Richard Fitton: 0:00

I spent a long time as a building surveyor, so I qualified as a building surveyor and I'm a chartered building surveyor. That really was my core role, so looking at buildings, improving buildings and ultimately retrofitting buildings towards the end of what I did. So, yeah, I came out of uni as a fresh grad and I went to work for building surveying practice, surveyed buildings for a number of years, from stock condition surveys right through to post office banks that ended up working at the army and the RAF on the ministry of defense side of things. So, yeah, I've covered homes, hangars, you name it all with a view to improving either their performance inside, outside, energy performance you name it and cyclical maintenance. I spent a long time dealing with buildings that aren't perfect, which is pretty much still what I do.

Darren Evans: 0:50

So buildings that aren't perfect. You're talking retrofit or existing buildings retrofit.

Richard Fitton: 0:54

Bear in mind, you know, 20 years ago when I came out of university, retrofit wasn't really a thing. We were improving buildings, were insulating buildings, but the kind of retrofit putting it all together, that that didn't come to quite a lot longer after that in any number in an organized way right, yeah we were just doing lofts, so why do you care so much about?

Darren Evans: 1:14

why you?

Richard Fitton: 1:14

why do I care so much about buildings? It's a good question. I think I've always been into looking at how things work. If something doesn't work, then why doesn't it work? But usually with a view to kind of, if I find something doesn't work, how do we get it to work?

Richard Fitton: 1:32

I think buildings we can go around pretty much any building that you go into and you can find something that can be improved. So what happens in the building is really important and you go in a bad building and you can, you can feel it. You know, we came in here today. First thing I did was complain it's very warm in here, isn't it? And it affects how people are and you know, and and we hear the horror stories around mold and health problems and things like that, and that's the extreme end of it, unfortunately getting more extreme and more common, unfortunately. But anything that you do in a building is affected by the building itself. So I I see buildings as a place where we spend a lot of our time and there's always room for improvement in buildings, right from the, from the old buildings like we're in now to, to, to new homes that are being built.

Richard Fitton: 2:18

So yeah, I I go with a meal with the missus and the first thing I'm doing is looking at how a building can be approved and it's damp on the ceiling. You know that fire exit spots, things like it's. It's kind of something that you develop and you never switch off and and it is fault finding ultimately. But fault finding is useless unless you can kind of fix it. And I think that that's what I like to do find something wrong, fixing so at the moment you're a professor at haufel university?

Richard Fitton: 2:43

yeah, but you actually do my title is professor of the energy performance of buildings. Okay, so that's that's what my chair is. What do I do? I don't teach a lot. I teach a small amount on on the building surveying course and the masters that we have in sustainable buildings which I enjoy. 90% of my time is is researching how buildings perform. So the history of kind of what we do, if you like, which will tell us kind of what I do day to day. When I started 12, 13 years ago, we we had a project that opened on the day I started which was called energy house. So energy house is a 1900s victorian terrace in a, in an environmental chamber, so full size building one and a half. So it's got number one and number three, exactly as you'd find out in the out in the field, built using using reclaimed bricks, recycled materials, and we've validated that it performs the same as a house outside and so this house is built inside of a larger warehouse or a larger Absolutely so.

Richard Fitton: 3:38

It's in a large environmental chamber but the bricks are 100 years old well more now that the materials that we use to construct it are all consummate of the materials that would be used at that time. So it behaves the same as that building. The thing that makes it unique and globally unique is that we can alter the temperature and the weather and the climate if you like in that chamber, so we can go down to minus 12, up to plus 30, wind, rain, snow, solar radiation, and we can put all those things on in any quantity we like. So you're talking really the northern european climate. We can recreate in there, certainly the uk climate, and the whole point of that building was to examine retrofit in the uk at the time and we've examined retrofit.

Richard Fitton: 4:20

We've pretty much looked at everything that you could put on, change, alter, install or take off a building. So right the way through to full, deep retrofits, you know, with walls, floors, ceilings, windows, doors, heat pumps, you name it, the full package of work, right the way through to looking at curtains and carpets and the smaller but more cost-effective energy saving measures and the smaller but more cost-effective energy saving measures. It's a mix of funding between government funding, academic funding funded through the university, and commercial. So about 60-odd percent of our work is commercially funded through industry. So whether that's boiler manufacturers, energy suppliers, building product manufacturers, you know there's a really good mix of people and right down to one man bands literally out of garages and sheds through to the multinational, multi-billion pound companies, and I think it's a really healthy mix.

Darren Evans: 5:15

So can you give me an example, then, of things that you've discovered from house, from the house projects?

