of problems as big producers suddenly muscle in on the scene, pushing out the niche suppliers. But that's a worry for another day.

Bill Wachtler of the US equivalent body, SIPA, gave a 20 minute presentation on the American experience. SIPS there remain a premium product, accounting for less than 1% of the residential newbuild market and last year they completed no more than about 6,000 SIPS homes, down from 10,000 in 2007. That may sound bad, but then he showed a slide showing how US housing starts had deteriorated in general: from 1.7 million new homes in 2007 down to an estimated 450,000 this year. That's a 75% reduction. In the UK, the equivalent figure shows a mere 60% reduction. Even so, that's some downturn. It's a wonder that everyone remains so optimistic.

By the way, as a budding reporter on the SIPS scene in the UK, I can’t be the only one to be confused by the similarities of many of the names. So here, for my benefit as much as anyone elses, is a bluffer’s guide to the SIPS scene.


• Kingspan Tek System: now just a supplier of PUR SIPS from Germany, used by a number of installers (formerly process partners), notably SIPS of CLAY in the selfbuild sector

• SBS Building Systems, makes PUR panels in Widnes and supplies SIP It Scotland, SIP Build in the North and Built It Green in the South.

• SIPS UK, aka SIPTEC, is the business started by Tony Palmer in Northamptonshire but now mostly concentrating on overseas markets. SIPHouse is their current manifestation in the UK market, but they no longer manufacture here.

• SIPS Industries, formerly BPAC, is the Fife based manufacturer and installer of EPS panels, run by Charles Stewart.

• SIPS EcoPanels is the SIPS offshoot of Custom Homes (closely related, but independent from). The panels are EPS-based and made in Scotland. Contact is Peter Keogh.

• Hemsec produce PUR SIPS on Merseyside, but aren’t really in the selfbuild market. Main man is Richard Daley.

• Innovare Systems, based in Coventry, are in the social housing market mostly, and seem to be part of the Osborne Group. Main man Andrew Orriss, now chair of the UK SIPS Association.

Have I forgotten anyone? Or got something wrong? And why is it that Scotland makes EPS panels and England PUR?

Should Barratt be rescued?

Rumours in the City have it that Barratt will soon be coming cap in hand with a rights issue. It wants to be baled out of its debt mountain. If it happens, then expect a flurry of activity from the other quoted housebuilders who, with the notable exception of Berkeley, all seem to be sinking in debt that they can’t service. They are all waiting on an upturn in the housing market to enable them to get back to business as usual, get building and start raking in the profits once more.

If Barratt was a single householder, it would have been repossessed by now. “Behind on the mortgage payments, are we? Well, you’ve got two weeks to get out.”

But of course the UK housebuilders are collectively too large to be repossessed, so the banks don’t dare pull the plug. For a start, there would be almost no one around to snap up all the land which would be sold off, and this would put further downward pressure on prices, which the banks fear as much as anyone.

But what if the fabled upturn fails to materialise? What if the way things are now is how it’s going to be from now on? Maybe this is what a stable housing market looks and feels like? Instead of forever looking for signs of whether house prices are going up or down, just accepting the fact that they really don’t change that much from year-to-year and learning to live with the consequences.

One of which would be that we wouldn’t need cash-hungry housebuilders anymore.

On Icynene

Icynene has arrived in the UK. What is it and why should it raise you from your slumber? It’s a spray-in foam insulation system, hailing from Canada and its makers claim you can get PassivHaus style performance from it without having to build walls and roofs which are 500mm thick. In fact, it gets used in the high Artic where the temperature falls to minus 60°C at only 90mm thickness.

I interviewed Jeff Hood, one of Icynene’s owners and the man responsible for bringing the product into Europe. Since the company’s formation in 1986 in Toronto, it’s achieved spectacular growth in North America and now accounts for around 5% of installations in US new housing. It works equally well in hot climates as in cold. Unlike the more common polyurethane foams, Icynene is blown with water: this was originally done to avoid formaldehyde off gassing but they have stuck with it to produce a unique sponge-like product that remains flexible. This flexibility is one of the keys to its success because it produces a truly airtight barrier and one that will stay airtight indefinitely. Hood tells me that this factor alone makes Icynene much more effective than almost any other insulation system. “We don’t believe boards are really effective because the caulking around them is never going to be done perfectly and in any event it will crack over time.”

