2007 Conference

[Nick Grant]

Thanks to everyone who organised, presented or simply turned up, another great conference in a great venue in a great city. Always great to meet old friends and put faces to names and voices.

It would be great to build on some of the discussions that happened in the workshops and I'd suggest that this happens in the relevant boards - Building design, local groups, AECB business etc. I'd certainly like to invite robust discussion and criticism from people who attended my talk which presented Peter Warm's work which came out of a need to meet a zero carbon brief.

Nick

[Mark Siddall]

I'd just like to add my support to Nicks sentiments. A good job done by all those that took the time to arrange the show.

It was great to finally meet people that I've been penpal-ing (new word) with via the forum for a good while now and to meet a few new faces. Role on next year.

Mark

(Did I just hear Geoff grown?)

[Tahir]

I'll make it to one of these some day

[Liz Reason]

Nick,

Had to miss your presentation - any chance of sight of it please?

Liz

[Nick Grant]

I need to make it smaller before posting it as its about 13Mb for some reason.

On my to do list, your interest will move it up the list.

Nick

[mike whitfield]

Thanks to the conference organisers.
Re: Joining the UKGBC.I agree with the majority view that, as someone pointed out in the questions session, it is better to go along with this organisation and try and influence it from the inside.
This worked really well for Tony Blair in Iraq ,didn't it?
But couldn't the AECB have some kind of 'headline billing'/junior partnership to reflect it's expertise and generate interest/membership, and not just be added to the list below Kingspan, Bovis Homes, etc?

[Nick Grant]

Hi Mike

Looks like your computer literacy age has dropped!! welcome.

[Mark Elton]

Nick,

I would just like to add my own congratulations to the conference organisers - a first attendance for me and I found it really inspiring. My only complaint is having to choose between workshops - they need to be repeated throughout the two days so we can get to more of them! Great to meet a whole bunch of people outside the London scene too and meet the people behind the names I've known from reading BfaF magazine.

Regarding the Urban Village scheme in St Austell you presented, was there ever a winning project? I was particularly interested when it was announced as I used to play in those fields as a kid (my parents still live in our family house less than 200m away) but then I heard (from Paul Bright as CSBT) that the competition was dropped?

I think the key points I took from your powerpoint were the compromises you had to make from the outset because of poor architectural design /masterplanning considerations, and the reliance on offsite wind generation for power. Is there not a limit to how much the latter can be relied upon for CfSH Level 6 dwellings across the nation, especially given the requirement for renewables to be accredited and additional to "existing plans"?

I look forward to getting involved in the forums from now on . . .

Mark Elton

[By the way, maybe you know this, but if you right-click on a picture in a powerpoint, there's a compress option which cuts the size down dramatically]

[Nick Grant]

Mark

Glad you enjoyed the conference. Not being able to do all the workshops always comes up as an issue but unless we make the conference twice as long or do half as many workshops . . .  Plus what about the poor presenters who also want to go to workshops!!! Tricky.

Re the competition, our team won but I'm out of the loop and can't discuss that side of things.

For the record whilst I did flag up some aspects of design that needed addressing to maintain good thermal performance, I have loads of respect for the Architect and I certainly wouldn't call it poor design, early stages of a learning process. I was perhaps too flippant with my spot the mistakes game, we can do that for any building and in future I should do it for my own home to be fair.

On the CSH 6 thing this was pre CSH final draft and we were responding to a naive zero carbon brief. I hope I made the point that NBT Consult don't see this as a sensible target but that's another debate we should start in the technical area of the forum. I think the AECB energy standards and PassivHaus approach is much more sensible and don't see that developers should need to get involved in enabling large scale wind projects.

I think the main point we were trying to make is that on-site wind and PV doesn't do it. Biomass is a fudge but was a cheap and easy route to low carbon. Perhaps we should have tried to challenge the whole zero carbon brief rather than simply challenging the assumed wisdom of doing zero carbon on-site which felt risky enough.

I would be great to continue this but please start a topic in the building design or services section as appropriate and I'll try and drag Pete into the discussion.

Thanks for the ppt tip, I'll try. For my own I always compress the images in Photoshop as a batch but it wasn't my show.

Nick