Richard Fitton: 5:20

Yeah, I mean, discovery is a strong word. You know we didn't find graphene. You know what we do find a lot is things that do work and things that don't work or don't work as well as perhaps they could or should. So but part of the fun I think it's fun is not also finding something that works and confirming that it works. It's nice to find things that work slightly better, because for the environment that kind of helps and and it's pleasing, it's nice to see someone happy with the test results. But it's also good for us to find things that don't work so that they don't get installed in buildings and they don't get installed at a very high cost to make very low savings.

Darren Evans: 6:00

So give an example of that then. What historically do people believe, or did they believe, that would work really well in a retrofit through the research that you've done, it's actually negligible ceiling that claim to make some pretty significant savings.

Richard Fitton: 6:11

So some of them were advertised with savings. If you paint all your walls and ceilings with savings, up to 35 percent of your energy would be. You know, heating energy would be reduced an incredible amount of savings. We found that when you compare them, even to things like vinyl, paper, wallpaper, eps, very thin eps sheet like we used to put on in the 70s to stop condensation, they're nowhere near even that. You know the the savings. We we found paybacks up to 200 years because the sheer amount of paint you need to put on a wall to make the saving, the simple fact that they didn't save hardly anything from from a u-value on a solid wall, was quite stark. So but being sold in in quite considerable numbers now.

Richard Fitton: 7:06

Thermal paints do have some use and that's to lift the surface temperature of the wall. So in condensation cases they can often help. You know that they provide this kind of very thin layer of insulation which can just bring that wall away from being a condensation risk. But to say they're gonna save you a great deal of of heating energy, well, your listeners can. Can read the paper. Yeah, I'm not so things like that. You know I'm a big believer in in proving things don't work if if it can help society find out that it doesn't work as well.

Darren Evans: 7:39

What have you found works really well, what stands up well and?

Richard Fitton: 7:42

so. So again there's you know there's been no graphene moment. There's there's no eureka moment. We found a lot of things that work as they should and to me that's a good finding because you know, you're, you're, you're heavily involved in the design of buildings, darren, and when, as a designer and an evaluator of a design, when you, when you've got some surety and confidence that what you put in is going to work, that's good and that, to me, is a good finding. Yeah, there's been some things that have surprised me in a nice way.

Richard Fitton: 8:15

So there's a product called Thermosil, which is by a local innovator, and Thermosil is a window board that you put across. You take off your old window board, a windowsill some people call it window ledge, some people call it and then you put on this sill. As we design buildings generally in the UK, we have a radiator underneath the window, which is fine. It's convective flow. That's kind of how it should be. What Thermosil does is channel the air, the warm air. The rising air in front of the window lifts the air. The warm air. The rising air in front of the window lifts the surface temperature window creates the same effect as a mini air curtain. So when, for your listeners. You walk into marx and spencer's and you get the air curtain effect and it stops the heat or the cool leaving the building. So that's the effect that they claim to have, and it's counterintuitive if you think about it, because you you funnel in heat next to a cold surface.

Richard Fitton: 9:04

So so I had some thoughts, but as a scientist you should put them to one side and just do the experiment, and my instinct was it wasn't going to work. It did work and the savings aren't, you know, colossal. And again, there's a paper just gone out on this topic and if you Google it you'll find our findings. But you know over a U findings, but you know over u value. You know it's a couple percent and and it changes at different points in the window and stuff as well.

Richard Fitton: 9:29

Again, when you look at things like condensation, that can have quite a marked effect, you know, and and if, if you can turn a house that's got condensation problems on single glazing, something that doesn't, then that's, that's a, that's a win as far as I'm concerned. But it was counterintuitive and I explained it with physicists that are far better than me. I'm a building physicist, I'm not a physicist, and I've explained it to engineers who are far better than me and it's counterintuitive. But you've got to do the test and you know we found it worked. And we've been working with Thermosil now for probably about seven or eight years with a view to providing data to get them through.

Darren Evans: 10:08

SAP and things like this. If someone's looking to make savings in their energy bills, make a difference in the amount of CO2 that comes from their own carbon footprint, what would you suggest would be the top three or four things for them to look at?

Richard Fitton: 10:21

Which is a question I get asked all the time. So it totally depends on the house, totally depends on the person as well.

Darren Evans: 10:27

So if we just take the average two up, two down victorian house and then maybe end with a I don't know, like a 1990s style build terrace, to me.

Richard Fitton: 10:38

Many people will disagree with me constantly do. It's about getting the fabric right first. You know we can talk about heat pumps and changing boilers and controls and things like that. Unless you've got the envelope in a better shape, then it doesn't matter what heat pump you're putting in. You're going to be heating manchester rather than heating your house. But there's a big cost. You know. Some loft insulation probably the most cost effective bang for your buck. Floor insulation is probably the least bang for your buck, and solid wall insulation if we're going down that road costs a lot of money it's, but for some it's prohibitively expensive for grant funding stuff.

