From Victorian House to Eco-home

The home of TV presenter and environmentalist Penney Poyzer and her architect husband Gil Schalom looks like all the others in the row of three storey Victorian semis, a mile or so from the centre of Nottingham. Aside from the array of solar collectors on the roof, there is little evidence to suggest that this is the self-styled Nottingham Eco House.

Look a little closer, however, and you will observe that the copper drainpipe carrying rainwater from the roof has a filter at the base. The pipe connects to two huge tanks in the cellar that store up to 2,500 litres of filtered rainwater, which is used in the low-flush WCs throughout the house.

Step inside the front door and you immediately experience a fresh atmosphere. An earth plaster covers most of the downstairs walls, including those covered with a heavy layer of zero-ozone-depleting foam insulation board.

“The house had been student lodgings and had had a very cheap makeover two years before we bought it in 1998,” says Gil. “It was pretty desperate to the point of internal toxicity. It had been coated throughout with a polymer-based emulsion paint and many of the ceilings were covered with polystyrene tiles.”

“It was totally inappropriate for a house built as a breathing structure with traditional nine-inch brick walls,” says Penney, who presented last summer’s eight-part BBC Two series No Waste Like Home.

Penney and Gil’s house demonstrates many of the things she was trying to promote in the series, especially the reduction of waste — particularly that of precious energy.

Apart from the solar collectors, there are rooflights with low-emissivity glass to pull light into the third floor rooms, where lodgers live, a super-insulated hot water tank, and around 300-400mm of roof insulation made from shredded recycled newspaper. Removing almost the entire roof to add the insulation and to modify the structure, so that there was still ample living space after the addition of the insulation, was a huge task.

Inside the front façade of the house, there is 100mm of ozone-friendly insulated dry-lining — this has also been installed at the corners, where there was a high level of heat leakage. On the side and north-facing rear wall, where it is less important to show the period brickwork, 150mm exterior wall insulation has been applied. As the walls are solid brick there was no possibility of cavity insulation, so rigid insulation boards with an insulated render finish were applied, bought at a reduced rate of five per cent VAT on the £12,000 cost of the job.

Double and triple timber glazed timber units have replaced many of the PVCu windows. “PVCu windows are bad news from an environmental point of view because of the problems with disposal,” says Penney. Where they are not replaced it is because some were newly installed before they bought the house, and also for financial reasons.

In addition to all these features, Penny and Gil have installed a completely new central heating system that runs off waste timber, meaning that fuel costs them nothing. “There are so many construction sites round here that I do not think we’ll ever run short of free fuel,” says Penney. “A number of builders drop off their scrap pallets, and we are also great skip raiders!”

Combustion takes place in a manual boiler. It is an Italian product, and Penney and Gil believe it to be the first domestic application in the UK. “It is specifically designed for biomass, and for heating water,” says Gil. It works as a top-up to the solar water heating system. One of the most fascinating eco features is the brick and concrete composting chamber in the cellar, which has a raft inside composed of coir (fibre from coconut husks) and a large colony of worms. The contents only need to be removed about once every three years and can be used as garden compost.

“The brick frontage is unchanged. The whole idea has been to test new products to demonstrate that other people on relatively low incomes – perhaps in smaller terraced houses – can do this and make significant energy savings,” says Penney.

“So far the house has cost about £85,000 to renovate and we still have to replace the kitchen. We reckon that if we had not used so many green techniques we could have done it for about half this figure,” says Gil. “But our motivation is more for environmental reasons than to obtain rapid payback — we do not expect to reap the full economic benefits for 10 years or so. However, in terms of water and energy savings we are now paying less than £500 a year in electricity for top-up water heating when the solar panels do not produce enough hot water and for all other purposes. Not too bad when you consider that this is for two households in a 240m² house.

“We think we have shown that, despite the undoubted need for thousands of new homes in the UK, there is huge potential for updating the existing housing stock — 60 per cent of which dates from before 1919.” As a result of all of Gil and Penney’s efforts, the house has been recognised by the Government-sponsored Energy Saving Trust as one of the most advanced low-energy retrofits in a house in the country and is being used as a model in two of the Trust’s Best Practice manuals.

“None of our house’s features in their own right are revolutionary, but together they amount to a huge energy saving,” states Gil. “Because of this we are close to being a zero-CO2 house.”

Penney & Gil's Eco Features at a glance:

Biomass heating system: A central heating system based on a combustion boiler powered entirely by locally sourced waste timber.
Composting chamber: All sewage is treated by a large colony of worms and can be eventually used as garden compost.
Rainwater harvesting: All rainwater recycled for grey water use.
Additional insulation: Applied to both internal and external walls and roofs, up to 400mm thick.
Solar panels: Used for hot water production.
Natural paints: To cut down on toxicity. Low-emissivity glass: To reduce energy loss.

Find out more about green features...

Further reading:

• A Green Mill Conversions
• A Green Upgrade for a 1990s Home
• Contemporary Living in an Old Home