9 Ashford Park Pontesbury Shropshire
A LOW ENERGY HOUSE

9 Ashford Park  is the site of a new house to be built for Mr and Mrs Bryan Henshall. The plan is to create a traditional house on an existing housing estate on a plot which wasn't built on when the housing estate was developed in the 1960s.

The new house is to be a low energy house with no primary heating installation. The walls, roof and ground floors will be so well insulated that the only heating required will be generated by the occupation of the house using an installation which extracts air, takes the heat from the air and transfers the heat into the fresh air being brought into the house by the extraction of the old air.

This system is called mechanical ventilation and heat recovery (MVHR).

The design process has been partly informed by the series of blogs in the Building magazine  about a house called 'The Denby Dale house' posted by Bill Butcher from The Green Building Shop.

The house will have 200mm mineral glass wool insulation in the walls; 135 Kingspan in the roof and 300mm polystyrene beneath the floor slab. Windows will be triple glazed.

Heating of the domestic hot water will be assisted with solar thermal panels backed up with electric immersion heater. The hot water storage cylinder will be the biggest that will fit in the cupboard set aside for it and there will be a coil within the cylinder to provide heat to the heater battery on the supply side of the MVHR. The heater battery will also have an electrical element for times when the water temperature drops.