Richard Fitton: 11:14

It's obviously different then, it's about minimizing wastage.

Richard Fitton: 11:18

So you know, look at, if you have got a gas boiler and you're probably not looking to change it because you haven't got that much money, then controls are a cost-effective way of just reining that in.

Richard Fitton: 11:29

And if we can heat the rooms where we are, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that it's going to save you money. So TRVs, thermostatic radiator valves, even the manual ones, you can back off in the rooms you don't use that often. Caveat that with not too much, because then you end up with even more problems around condensation and mold. And then you can step up a level to the kind of things you can control by the hour, by temperature, which you know they're. They're nice devices to have because you can control. So I have them in my house.

Richard Fitton: 11:59

You know the kids rooms get warm at night, but when they're at school what's the point heating them? So you know, controlling that, even if you have an old, efficient boiler, if you can control it, well, it's going to save you something. Then you start to look at the heat source and we get to our air source heat pump challenge of what, what do we do? And? But if you have insulated it, you can, and you can put a slightly smaller one in, but if you haven't insulated you're looking at a bigger one, and and again that's that's a challenge. But many people will say that you know that that is outweighed by the the the three to one, four to one ratio that you get from a cup of a heat pump, and then people will disagree to say that you might not get that cup if you haven't got the insulation in place.

Richard Fitton: 12:42

That's a detailed chat, you know, and it's not a chat that you can have about an archetypal house. Every house is different and we need to really understand that Every house is different, every occupant's different as well. Someone who sporadically occupies a house might not get some of the benefits that someone who's living in a house all day, every day you know someone who's retired and I think day you know someone's retired and I think I was having this chat with someone the other day. I'm not copying how we question it, I am a little bit retrofit. Needs to be a bit more personalized. You know I was having this chat in an rs yes, meeting the other day about how we survey homes and I think, unless we can get to to nail the problem of what does that person want out of a retrofit?

Darren Evans: 13:19

you know we've got to stop seeing the house and maybe seeing the person with it as well I think what you're saying there with reference to using a broad brush approach to retrofit and you need to do this, this and this, whether you live in this type of house and you have this type of lifestyle versus someone else's, I think is 100 correct we decorate houses to our own taste and our own living styles and and we equip them with technology to meet our own lifestyles, our alexa and security systems, and this and the other, and and yet some.

Richard Fitton: 13:48

Sometimes I think retrofit gets seen as a one size which it can be for a loft installation.

Darren Evans: 13:53

But you see, that's the, that's the downside of the soundbite society that we live in is what people are chasing. Is this soundbite to say do this, all your problems are solved it's not.

Richard Fitton: 14:04

I wish it was that straightforward, but on the other hand, if it was, then I wouldn't have a job. So we get asked to come up with silver bullets in life across many, many different things whether it's education, lifestyle, diet and fitness Everyone wants this kind of magic cure. You know, air source heat pumps get banded around a lot for this magic cure and don't get me wrong, they're good and and they are super, super, super efficient. But that without some insulation being fitted across the stock as well, then we are heating the uk rather than our homes and just doesn't add up.

Darren Evans: 14:39

So we've talked really briefly about house number one. What's the actual name of it? I call it house, so and it's so.

Richard Fitton: 14:46

When we opened, it was Salford Energy House and it still is Salford Energy House. We we've started to call it Energy House one only because we built Energy House two, which leads nicely on to what we do there. But we, joking apart, there was, there was a. There was a bit of a shift, so Energy House was with us. For First of all, energy house is probably our busiest asset at the moment. Retrofit we discussed it then for 10 minutes. We didn't get to the end of it. It's like we don't know what the answers are yet. It will always, I think for the next 15 years, be our busiest asset. Retrofit has not been answered globally, and certainly not in the UK. There's more things we can do. There's smarter ways of doing it. There's more efficient ways of doing it and there's cheaper ways of doing it.

Darren Evans: 15:35

It also feels like to me that there are things that we can use that have not been invented yet or been bought to market.

Richard Fitton: 15:37

You know, we we thought that when we'd achieve flight, nothing else could be done. Okay, it's if, if. If we stop here, we could be missing loads of stuff. Well, we could be missing the silver bullet, you know, I don't know what it is, but we could be missing it. So we aren't stopping. It is very much our busiest asset and and the guys down there are mega, mega busy trying to fit in all the tests because there's so much demand government demand, commercial demand, academic demand right the way across the piece it it will be busy, busy, busy.

Richard Fitton: 16:08

We noticed six, seven years ago now, will, who's my boss, and I that we should probably make a shift and try and do something a bit different.

