This module will illustrate how to deliver low carbon homes that achieve best practice indoor air quality and at the same time are cheaper to heat. The speaker will share his learning from build and monitored projects, what worked and what didn’t. Discussions about sustainability often only focus on carbon emissions and neglect the more complex issues around low carbon strategies, energy availability/affordability and their impacts on our wider environment and people’s health and wellbeing. Driven by government policy, the energy sector is changing at a dramatic pace to catch up on carbon emission targets. The UK government has announced its plan to power all UK homes with wind delivered through the electricity network by 2030. In 2015 a ‘Consumer Vulnerability Strategy’ published by OFGEM found non-gas, electric households being more likely to be ‘fuel poor’. These households already struggle and often face the choice between heating or eating. The UK housing stock is one of the oldest and worst insulated in Europe. Most homes are expected to still be in place in 2050. With rising fuel prices and relying on electric heating, residents will be trapped in environments which they will struggle to heat or ventilate with significant impacts on the indoor air. At the same time modern construction has changed – researchers found indoor contamination with critical substances can be as high as 10 times the external contamination level of inner-city environments. With 90% of our time spent indoors, our building environment is a major contributing factor for wellbeing. Even designers are too often unaware how their design decisions from the earliest stages – site layout, orientation, material specifications, low carbon design, ventilation strategy etc - impacts on the indoor environment and on their clients’ health and the vast range of ‘eco-standards’ is often misleading. More than 150 different ‘eco labels’ are currently in use in the UK,from household goods to building products and entire buildings. It has become a game of ‘Top Trumps’. The more we tick as designers the more sustainable our buildings, when in fact most of these labels are only industry driven sales tools with little practical benefit for the project or end user. Tomas Gaertner Tomas is a chartered architect and a director of SE3D, an RIBA Chartered Practice specialising in human centred, high performance, healthy design. Having specialised exclusively in low energy building design rooted in building physics, throughout his career he was involved with some of the UK’s first Pasisvhaus projects including multi-residential, commercial, education and leisure facilities as well as a range of deep energy retrofits to Carbon Lite, EnerPHit and Energie Sprong standards. He is a founding director of the Building Biology Association, a certified Passivhaus designer and Building Biology consultant IBN and a regular speaker at Green Register events, the UK Passivhaus conference and Ecobuild. This module was recorded in November 2020 and is available to view on demand.Two ways to book on demand Core CPD topics On demand Core CPD Club Ticket: one single booking for all 10 topics Pay-as-you-go: purchase webinars individually in our Learning Programme Please note that there are no live interactions as part of this series. RIBA Chartered Members are eligible to use their £200 voucher code for this course. For more information, please refer to our step-by-step instructions, terms and conditions and FAQs. This course contains specific references to UK regulations/legislation. Please view the Terms and Conditions for more information. For more information on this course, or if there are no places available, please email us, or call +44 (0)20 7307 5355 to talk to a member of the team.Core CurriculumSustainable architecture
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