Energy Efficient Refurbishment of Victorian Dwellings
speaker: Magdalini Makrodimitri
Magdalini Makrodimitri is a PhD student at Cambridge University. She was awarded MSc in Environmental Design and Engineering from the Bartlett, University College London. This talk is based on her dissertation: Energy Efficient Refurbishment of Old dwellings: The Case of 17 St. Augustine's Victorian House. This talk contains a number of minor factual errors - 'lapsus scribae'.
A Victorian house in Camden refurbished for energy
efficiency by UCL Bartlett researchers won the ‘Low Energy Upgraded
Social Housing Project of the Year’ at the 2008 Sustainable Housing
Awards.For more details visit www.levh.org.uk
Professor Robert Lowe and Dr Ian Ridley played a major
part in the design and implementation of the energy efficient
refurbishment measures, which is expected to lead to an 80% drop in the
house’s carbon emissions. The researchers were funded by UrbanBuzz, a
UCL-led sustainable communities programme of knowledge exchange.
The carbon-saving ‘EcoHome’ is an experiment led by Camden
Council and UCL to cut emissions from a house built in 1850 by up to
four-fifths. Professor Lowe was involved in teaching construction
workers how to make 17 St Augustine’s Road as airtight as possible. Dr
Ridley designed and installed a monitoring system to measure the heat
and electricity used by the house, and humidity sensors to check the
air quality in the home. Improvements to the house included floor, wall
and roof insulation, solar UV panels, solar hot water, heat recovery
ventilation and double-glazed windows.
The house is one of only three ‘ecohomes’ being monitored for energy performance in the UK. Professor Tadj Oreszczyn, Head of the UCL Bartlett School
of Graduate Studies and Director of Environmental Design & Engineering, said: “The house is in a conservation area and has been
refurbished to reduce carbon emissions by 80%, making it significantly
better than most new houses built today. The predicted energy costs
should be around £5 a week, which for a six-bedroom Victorian house –
three times the size of a typical UK house – is astonishingly low.
“UCL has recently tested the house and during a typical
winter day the house should only require around 3.5kW of heat input,
compared with most modern domestic boilers rated at 12–24kW. Occupants
will move in before Christmas and the energy performance will be
monitored over a year. It is hoped that this project will lead on to further low-carbon collaborations between UCL and Camden Council.”
Presentation Details
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Video Width: 800px
Video Length: 01:10:00