Richard Fitton: 16:17

You know, sometimes you've got to move and Retrofit did go through a bit of a slump and we thought, okay, well, what we need to do is we need to branch out from the UK, we need to make somewhere more flexible and we probably need to look at newer and more innovative types of housing. Because we got part of the way answering retrofit and I think we've done the team down there led by Dave Farmer done an absolutely magic job, since I kind of handed it and but we still know any of the finished products, but we needed to kind of shift. So what we? What we did is we came up with some feasibility studies for the, for the new building, and several versions of that. Later we came up with something we could actually afford. So we went from having the full street in a chamber, the trees and everything you know I seem to remember we we kind of value engineered it down to something we could afford, which is still an enormous place.

Richard Fitton: 17:06

So we got enough room in two chambers to build four homes. So we have two chambers. You can fit two detached family homes in each one. So an enormous, enormous place. And then we went to get the money. So we were funded part from erdf, european regional development fund, the last batch of that money, efki, as it was now the office for students a significant amount in and the government sorry, the government the for students a significant amount in and the government sorry the government the university put a significant amount in as well. So 16 million pound later.

Richard Fitton: 17:37

We built it during covid, which was interesting, and we finished on time and on budget, which was good. It's an absolute win and it worked. So we the problem with energy house when we first opened is it didn't work as well as it could. In what way? We went on. Let's call it hvac principles rather than refrigeration principles. So the controls were difficult. There was a big for the technical listeners. There was a big hysteresis in what it was achieving. It was bouncing up and down. The temperatures are bouncing up and down. So we refitted the system. We went for more of a kind of cold room refrigeration style approach with blast chubbers and things like that, and yeah, it's great, now works within 0.5 of a degree.

Darren Evans: 18:17

It's brilliant system so for those people that don't understand the technical element, what does that actually mean?

Richard Fitton: 18:21

we. We used, let's call it an air conditioning type approach, which we've got you something somewhere in this building out in central core there. What we moved along to was the ability to use what we call blast chillers. So when you're going to walk in freezers, that's the kind of approach that we use for going. You know, five and less is what we use those for. So that gives us a closer control, so we can recreate these weather patterns within 0.5 of a degree accuracy.

Darren Evans: 18:50

That's because you're getting the temperature down a lot quicker and the temperature is maintaining that yeah yes, and there's less, less kind of frosting on coils and and stuff like that.

Richard Fitton: 18:59

So all physics experiments should be well controlled. So we, what we do in there, there's a well-known kind of scientific scientific principle called one factor at a time. So you change one thing at a time. So we, we add insulation, that's our one factor. We change the weather, that's one factor. We change the windows, you know, and then we go through and we do it step by step by step. Then we get a nice graph that says these are what each savings made, and it's really sound principle, works really well. Everyone can understand it and it's it's pretty easy to communicate, whereas models, they're a little bit less easy to communicate. So we had lots of learnings from from energy house. We need to probably build something bigger, more flexible space. Everything to build that two bedroom you know, two up, two down terrace came in down a corridor through a set of double doors and into the chamber, because the chamber was already built. It was an old physics facility, so everything had to come down wheelbarrows and trucks basically, yeah, it's really limited for size.

Richard Fitton: 20:02

So, energy house two we had to totally change the way we thought about things. So we wanted a broader climate, so we wanted to go down to minus 20 and up to plus 40. Uh, we can go higher than plus 40 with solar radiation, but that's the air temperature and arguably we should have gone a bit higher because, well, because the climate's changed in the last 10 years since we kind of started planning that building, we were okay, we can the solar radiation rigs take care of a lot of that. If we were going to do it again, I probably want a good, maybe going up to plus 60 air temperature, just to give us some breathing space up at the top end of the climate predictions. And we built it with a view to a big hangar with cargo doors on the back. So the cargo doors will take any truck that can move on the UK motorway network. So when you're talking about volumetric and modular and even things like, you know, large caravans and stuff which we've been asked to test in the past, anything can fit through those doors, basically very high, very wide and very capable of taking the traffic. So so we wanted something flexible where we can literally come in, build what we want a few years, tear it down, ship it out, build the next thing.

Richard Fitton: 21:08

But we also wanted something real. So the reality of those chambers comes not only from the size and from the climatic control so wind, rain, snow, solar radiation but also the fact that when you build a house you put it in ground. You don't build it on stilts or on a little concrete thin pad or something like that. It goes into soil and the soil bears the load and it bears some of the heat transfer as well. So we had to make it super realistic. But we didn't want it to be soil that was affected by the outside, wanted to be soil that was let's not call it climatic control, but that was altered by the climate in the chamber over a period of time. So we we have a 1200 millimeter, basically a swimming pool full of soil that's really well insulated. It's got local soil in the real soil. 6n grade soil will bear any building that we put into it and obviously that's fully insulated, fully reinforced.

