hedgehog

Remember the green nuts who want to ban private transport, want to limit what there is to 40mph, want to track your car until they can ban you, want to force you back to the stone age? Well, now they want to knock your house down so you will have to live in a cave, honestly:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main...0/nhomes30.xml

3 million homes 'should be demolished' to cut global warming

By Charles Clover (Filed: 30/05/2005)

Some 3.2 million homes must be demolished over the next 45 years to fulfil the Government's aspirations for tackling global warming, academics have warned.

The report, by researchers at Oxford University's Environmental Change Institute and Heriot Watt University, is bound to re-ignite the controversy caused by the proposed demolition of 400,000 homes in the Midlands and the North.

Households account for around 30 per cent of Britain's total energy use and the researchers conclude there is a "desperate need" for a clear strategy for housing stock to bring about the 60 per cent reduction in the country's fossil fuel emissions that Tony Blair has said he wants to see by 2050.

darts_aint_sport

Pull down **** houses. Where's the problem?

sti-04!!

Then sell me the land so i can build some more

SJ_Skyline

The way his heart is going I doubt he will be around to see it in 2050!

Tiggs

lol...hedgehog is SN's version of comical ali!

how you get from "gov want to knock down ****e old houses" to "greens want to knock down your house" is beyond most people....but not Captain Tenuous!

ALi-B

iTrader: (1)

When will they learn ? Presumably the "inefficiency" in old housing is wasted heat through poor heating systems and insulation.

Build a modern house with modern insulation..great nice and cosy in winter, uses less energy.

But there's global warming isn't there? Summers are getting hotter (alledgedly...still a bit too cold if you ask me!!! ). So your cosy-wrapped home is like a green house....how do you cool it?

Fit air conditioning!

What does that use? Power! is it efficient? No! What will it cause? More electricty consumption, thus more pollution.

Just look at the problem New York had when they last had a heat wave and everyone turned on their A/C!

ChrisB

If your house is built with a view to keep the heat in, then shouldn't it keep the "summer" heat out as well?

jasey

New for old homes for the Northerners - more buying votes by the sounds of it !

AndyC_772

iTrader: (2)

You can always open the windows!

I'd bet that far more energy is saved by good insulation in a modern house than is used by a/c on those few days when opening the window and/or using a fan isn't enough. Without proper insulation though, you may as well have the window open all year round, that's the difference.

PCatWork

They can knock mine down if they like. Just give me £0.5M and let me know when they want me to move out.

jasey

Used to cost less per year heating a 4 bed detatched New house than it did a 2 bed terraced fisherman's cottage we used to own.


Building new houses for old **** ones makes good sense - so this will porobably be shelved for more important things (Id Cards, Invading Korea and the like)

ALi-B

iTrader: (1)

Not quite, its yes and no actually.

Well judging by my old work with a/c. All the domestic stuff we did was to new housing, but that maybe because they had more money!

There is a hell of alot more thermodynamic principals involved than just keep heating in or out. Houses need free-airflow to prevent damp. Then there is solar or radiative heat that is gained from the sun and lost at night. And thermal transfer between insulation materials.

As a (very) rough (and basic) lamen description, A house heats up during a hot day due to ambient temperature and heat absorption from the sun. In the summer you can potenially get up to 15 hours of sun and warm air heating up your house to unpleasent temperture levels (above 23 degrees). Leaving 9 hours too cool and transfer that heat back out again.

Overall it'll probably take longer for an insulated house to heat up in summer (say a weeks of hot summer) but it'll also take it longer to cool back down, so the average temperture inside just gets higher and higher. A poor insualted house will loose its heat as quick as it gains it, so can be more pleasent on those hot summer nights .

Either way it uses less energy to heat a house than it does to cool it. Simply due the inefficiency of a/c.

Tiggs

poor old gov.......hedgehog attacks them for the idea......then jasey has a go because he likes the idea but doesnt think it will happen!

jasey

Always said Tony was making a great job of a bad deal .

Could you imagine trying to keep some Brits happy without upsetting all the others Never mind the SN Dwellers

OllyK

If they want to kock down the god awful 1960's council built dumps and re-build using modern materials, then I don't have too much of an issue with it other than from an upfront tax-payer funding perspective.

But...if they are planning to start knocking down non-listed Tudor, Georgian, Victorian and even Edwardian properties and replace them (no doubt 2 for 1) with cramped, faceless, dull modern shoeboxes, then they can stick it up their a$$, 1 Milton Keynes is enough.

jasey

We were discussing MK in the office yesterday and came to the conclusion that 1 was infact 1 too many .

OllyK

I see a solution - demolish and re-build Milton Keynes, just need to get it privately funded and everyone's a winner

_Meridian_

iTrader: (1)

Only the first half of that is necessary...


M

hedgehog

OK, I can accept that many will like their new government standard house but, in light of past government planned mass housing schemes and the fact that I like where I am at present, I'm not sure that I'm going to like mine. I'm also not dead sure my carpet and other fixtures are going to fit into it.

Perhaps they will go for this sort of design approach:

http://www.msu.edu/~potters2/housing2.jpg

warrenm2

and anyone bothered to calculate the environmental cost of manufacturing the materials, hauling them all to site and building the house? Bet it makes the equation start to look dodgy especially as most of those crap houses could be made more efficient with 3inches of loft insulation, some decent windows and some rockwool at a whole lot less cost as well

Lum

Are they going to replace them with flats or houses? I refuse to share ceiling space with some lead footed scally **** like I have to in the place I'm currently moving out of. Then again, my GFs 1960s maisonette is freezing in the winter, and as soon as the sun even thinks about making an appearance it becomes uncomfortably hot.

Combine this with the fact that the landlord refuses to fix the storage heaters (being of the opinion that if the light comes on then they must be working, despite the lack of any heat output) and it's portable convection heaters half the year and a portable aircon box for the other half of the gear.

Grants for insulation and energy efficiency are a great idea but something needs to be done to force lazy cheapskate landlords to do something.

boomer

warrenm2,

very true words indeed. Didn't Trevor McDoughnut do a (two part) program about this a few weeks ago. They refurbished an existing terraced house to modern standards for LESS than the cost of pulling it down (let alone building the new house).

Also, todays old houses will probably still be standing in a couple of hundred years time. Whereas the modern "airfix" houses will have fallen apart in a few tens of years - and will have had to have been continually maintained in the meantime (as per my comments about "modern energy efficient boilers" in the DIY forum).

We will be killing cows in fields next, followed by plankton culls

mb