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It's quite a large house. It's 6,500 square feet approximately. It's 5 big bedrooms with
5 bathrooms. Nothing is very rigid. It's got curved walls. The corridors change size as
you move through them, so they try and introduce you into the spaces rather than be very rigid
and uniform in the way it's designed. The top priority was to achieve the best house,
making the best of the site because it is a beautiful location. It's one of the highest
places in Hampshire. Lovely long views. You could probably see for 30 or 40 miles from
here. So we've got a lot of glass. We've got to make sure that glass and windows are high
performance. You can now get very good, very economic, top quality windows that are very
low on energy use compared with what we would call traditionally good windows but you can
do much better than that now. The envelope is the starting point. Walls,
floors and ceilings are easy to insulate when you're building but very difficult to improve
later. Then the element of sealing of the envelope is really important. So you have
to make the building airtight because obviously leakage out of a house is energy lost. So
very important to make the house as sealed as you can. And the next thing that you have
to do having made the house really well sealed is to provide mechanical ventilation with
heat recovery so you get good fresh air, good quality internal air conditions but not very
much energy involved in providing that. Having done that we added a few things to the design,
such as significant roof overhangs so that where we've got large areas of south facing
glass, like the screens behind me, in the peak of the summer when the sun is
overhead we don't get too much solar gain from that glass, but of course in the winter
when the sun is low you do get solar gain. So simple things in the design can help you
make the best of what nature's throwing at you. And then finally once you've reduced
the amount of energy the house needs, then finding the best way of doing it, providing
that energy is obviously critical. Here we've used, because we've got land, we've used a
ground source heat pump with a ground array in the fields. Probably heating bills for
this house are less than £1000 a year, which is more than offset by the solar panel array
that we have on one of the outbuildings here. So it's probably on balance a net positive,
if you like. We're generating more energy than we're using, for
heating only.