Richard Fitton: 21:58

A couple of million pound went in just to build in that. That no one would ever see. I've seen it and and the the guys who I work with have seen it, because we've been down in the mud putting the sensors into it but no one else would even know that was there, for instance. So when you look at ground heat transfer, under floor heating and things like that, we've got sensors under the buildings that are kind of looking at that. So that that's that adds that depth to it. So, and then you've got it. You've got the size we need to get things like cranes, timber frame, erecting machinery and stuff like that in there, which, which we, which we do and which we've, which we did with the two houses that are in there now.

Richard Fitton: 22:34

So, yeah, it was, it was a very complex engineering task. And then you throw a problem, the, the design engineers, to say this huge volume of space, you know, so that's two houses plus a few meters, probably three or four meters around the outside plus at least eight meters above them, all has to be conditioned with stratification of less than half a degree and control of better than half a degree. And then you talk about humidity, then you talk about putting wind in there and you talk about putting solar radiation in there, which are all on mobile rigs, because we don't know what shape anything's going to be. Then you want it to snow, then you want the chamber to deal with snow. It becomes from something that seems really easy something's bloody complicated. To be honest, just getting snow in there is is an immense chore so you're talking real snow here?

Darren Evans: 23:23

this is not fake stuff.

Richard Fitton: 23:25

So we were complimented by the guys who installed our snow machine. That and they said because these are snow machines off the Alps, so the Klenko they're called, they make the snow machines that you see on the Alps. They're exactly the same. We just provide the temperature and humidity that you would find on the Alps. Then they just come and put this. You know, the snow machine comes in and does as it would on the Alps. So snow machine. For those who haven't operated snow machines, it's a fairly straightforward principle.

Richard Fitton: 23:56

It's compressed air, compressed water coming out of a very fine nozzle, a nucleating nozzle, which creates a very, very small drop of ice, if you like, and then there's something called a hang time. So you put it high up in the chamber and as as it hangs it forms little snow crystals on the way down, so it's the same as not as high as the clouds, but kind of getting there. And yeah, they said, you know, this is powder snow, this is snowboarders would would pay to come and kind of roam, roam around in this stuff. And we've done studies. Uh, we just put a paper into a conference looking at arctic research bases and we looked at the literature.

Richard Fitton: 24:32

We look at the conductivity of snow and ours is pretty much nailed on, but no one's done a great deal about how much snow insulates a building, which it does. But then it starts to turn to ice and the phase changes and then it starts to do something a little different and then, when it melts, does something quite different. So but all these things we don't know about until we can do under control climates, because we don't get the chance to let the snow sit there and do a co-heating test in the building and stuff. So yeah, when you've got things like that that you've got to contend with, lots of heads start getting scratched and it becomes complex, expensive and, you know, difficult to design. I would say so we got through it and it does what it does.

Darren Evans: 25:13

What surprised you about the completed project? Yeah, I think about just the completed project from because this house 2.0 is new build.

Richard Fitton: 25:20

Yeah, absolutely so. What surprised you with our findings? First and foremost, the building works okay, and that surprised me because it's never been built before in the. In the history of mankind, no one's ever built that shape size of buildings where you can, where you test buildings inside. So someone explained, when we looked at energy house one as the hvac principles, a cold room has dead cattle in it. Okay, you freeze the cattle, that's it. That pretty much that's. That's the heat energy taken out of those dead cattle.

Richard Fitton: 25:49

Unfortunately, energy house one and energy house two has very much live cattle inside with the dynamic loads from the chamber, the, the heat burden of the heating systems, of the housing, people, metabolic, the lights, everything else. We have got live cattle in our cold room and that is a is a problem, so that the, the machinery, the hvac equipment, has to be able to constantly take readings and react to those live cattle, those live loads, if you like. So we did a load of cfd around it. Cfd is great. You know my thoughts about modeling. It's good for some stuff.

Richard Fitton: 26:21

Some of it's just made up numbers and, yeah, we were sure it was going to work and it did work and that was a big. That was a big finding for me, first and foremost. So after that we then went to an open competition about who was going to build homes in there. So we had a free and open competition because it was funded by the erdf. So we had to have it open and they had to bring whoever won had to bring in smes, small to medium enterprises in there and and work with some of the novel stuff. It couldn't just be a big insulation firm or this, only we had to work with some of the novel stuff, it couldn't just be a big insulation firm or this and that we had to work with some small companies as well, because that's the way you should do business. So what?

Darren Evans: 26:56

you're saying here, just to clarify here so you've got this big test chamber with the ability to change the weather. We'll say it a push of a button. I know it's more complex than that A click of a mouse. And then what you did is went onto the open market and said, right, who wants to come and build something? Yes, or who wants to come and build a house in this space, yeah.

Richard Fitton: 27:18

And they needed to put an application into you and your team it was a fully open and transparent process and we had several applicants and we judged it by did you have more than a handful? Okay, more than mean you don't get a million for something because they're going to have to come in, pay for the house to be built and this, that and the other. And what were you looking for?