So far all well and good. However, Icynene faces one or two problems before it can become widely adopted in Europe. “Europe is U value obsessed,” says Hood. “We believe we can get excellent performance from this product at fairly minimal thicknesses and that, whilst we could apply it at 300mm depth, there is no point because the performance improvement is absolutely minimal. Why waste footprint needlessly?”

Europe however is still feeling the effects of a nasty little tiff with the multifoil industry which, in truth, is still not satisfactorily resolved. The multifoil manufacturers make very similar claims and thus far have not been able to establish them via traditional testing methods. Icynene is a very different product to multifoil but the claims made by Hood and his colleagues have many similarities. Thus far Icynene has won BBA approval for use in walls and roofs, but only as a substitute (in performance terms) with glass fibre and/or polystyrene, which makes it rather poorer than the polyurethane family. But Hood’s contention is that it’s actually much better than all the other available mainstream insulation products and to prove it he has hired the building scientists at Napier University in Edinburgh to run some tests on Icynene in their laboratory in Glenrothes, a facility I visited last year with the UK Timber Frame Association. Results should be available soon. If they confirm Hood’s contentions, it could re-ignite the debate over the effectiveness of the established testing method, the guarded hotbox test.

Many people will think that we’ve been here before. The multifoil debate raged for many years and it was all based around the validity or otherwise of the guarded hot box as being the best (or only) method for measuring the effectiveness of insulation materials. The difference this time is that, in Icynene, we have a manufacturer who can quite happily supply insulation at any thickness. As Hood explained to me: “We can spray at whatever thickness the client wants, we just don’t want to waste their money, or use more material or footprint than is necessary. We think that’s green. And we think the move in Europe towards PassivHaus-style massive insulation is a costly mistake.” With Icynene installed in over 200,000 buildings including several LEED platinum standards, it could be that our future insulation standards could once again be up for debate.

Builders rates softening

There’s really no definitive way of knowing exactly how much a builder charges because every contract is different and each rate is negotiated on a job-by-job basis. But there is a lot of evidence around that labour rates are softening across the board in response to the recession.

Having said that, recession bites in some funny and unexpected ways. I keep hearing about builders who are rushed off their feet and have order books as long as ever. A plumber I know locally (in Linton, Cambs) told me he’d never known it so slow, but that his brother (a plumber in Swindon, Wilts) was snowed under, so much so that my local plumber was now working three days a week in Swindon. Just why Swindon should be busy, whilst Cambridgeshire is quiet, seems to defy common sense, but that’s often what happens.

Other tit bits. A groundworker I know was getting £160 a day for agency work a year ago. Now the rate is £80 a day. Ouch if you are looking for work but good news if you are paying for it. My bricklaying contact tells me that the rate per thousand bricks laid has softened from around £420/k down to £360/k (though be warned that this rate is subject to a lot of regional variation — many quieter areas of the country never got as high as £360/k in the boom). And at EcoBuild last week, I gleaned that rates for timber frame erection were down from £20/m2 to £15/m2.

Cash Deposits — The Difficult Question

For many years, I have helped out on the Ask The Experts stand at the Homebuilding & Renovating shows, which are held at various venues across the country. We work as a small team (usually about six of us) and we advertise ourselves as offering independent advice. It’s also a very useful exercise for us as working journalists in that we informally monitor the questions being fired at us, and this gives us good feedback on what issues are of concern to selfbuilders. Besides the ever-popular planning questions, for the last two years the main question has been “How should I heat my house?” A jolly good question it is too, and one which has no clear answer.

November always plays host to two shows, one in Yorkshire, the other in Somerset, and this year credit crunch questions were a notable feature at both venues. One question which did come up repeatedly was: “Is it safe for me to hand over a large cash deposit to a supplier for future delivery of some product?”

The main area of worry here is the package build suppliers, where deposits of tens of thousands are often requested, but it also came up in relation to a kitchen supplier and a window manufacturer. Many of these companies have built their business models on getting upfront payments and many have good reason to charge a large deposit, as the work about to be undertaken is usually specific to the individual contract and would be almost valueless if the client were to default. For instance, between 70% and 80% of the work carried out on a timber frame kit is value added by the manufacturer — the timber itself is rarely more than 20% of the final bill.

