Hockerton Housing Project is excited to announce it has released its own housing standard fit for the future world of zero carbon houses. It is called the Hockerton House Performance Standard and outlines the requirements that houses will need to be built to in order to achieve a sustainable low impact world. Unlike the Passivhaus standards these are free to use and go far beyond what Passivhaus can achieve. They are there to inspire!
Minister for Housing Nick Raynsford visiting Hockerton Housing Project
Since the visit of the Minister for Housing Nick Raynsford at our opening we have been pushing the boundaries of construction. Our latest development of nine houses is taking shape with the walls going up in Howgate Close, Eakring with a predicted SAP score of 142! Jerry Harrall is delivery the project and writing Howgate Close, blog.
Howgate close foundations
The UK is facing a crisis in housing which requires a dramatic change in how houses are designed and built to achieve the carbon reductions necessary to meet our climate change targets. With this in mind we are proposing standards of construction to inspire people to construct very high-performance houses factoring in embodied energy and within sustainable communities. The lifestyle of the people living in houses affects emissions of carbon significantly so cannot be ignored. A well-engineered house and designed community space will help inspire them to reduce their carbon emissions. Inspiration can lead to action given the right environment.
The imbedded House Performance Standards are performance based to allow individual designers and builders to create their own solutions. This should encourage creativity and enable future solutions to be incorporated in the finished houses.
These performance standards have been inspired by Dr Robert Vale, Professor Brenda Vale, Mr Nick Martin and the practical experience of the members of Hockerton Housing Project since 1993. They have drawn on General Information Report 53 produced for the Department of Environment Transport and the Regions by the Building Research Energy Conservation Support Unit. More recently the Leti “Net Zero Operational Carbon” targets have pushed us!
I am pleased to announce that in conjunction with Sustainable Hockerton we are now working with students who are solving the climate crisis on a regular basis.
We often get requests for help with dissertation projects in the form of requests to answer questionnaires or taking part in interviews. Sustainable Hockerton has agreed to fund some time to enable this support to occur. This is a limited resource so there will be a queuing system. In exchange for our input students will be requested to supply their finished work for publication on our website so that others can share their insights.
The climate crisis needs all hands-on deck to create a new way of living that does not destroy our atmosphere and decimate the wonderful species around us. Academic learning on how we do this is a critical step. Action based on good knowledge and understanding is now urgent for all of us.
As an example, Ellen Potter a student from the University of Sheffield ask us to be interviewed on the a topic she was assigned to written on. The title was How Do Cooperatives Put into Practice New Ecological Relations? HHP is a cooperative acting as a catalyst for change towards sustainable development and Sustainable Hockerton is a cooperative society developing community owned renewables and promoting sustainable living, so we were able to help her with this. Her report can be found here and is a good example of the in depth thinking necessary to start solving the problems we face. She has produced a thoughtful and well-argued case for cooperation and its ability to value what is not on a typical business balance sheet. working with students is very rewarding. This fits well with Dr Geeta Lakshmi and my work on community, value and power. This latter work may help facilitate financiers to understand arithmetically the wider value of capital within organisations. Link to paper and here.
How can better ecological relations be put into practice? We have been working on this. Here is a practical live project. Located at the western gateway to the Nottinghamshire village of Eakring, the site’s 10 acres have been taken out of agriculture production to provide nine homes within a managed wildlife area.
Eakring farmer and retired GP, Dr Chris Parsons, describes his project, Howgate Close as an opportunity to address some of society’s most pressing issues: rural housing shortage, climate change, soil restoration, carbon sequestration, biodiversity, water management and purification and community cohesiveness.
Howgate Close’s main objective is to provide local people who’ve been priced out of home-ownership, with high quality rented homes, offering low running costs, low maintenance and access to the open countryside. Also underway are plans to benefit the wider community with permissive access rights to part of the wood pasture.
Dr Parsons engaged the local ‘Hockerton Housing Project’ (HHP) to design ‘Howgate Close’ formally Eakring Eco Houses, using the design principles applied at HHP by its Architects, Professor’s Brenda and Robert Vale. Jerry Harrall is now also closely involved and writes more about the project here. It has an impressive SAP score you can see above, 142A.
To conclude. As Ellen says “humans and nature are not separate entities”.
Never have you seen a more satisfied group of people than our cohousing residents yesterday after a day of working together to regroup after the summer and prepare for winter.
Last week we walked around our 8.5 acre site together and prepared a list of jobs. Some are urgent, some not so, and some will continue to bounce along in and out of the long grass. With this list in mind, yesterday people put their different skills into action…
Barley straw added in to treat non-potable water reservoir
Chicken shed moved
Angle grinding of an old axle to prepare for recycling
Hotbox composter emptied and refilled
Pallets in place ready to construct into new compost bins
Donkey manure ready to mulch
Digging of beds (couch grass means no-dig methods are no go so far)
Sheep sorted into different paddocks, ready for the ram later in the year
Hay moved to winter storage
Shared space means shared responsibility
The definition of cohousing is that there is an element of shared space. At Hockerton Housing Project each household owns its own house and garden, but with that comes the benefit of shared access to 8.5 acres land, income from the onsite business and the use of facilities including renewable energy systems and various ponds and lakes. Not forgetting the zip wire, treehouse and pizza oven! To manage all this, each house has a commitment, set out in the original planning permission and bound in a 999 year lease, to undertake a certain amount of hours work on the Project. Visitors on our tours are often taken aback by the idea of such a formal commitment but, as the work is flexible in terms of content and timing, it quickly becomes a way of life.