Darren Evans: 27:37

What was your criteria to yes, these are the organizations that we want to work with.

Richard Fitton: 27:42

Impact. So how do we get our message out? Pointless doing research if you can't get it out. So you want someone who's who's got good contacts with, with the press and and industry as well. You know point was keeping the findings inside that chamber. Carbon you want good carbon savings. You want people who work with smes. You don't just want to work with big multinationals. You have to have some and then working for innovation, what you're doing different go back to just dwell on the smes.

Darren Evans: 28:08

Why is it important for a large organization? Because it's not going to be a small house builder, is it that's going to have the money to do that? But why is it so important to have a large organization connected with SMEs?

Richard Fitton: 28:21

Because I think it drives innovation, and SMEs do innovate a heck of a lot and they're very nimble, they're very lightweight, they can move quickly with technology and and I think, unless you don't put the two together, you you're on a highway to nothing. You really, really are, and we see some of our most interesting, novel and impactful things come from smes. Now, clearly, we do with with huge manufacturers as well, and the house builders really put it all together. You know that they will deal with innovators, but you know they need some innovation to come to them as well. Are you happy?

Darren Evans: 28:56

discussing the house builders that were successful in working with you.

Richard Fitton: 29:00

Yeah.

Darren Evans: 29:01

And also what they have brought to the table.

Richard Fitton: 29:05

So the two house builders that we have now in Chamber 1, our first chamber is Bellway, bellway Homes and then next to them is Sangerban, the product manufacturer, working in partnership with Barrett Barrett Homes. Barrett and Bellway are competitors, as you will know, fierce competitors, I'm sure, in the commercial marketplace, and oftentimes probably don't share a lot of information between those two companies. But when you cram someone into a chamber to work together which which they actually suggested, not me and they're sharing ground, workers, timber frame, erectors, scaffolding you know the the things that go on on a building site and then they shine a shine, sign an agreement, say they'll share all the data with each other. They agreed not to test the same technologies because that just would have not been a good use of anyone's time.

Richard Fitton: 29:55

They agreed to publish everything they found into the public domain, where the reports are now, and also to actually have a genuine partnership and develop this as a project. That's unusual. You know the house builders tell me that if this was real life, if you like, if this was a green site, they'd be barred by a fence up down the middle and there'd be no talking across the line. You know they're commercial outfits. So I think when they've got this aim, which is to create something that they can use for the future home project standard, if you like and you see that that's the length they go to, you know there's a risk there. You know that they're doing that because it's a difficult problem to get over and they actually work really well together. There's nothing between them. They've got the same goal really to get good quality housing that meets regulations and people are happy with. You know there's nothing. They brought their expertise. Now, let's not forget, you know the house builders build a significant number of houses up and down the country of varying different types, to the regulations, over and above when they need to, and they understand the house building sector. If an academic designed the house of the future well, I think we'd be in a different place. I think they look a lot different, but it wouldn't be representative of what was on the housing estate. They've built houses that exist on the sites now that people are buying and that they will build in 2025, when, when the regs should come out to me about chamber two chamber two is currently where we've got some more of our, let's say, r&d-based projects. I think the view is to build two houses in there, probably next year. Now we're looking at doing that. That might reflect some of the older housing stock Yet to be decided. What we have in there are some interesting projects.

Richard Fitton: 31:48

So we just finished a project with an outfit called mat zero. So, mat zero, we're looking at the the un and issue a standard tent to refugees. Very good quality, it's a tent and they're in some very distressed regions of the world, both hot and cold and people living under dire circumstances all around. The average time that people spend in there is multiples of years, not multiples of months, and four or five people will live in these tents, these canvas tents, and that they heat them by lighting a fire outside and then moving it inside sometimes, and that's obviously just a death trap all around fires, suffocation, you name it just terrible. So mat zero came up with a kind of carbon heating mat that works using renewables on the outside of the tent, which feeds a battery that they can use for mobile wi-fi and to charge phones and torches and things like that, which heats them as they sleep in their beds at night obviously a much, much safer way.

