Category: Ventilation & Health

Fixing fuel poverty – is there a healthier way?

Fuel poverty causes misery and ill-health – and alleviating fuel poverty by retrofitting homes could potentially offer valuable savings to the health services. However, different approaches to retrofit are likely to have different impacts on health.

The first in this two-part series, published in Green Building in December 2014, looks at how cold, damp homes can harm people’s heath, and at the evidence to date that retrofit can improve matters.  It also explores some pioneering efforts by concerned health organisations to tackle the ill health of their vulnerable patients where it starts – by fixing their cold homes.

The second part, due to be published in Spring 2015, will look a little more closely at different retrofit strategies, and the risks and benefits to occupants – and to the buildings themselves.

PDF download: Fuel poverty and health – Part 1

Continue reading “Fixing fuel poverty – is there a healthier way?”

Prescribing healthy homes

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) recently ran a consultation on the guidance they give to health bodies and local authorities on reducing the burden of winter deaths and illnesses from cold homes.

The AECB (Association for Environment Conscious Building) along with the STBA (Sustainable Traditional Buildings Alliance) and Severn Wye Energy Agency submitted a  response, which I helped to draft.

The response welcomed the idea that health professionals should be involved in identifying and tackling unhealthy homes. It also emphasised that excess winter deaths and illnesses were almost certainly due to a combination of low indoor temperatures and poor indoor air quality (exacerbated by cold surfaces in uninsulated homes, and by occupants restricting ventilation to keep out cold draughts), and that an emphasis on low temperatures alone could miss significant causes of ill-health – and valuable remedies.

You can download the response here: NICE excess winter deaths and illnesses consultation response

You can also find out more about the original NICE consultation on the AECB website here

 

Ventilation – presentation for AECB

Slides from my presentation to the 2014 AECB annual conference on ‘Natural ventilation – does it work?’.

Download pdf – Natural Ventilation – talk for AECB 2014

Cold bridging, condensation & mould CSE
Failure of ventilation? Photo courtesy of the Centre for Sustainable Energy

For my article on the same subject, see this link:

Natural Ventilation: Does it Work? Article for Passive House Plus magazine

 

Overheating – how can we avoid it?

Jump straight to article in html Overheating – how can we avoid it?

There is a lot of concern that modern, airtight, well-insulated buildings might be more prone to overheating than older, leakier ones. However, the worst-offending buildings for overheating (and there are some shockers) are as often old as they are new. Overheating buildings just tend to be all-round bad buildings: often cold in winter, as well as hot in summer.

It looks as though buildings with too little insulation, too much glazing, not enough shading, and inadequate provision for purge ventilation are at risk of overheating – as are buildings with badly designed and inadequately insulated heating/hot water/community heat systems. Extravagant use of glazing, in particular, seems to have a great deal to answer for. Continue reading “Overheating – how can we avoid it?”

Overheating – how can we avoid it? – article from Green Building

This article originally appeared in Green Building, Spring 2014

“Everybody loves the summer time”, as Carole King once sang: everybody that is, except those who are separated from their sweethearts – and those sweltering in stifling buildings that they just can’t get cool.

At its worst, overheating can be a serious – even fatal – health issue, with the very elderly, and babies and small children most vulnerable, and heart attack, stroke, and sudden infant death all possible consequences. But much more commonly it is a discomfort issue, which can affect the usability of buildings, and/or drive people to deploy energy-consuming measures such as artificial cooling.

A building that cannot be cooled down to a comfortable temperature whatever you do is obviously overheating. One that cannot be cooled in a secure and comfortable way (eg, can only be cooled via opening window onto a busy road, or by leaving patio doors open at night), overheats so far as the occupants are concerned. Both are a failure on the part of the design and construction team. Continue reading “Overheating – how can we avoid it? – article from Green Building”

Does Natural Ventilation Work? – References and Links

I’ve had a couple of requests for links to the sources for “Natural Ventilation – does it work?”, my article for Passive House Plus Issue 6 (start of 2014), so here is a list of most of them – live as at the time of posting in April 2014, but no guarantees they will remain so of course. Continue reading “Does Natural Ventilation Work? – References and Links”

Healthy buildings – feature in Green Building magazine

Most people spend 80 – 90% of their time indoors, which means the indoor environment is where people meet many of the influences that affect their health and wellbeing, for good or ill. The impact is serious: just one condition affected by the indoor environment, asthma, kills three people a day and costs the country millions of pounds annually.

We all want the buildings we create and  occupy to be healthy, and the sustainable building world often makes special claims to be creating healthy spaces. But are we directing our attention the right way? Which hazards are most important – and which can we actually do anything about?

In this article for the Spring 2014 issue of Green Building magazine, I have a look at the indoor hazards that might affect out health, and consider which ones we can do anything about – and how they might be tackled.

Download the article in pdf, for references and links: Healthy Buildings

Natural ventilation – does it work?

While mechanical ventilation is sometimes perceived as problematic, expensive and possibly even energy-guzzling, natural ventilation often seems to be seen as – well – “natural” – a safe, old-fashioned,  reliable default solution. In this article for Passive House Plus I had a look at this assumption.

Theoretical modelling suggests that natural ventilation is likely to be rather unreliable, with the same building at risk of both under- and over-ventilation under different weather conditions. But what happens in practice?

The first problem I had was finding some data: there is very little of it.

In the studies I was able to find, it turned out that indoor air quality in naturally ventilated homes (including levels of relative humidity, oxides of nitrogen, and volatile organic compounds, for example) is not what it should be. (I also found some studies from schools raising similar concerns, but there wasn’t room to write about these as well).

For example, a study of 22 homes built to the 2006 Part F regulations for ventilation found that about half of them failed to achieve their recommended background ventilation rate even with all vents open/fans running as intended; pollutants exceeded the guideline levels in a number of them.

But what was really worrying was that when the researchers first arrived, they found that many of the vents were closed, and many of the extract fans (both in bathrooms and kitchens) had been disabled at the isolator. Similar findings appeared in all of the studies I was able to track down. Continue reading “Natural ventilation – does it work?”