The unofficial line that we adopt (and we have as a group discussed it) is to suggest that, if the client is at all concerned, then they should insist on their funds being placed in a third party or clients’ account, also know as an escrow account. This would be run by a solicitor or a bank, and the deposit would stay there until the goods are delivered to site. In theory, it sounds fine, but in practice very few firms actually offer such a facility. The main reason is surely that just by mentioning it, the seed of doubt gets sown: it makes people think about the security of their deposit and that alone maybe enough to scare them away. It’s that confidence thing. In addition to this, escrow accounts are costly and time consuming to administer and once people start thinking about them, they tend to want to start adding additional clauses, such as quality audits and time penalties. You can see just why manufacturers don’t like them.

And yet, such is the severity of the downturn in construction that customers are focussed on security in a way they haven’t been before. Construction-related businesses are getting squeezed. In truth, many of the ones which primarily deal with the selfbuild market seem to be weathering the storm quite well — the selfbuild market isn’t exactly thriving but it certainly hasn’t ground to a halt either — but how is a customer to know what businesses the supplier normally sells to and what it is like for any individual company at any given moment? Again, it’s that confidence thing that’s so important.

The problem for the deposit-taking suppliers is that confidence in their businesses may just seep away, even if they continue to trade well. Potential customers may just assess the whole sector as being too risky and decide to postpone their project, or chose build methods which can be entirely funded in arrears. An industry-wide deposit guarantee scheme might have helped, but no such thing exists for package build and it’s probably too late to organise such a thing now, at least as far as this recession goes. A more realistic option is for individual companies to reduce the size of the deposits requested (be they via escrow accounts or not), or even to go ahead on contracts without deposits.

So my advice consisted of the following. Firstly, be aware of the issue surrounding deposits; don’t be afraid to mention it to the potential suppliers and to express your concern that your deposit might not be safe. Ask them what they can do to address your fears. If you like the product and the company, and you are tempted to go ahead with them, then by all means use the deposit as a negotiating tool. But do bear in mind that just as customers are ultra wary of paying out large deposits at the moment, so businesses are worried about delinquent customers as well. It might help matters if you, as a customer, could demonstrate your ability to pay before getting too clever with discounted deposits. It’s all about confidence, but that cuts both ways.

Zed Shed?

Whilst undertaking a speaking gig at the Grand Designs show on Friday, I stumbled across this, the latest innovation from the Zed Factory team, named in honour of their helmsman Bill Dunster. Or maybe not.

Try Before You Buy

I don’t know why no one has thought of this before, but it’s taken an innovative Hereford-based green oak builder, TJ Crump Oakwrights, to pioneer the concept in the UK. Not only have they constructed a showhouse, but they offer it for weekend lets to prospective customers as well. Now you can get to live the dream, even if it’s only for a couple of nights.

Ever wondered what Lutron Homeworks is like to use? Or whether you can get to grips with MVHR? Or underfloor heating? Or a body shower? Or how a boiling water tap works? Or a whole house audio system? What are these big glazed gables like at night time when the stars are out? Or in the morning when the sun shines through? Or just what it’s like to pad about barefoot in a huge hallway, with cathedral ceilings? Seeing this stuff on tele and in magazines is one thing. Staying in a top of the range show house puts a whole new perspective on it.

OK, I admit it, I was a guest. It was a favour in return for a speaking engagement at their open day. But I learned a lot and really enjoyed the weekend. Not surprisingly, the house is booked up months in advance. And also I am not surprised to find that here is a housebuilding business with a full order book.

Wolseley's Sustainable Building Centre

Tim Pollard is Wolseley’s Mr Sustainability. Here he is pictured yesterday outside his pride and joy, the £3m Sustainable Building Center, which opened in April this year at Wolseley’s UK HQ in Leamington Spa. He used to be head of marketing at Wolseley, owners of Plumb Center, Builder Center, Encon Insulation and Bathstore.com. But somewhere along the line, he got the green bug and saw a need to start promoting sustainability as a concept from within the Wolseley empire. Or, put another way, rather than just stocking what plumbers were asking for, offering them a choice of products they may not even have known existed, in the hope that they will one day (soon) cotton onto them.

Due in large part to Pollard’s campaigning from within, Wolseley have invested heavily in sustainable building materials and show no sign of back tracking from this, despite the rotten trading conditions which have forced them to lay off thousands of staff. The deal with the board seems to be this: Pollard has identified 7,000 product lines (out of a total of 500,000), which can classed as sustainable. The relative sales of these product lines will be the yardstick by which the success of the SBC will be judged. The early indications are that the sustainable product lines are increasing their market share month on month.