Richard Fitton: 32:45

So we we we helped mat zero develop that product and do the testing, and it was a product that you know was going to be used for something that was really genuinely good, and I like projects like that and we give our time free for stuff like that, because I think if we didn't, then how would a small company kind of ever get that lift off that he kind of needed, and they were great to work with as well, very technological and scientific, and put the hours in to make it right. To one side of that, now we're working with a firm who insulates conservatory roof I think it's one of the larger firms that does it big benefits in terms of livable qualities of conservatories, which we've all seen overheat and under heat and things like that, and they just become this hot box or cold box on the back of you and they can be occupied for several weeks of the year in a comfortable condition. And there's an interesting aspect that we're going to look at in that in terms of how we model conservatories and the heat gains and heat losses that change dynamically during the year. So we've really characterized this conservatory well you values air tightness and and whole conservatory heat loss with the view to making a super good model of that. It's calibrated to within an inch of its life and then we see kind of what difference that makes the heat injection and heat rejection from from a home when the doors are open and doors are closed because regs say we need to put the doors on, but often they get taken off or they get opened, you know, as you would. So that's a really interesting piece of research. So we got that. We got the thermosil cabin there, which is a site cabin that we just transformed by filling one of the walls with sand and making it into a solid wall and then putting the, the windows and stuff in for the thermosil experiment. That was key to answering all our scientific queries around Thermosil because we needed somewhere super stable. You try and do this stuff out in the field and the noise on the measurements is really really difficult to work.

Richard Fitton: 34:37

And then a larger building in there is by an outfit called Vector Homes. So Vector Homes is a spin-out from one of our neighbours, just that way Manchester University, the Graphene Centre. So Vector are using graphene to reinforce the insulation. Inside they have a panelised, very lightweight panelised structure. I believe everything weighs less than 25kg. So there was no cranes and no forklifts and stuff. It was all if not manually handled. Certainly didn't need large cranes to kind of build, and that was the first house that they've ever built at Vector. Think it was a learning experience working with the construction industry and engineers to one side. It performs. It performs in line with how it should perform, so that they are aiming to to produce a very low cost and very low cost running and low cost building, low cost labor to get a very, very cost effective home so talk to me about the home energy model.

Richard Fitton: 35:32

So we've had experience with Solfit, but for your listeners, hem is a new way that we're going to start to model energy performance in buildings in line with the future home standard. I think, from what I know, it will be used for retrofit as well. I think it will replace the standard model ultimately that we use for existing buildings. But it takes us from a point where we're looking at monthly figures to ever look into half hourly figures. So we've gone from 30 minutes, so 30 months, to 30 minutes, and that is a dramatic transformation. I think it's a bold move by government. I think he's it was. It was a move that I was expecting they would do, but I think they've done it quite quickly. I think it's an adventurous step, but I think they've done it quite quickly. I think it's an adventurous step, but I think ultimately it's going to be one that's a useful step, because the buildings that we live in, particularly the future homes, won't be steady-state buildings. They'll be very dynamic and the energy systems will be very dynamic when you've got things like EVs, pvs, batteries, heat pumps, whatever's doing your hot water as well, all kind of interacting with a tariff that could be operating on a half hour basis or even a minutely basis. When we get to that point, then that becomes a bit more complex than monthly figures.

Richard Fitton: 36:41

And I understand SAP. I get what it does. I'm actually quite a big fan of SAP. I sit on the SAP Scientific Integrity Group. I think it does what it does. I'm actually quite a big fan of sap. I sit on the sap scientific integrity group I. I think it does what it should do. But I think it needs to change into the way that the current situation is going to change into and it will be dynamic and I don't think sap could have could have taken that big shift there's always a bit of fear around it as well the clients are coming to us quite anxious, asking us what they need to do and so on.

Darren Evans: 37:08

Just wonder what your thoughts would be on that, someone that feels quite concerned about getting hit with something that's unexpected and it's always cost-based yeah, it's always.

Richard Fitton: 37:17

Oh, this is going to cost us, assuredly so I think my advice would be, either themselves or through a consultant or an expert, build some models of what you're currently building, but they must be anticipating that things are going to change the future home standards. Now he's out for consultation with two options. I think there's a conservative one, there's more adventurous one. I don't know what's going to get picked. Historically we've kind of gone with more conservative stuff. Conservatives have gone, so do we end up with a different option coming out of the mix? I don't know. And the second we try and play the game of what government are thinking that's a dangerous game to play. We don't know what's going to happen.

Richard Fitton: 37:52

There's a model there that we can use and that's great. You know we they've they've pushed the model out the door. It's got some issues and we found some, and other people have found some that they've been fixed and they've been improved. And you know government want people to use it. You know they're actively seeking people to use this model. So get on the model, get some buildings built and see what it chugs out the end. But what are we going to end up building? I don't know. But I think what people do need to get into darren is what data they need to put in, because it's it's, you've used it, it's heavy you know, there's a lot of menus and there's a lot of stuff.

Richard Fitton: 38:27

There's a lot more boxes to fill than there is under sap, even sap 10. So I think that the industry needs to kind of get an understanding of what goes in. I think what comes out of that model ultimately now is a series of graphs, internal temperatures and things like this. I think there'll be a lot more to come out of that model and a lot more interesting stuff to come out of that model as well. The government talks about using wrappers, so a wrapper for future homes to see if the building complies. There might be a wrapper around retrofit, you know, to add different things, and all the wrapper is is something that surrounds this model and either takes something from the inputs or the outputs and presents it in a different way, and that actually is a fantastic use of a model.