Flexible working
Some of the work is paid, where undertaken for our trading business, and the rest is compensated by a supply of fruit, vegetables, eggs, meat and access to the land. All of it is tracked so we all do our fair share. Those working full-time elsewhere may take on the weekend jobs of public tours or evening jobs of managing the website and tour administration. Others may have ideas that they can develop as part of the business: our current projects include R&D for a new form of renewable energy generation with a local university, building performance monitoring on behalf of a housing association, asset management of wind turbines for community energy groups and farmers, and our ongoing range of tours and workshops to develop sustainability knowledge and skills.
Such flexibility, and a decent pay rate, means it can work well for people of all ages, including those who want to cut back on full-time work. The activities suit a range of interests and personalities, and stages of life such as those in the early days of retirement or people who want to continue working whilst also caring for young children, and for those looking to develop new skills, or apply existing ones, in the field of sustainability.
Where there is a will…
The need to cooperate underpins this cohousing approach to managing shared land and a shared business. Plans need to reflect shared needs and values, whilst also taking into account individuals’ skills, time and interests. If people had neither the time nor the inclination to act, the business or use of the land would not develop as intended. But where there’s a will, there’s a way. And there’s definitely a Hockerton will, and way, to develop… sustainably of course.
Every 3 – 4 months we read our 50 power and water meters to check how we are doing in terms of consumption, generation and export.
Each household pays for their share of consumption relative to use, with any income from the export of renewable energy shared equally between us.
The resultant figures help us remain aware of our use, not least because we see it relative to (or in competition with?!) our neighbours. It also reminds us how well these houses perform. This can become easy to forget when the house is your home – until heatwaves like this week, when we could feel the difference as the thermal mass soaked up any heat that made it through shaded windows.
* Our average daily energy use was around 23% of a standard house (per house, not incl the garages).
* We exported 38% of what we generated, compared with 48% in the winter
* We earn around 4p for a kWh exported but pay on average 7.5p per kWh we use, so over the last 4 months we’ve missed out on energy worth £145.
* In the last 4 months we’ve generated the equivalent of 95% of our total household use (not including our shares in our community-owned wind turbine of course).
* And we are using 260 litres of water a day per house on average. Potable: non-potable is 1:11. This is a similar ratio to that in the first quarter but an increase overall. Average usage per person is 82 litres, compared with Code for Sustainable Homes Level 5 and 6 target of 80 litres – perhaps due to higher number of washes during peak vegetable gardening season!
Earlier this year we heard Helena’s reflections on 20 years at Hockerton Housing Project. Now we hear from our newest neighbours, Deb and Pete, 2 years after moving from the local market town of Southwell…
“My husband and I moved in to Hockerton Housing Project just over two years ago. We are in our early to mid fifties and have a son of 27 years of age, who at the time was living in Japan but since then has come home to HHP which he loves!
We had lived in an ordinary house in Southwell for over 25 years and it was a big move for us albeit only a distance of 2 miles.
Why did we make the move? We knew we loved growing things, in fact we had an allotment in Southwell for a long time; we knew we wanted to have farm animals but didn’t want to be tied down by them or for that matter the growing; and we knew we wanted to live as sustainable a life as possible!
But we were worried about the unknowns of cohousing – the amount of work we would have to do in the community, privacy, and how we would fit in.
Two years on we wonder what on earth we were worried about.
It is great to have sheep, that I look after (by choice) on a day to day basis, but someone else is always around to look after them when I want to go away for the weekend or on holiday. It is the same with the people who look after the chickens, they just tell us when they are going away and someone volunteers to look after them until they are back.
As for the growing – it is a 1/5th of the work of looking after your own allotment and so much more satisfying than seeing food wasted when there is a glut of something. I have a well-used jam and chutney pan and a fully-stocked freezer to see us through the winter for fruit and veg. Our bees produce our own honey which tastes simply wonderful…in fact it’s a strong favourite with the extended family and hence I managed to get through 12 jars last year!
I have learnt from others to deal with the ewes lambing, there is always someone else about to help out when intervention is needed, and sharing the lambing experience is just awesome. We had 16 lambs this year, 8 boys and 8 girls so have a flock of 32 altogether. Amy, my next door neighbour who is ten is going to be a fab little shepherdess…next year I could almost leave the lambing to her!
No longer do I get in my car and go miles to purchase flowers for my little flower business instead I walk out into my garden or up to the cutting garden at the allotment to select seasonal sustainable flowers which smell gorgeous. That was something I never dreamed of doing until I moved here. I nip into our cooperative’s office a couple of times a week to check the inbox and promote and manage tours – it’s a twenty five yard walk from my back gate. I guide tours when we have them for schools and universities with other residents and also do catering for conferences when they are held in our purpose built sustainable venue.
In terms of privacy, my life is more private here than it ever was in the middle of Southwell. As residents there is a great respect for each others’ privacy but this all happens without being made explicit.
This is actually how I hoped life would be, it is idyllic. You do have to pinch yourself every day when you turn round that corner at the end of the road you come into another world. So many local people come and say I never knew that this was here and are blown away by its beauty and how warm our homes with no heating really are!”
If you want to find out more, do come and see for yourself on our next public tour on 19 September – booking essential!