Just by adding Wolseley’s market presence, many otherwise marginal products become mainstream. Take wood pellets as a good example. Many people have shrunk away from installing expensive wood pellet boilers because of fears about continuity of supply. However, Wolseley have partnered with Jeld Wen to come up with a solution. Jeld Wen have lots of wood waste: Wolseley have the delivery capacity, so Jeld Wen have set up a wood pellet plant in Lowestoft and Wolseley now offer to deliver the output nationwide.

The Sustainable Building Centre is all about education. It’s not a trade counter and it’s not even open to the public as an exhibition hall — it’s appointment only. Yet they have already taken 270 bookings for visits by various groups so it’s working at virtually full capacity. Inside you will see displays of everything from renewable and low carbon technologies, SUDS, green roofs, natural paints and floorcovers, LED lighting and low-flow shower heads. In fact, just about anything you could think of with the notable exception of micro-wind turbines, a particular bete noir of Tim Pollard.

They plan to hold a number of selfbuild weekends and if you want to visit it might be an idea to check the website for more details, or make an enquiry at your local Wolseley Center.

Sandtoft: Concrete or Clay?

On Thursday last week, I was guest of Nick Oldridge of Sandtoft Roof tiles at their Broomfleet plant on Humberside. Nick (pictured here with a yet-to-be fired clay batt) is part of the third generation of Oldridge’s to run this family business and, together with his brother Simon, they have repositioned Sandtoft as a greener and more natural competitor to Britain’s roofing giants, Redland (now Monier) and Marley (now part of Eternit).

To get a feel for how and why they felt this was necessary, it’s useful to look at how the roofing business has developed in the UK, and how this differs from the rest of Europe. The favoured roofing material of the Victorians was slate which became widely available across the country because of the canals and railways which forged the industrial age. Clay pantiles were popular in the east of England but most of these were imported from Holland and Belgium, used to fill the textile-laden boats returning from the Continent. It wasn’t until the great building boom of the 20s and 30s that industrial scale roofing manufacturing really kicked off in this country and the material of choice for this roofing boom was concrete. Marley and Redland grew fat producing large format concrete interlocking tiles. Sandtoft was one of the smaller fry riding along on their shirttails.

Clay tiles at the time were only produced in small format size which made them both expensive to supply and expensive to fit as a roof cover. They remained a specialist, upmarket niche. But across the Channel, the clay tile manufacturers worked out how to do large format interlockers and, despite several attempts by concrete manufacturers to gain a foothold, clay remains the No 1 roofing material in France and Germany. Concrete is an also ran. Generally, clay is a little more expensive to produce than concrete, but weathers better and is most people’s preferred option where a clear choice exists.

Which was why Nick Oldridge took the time to show me around their Broomfleet plant. Because here, on the rich clay beds beside the Humber estuary, Sandtoft have invested heavily on making large format clay interlockers. Or what they like to refer to as their New Generation clay tiles. Sandtoft’s aim is to build market share for clay in an area of the roofing market which has up till now been solid concrete. Their hope is that they can squeeze the cost differential down to just 10-15% and that way persuade builders that the benefits of clay are worth paying this little extra for, just as happens in the brick market.

It seems like a good bet, but the timing could have been better. One problem is that the big housebuilders are currently cutting back on everything they can think of and not only are they currently unreceptive to new ideas but the very faces they negotiate directly with keep disappearing as staff cuts begin to bite. Another is the Broomfleet gas bill: despite all the many green credentials which clay enjoys over concrete, it does require firing for three days in kilns with temperatures around 1000°C.

Generally, it’s not a great time to be a building materials producer. Costs are up, volumes down, payments late or frozen. But Sandtoft’s position is better than many, and the family’s decision to sell a majority stake in the business to Austria’s Wienerberger at the beginning of the year, partly in order to fund the expansion into clay roofing, must now look like a splendid deal indeed.

Can you tell your Grohe from your Hansgrohe?

I have been dimly aware for a long time that there is a very good German manufacturer of showers and taps and had seen them referred to as Grohe. Or was in Hansgrohe? Or maybe both. To tell the truth, I hadn’t thought that much about it until today when I noticed that the Grohe website I went to didn’t look much like the Hansgrohe catalogue I had in my hand. Something amiss on the corporate branding department.