Richard Fitton: 39:07

Sap was always behind this closed door. I know people who spent months, stroke, years, re-engineering sap into spreadsheets so they can do this work, so they can tap a few buttons and it'll tell you what difference a heat pump makes, or something like that, and I think that if, if that system's opened up which the, the mood music is that that I think that will happen. That's a massive benefit for us as users of it is to. You know, you have a client that says well, what if we? What if we change to a dynamic tariff? What if we? What if we I don't know have a, an ev charger in store, what, what kind of things, what difference that make? And you can just use a wrapper to kind of analyze that without feeding it all back in. Obviously we we made some moves last month about the, the data becoming available, free pcs and be able to swap it and things like that, which is great. But there's going to be a lot more data in in hem that we can make good use of.

Richard Fitton: 40:00

You know, models sometimes I have a problem sometimes in models being misused and sometimes they're not very good. But a good model is really useful and, and I think, good stuff in good stuff out, crap in crap out. That's how models work, unfortunately. But if you've got good things going in, you can do good things with it. You know, and I think it's a big adventure that we're all going to go on the next five years good.

Richard Fitton: 40:26

Do you think we'll hit the deadline? I don't know. Do we usually hit deadlines? Think we'll hit the deadline. I don't know. Do we usually hit deadlines on energy modelling? You answer so I don't know, it's a big move, isn't it? It's a big move. Listen. There's a beta model out there we're already using. We've been asked to do some work on how the model works with our houses in the chamber and things's working Great. I'm happy with that. There'll be cloud provisions coming up and stuff soon. Apparently it's going as well as I've seen projects go. So yeah, listen, sometimes you've got to be an optimist as well. There's people that will argue with me, but I'm open for good things out of it. I think it's a positive move.

Darren Evans: 41:14

Well, richard, I think we're now in a position where we can go to the demolition zone. We are in the demolition zone and, richard, you've created this piece of artwork here and it's and it's impossible for me to describe, to be honest, for those that are listening, but if you're listening, you need to just go onto youtube and look at this, because that's the only, that's the only advice I can give. But anyway, what does it represent?

Richard Fitton: 41:24

I think masterpiece would sum it up down yeah, or a random collection of blocks stacked on top of each other.

Richard Fitton: 41:30

What does it represent? I think we hear a lot of bad press about energy savings measures, and I didn't think it used to always be that way. We hear some good press, but there's a lot of sectors that kind of want to pan what we do in terms of energy savings and they want to badge it as carbon taxing and things like that. To me, it's about people living in better home, and why pay a fortune for stuff, for energy bills, when we could be spending it on things that we, like you know, whether it's leisure, whether it's doing other stuff that's a bit more sustainable, whether it's buying the kids, toys or whatever it is. It's why why would we want to waste stuff?

Richard Fitton: 42:07

And and it's never really sat right with me energy savings can be done for really good reasons, and they can be done cost effectively as well, and and I think this, this myth I think we're busting here is that energy savings can be good and they should not always be seen through negative eyes, and I think most people would agree with that. These days, to be honest, we're all suffering because we don't have a lot of money, and let's not waste it. You know, like I said earlier, let's not heat Manchester. Let's just heat our homes and keep comfortable and warm. They're not a lot of money.

Darren Evans: 42:38

I love that. The slogan from Richard let's not heat Manchester, let's heat the home.

Richard Fitton: 42:43

Yeah.

Darren Evans: 42:43

I think that's right Good.

Richard Fitton: 42:50

Well, you are now free in your own way, to bust that myth. This is just me knocking it down. Is it should do what to do from here? I can stay on camera, just throw my pad at it. I think we should just knock it down with reckless abandon, I think that's clear.

Darren Evans: 43:00

The table quite nicely for the book. Richard, the things that you are doing not only groundbreaking, because you've got two, you know big chambers that world first. So you're doing great work there, you and your team and the people that work with you. Thanks, my I'm grateful for what you do personally. I know that those people that will be listening to this will be as well, and we will put a load of things down in the show notes that people can click on and and look at this even further. But thanks for what you do, keep doing what you do I will, but I'd reiterate it, it's a team effort.

Richard Fitton: 43:31

I'm sat here but you know, I would have liked to bring 20 members of the team down. You know, you, the temptation is we, we are seen as a facility or a collection of facilities. Facilities don't run themselves, they don't build themselves and they don't carry out the test and have the brains. And I think, without the brains and and the skills that we've developed over kind of 14, 15 years, that then it would just be a box with some houses in it richard, it's been great having you on the podcast thanks for having us down.

Richard Fitton: 43:58

It's been great, thank you.