Turns out they are two separate companies with a common history. Thanks to Wiki Answers for this slightly confusing explanation.

The brief history seems to be like this:
Hans Grohe founded the company. Later the son sold the brand to an American corporation and set up his own company again. This time round he cannot use Hansgrohe, so he used the brand Grohe instead. As for which is better, I have not had the chance to compare them.
But based on first touch alone, Grohe taps are somewhat smoother when turning them on/off compared to Hansgrohe, but the price is very much different!
Hansgrohe is the original company created by Hans Grohe. His son created Grohe and made Hansgrohe specialise in showers and Grohe in mixers (or faucets). Then Klaus Grohe, current CEO of Hans Grohe took control of the company and Grohe got sold (and has been sold numerous times). Hansgrohe is still owned by the Grohe family, but Klaus's side! The showers and taps by Hansgrohe are the best, no question.

If you read this twice, it strikes me that it’s in fact two different accounts of the same events. The writer of §1 and 2 seems to prefer Grohe whilst the writer of §3 seems to be a Hansgrohe supporter.

OFT Investigation into Bid Rigging

People may be shocked that 112 firms have been accused of bid rigging, but my guess is that the practice is so widespread, that it’s almost universal. It’s certainly just as common down at the smaller end of the building game as it appears to be up amongst the big boys, and I can remember it going on on a casual basis all over the place when I was involved in the jobbing building market.

Here’s what the current edition of the Housebuilder’s Bible currently has to say on the topic:

One practice which is now becoming prevalent is for busy builders to get together and divide up the work in a way (and for a price) that suits them – it’s called covering. It works like this. A job is put out to tender – typically by an architect – to four or five local builders. Some of them are so busy that they simply don’t want to take on any more work. Architects tend to regard refusals to quote rather badly and the builders feel that, rather than risking losing the possibility of quoting for future work, they would like to put in some price, any price. So the next step is to chat with the competition – it’s not hard, it happens naturally anyway – and soon an informal cartel is in place.

Reg: ‘Have you been asked to quote for the old Rectory Job at Chipping Butty?’
Charlie: ‘Yes. I like the look of it.’
Reg: ‘I really can’t see any way we could do that one – could you do us a favour and cover us.’
Charlie: ‘Sure – I’ve no doubt you’ll be able to return the favour soon.’

So Charlie puts in his price and tells Reg to put in a price maybe £20,000 higher. Reg knows he won’t get the job but he hasn’t spent any time or money quoting for it and he hasn’t upset the architect so he’ll stand a chance next time around when he does want the work.

Occasionally the builders know all the other tenderers on any given job – in matters like this the grapevine works extremely efficiently – so that there are cases where every builder on the tendering list has been in on the scam. They all know who is providing the lowest quote and, consequently, the lowest quote is in reality quite a high one. Such a complete stitch-up is perhaps rare but frequently two or three of the quotes will be for show purposes only.

Partly this problem stems from the way building work is procured in the first place. And in particular the practice of builders quoting for free causes a lot of problems. It sounds too good to be true and of course it is. It takes a good deal of time to generate an accurate quotation and most builders simply send tender documents off to a quantity surveyor who carries out the work for them (for a scaled fee, depending on the size of the job). Now builders often end up quoting for five or six jobs in order to win one so the overheads of quoting for jobs they don’t get becomes a significant business expense in itself. Anything that helps to ease the load of having to quote for jobs is manna from heaven for builders so you can see the attraction of any informal price fixing arrangements they might concoct.

Unmissable inventions

How did we ever live without it? Throw out your old toilet brushes and fit the revolutionary HydroBrush. What is it? Essentially a water-powered toilet brush. A flexible nozzle that showers water into your toilet bowl for cleaning purposes, complete with a cartridge that contains cleaner, disinfectant, limescale remover, colour and perfume.

Even more amazing, the makers claim that HydroBrush actually saves you water. How can this be? Here’s what the makers claim: “every time HydroBrush is used instead of a conventional toilet brush, the potential water saving per use is about 7litres.”

They go on: “With HydroBrush an average household will save 1500 litres of water per year – improving your carbon footprint.”

Sorry guys, I am not convinced!