Another year, another Ecobuild, new venue, new chapter. The switch to Excel will no doubt be hailed as a success and the organisers will cite more exhibitors, more seminars and more visitors as their yardstick. But as others have suggested, it felt like there was something lacking at Ecobuild this year. The journey over was surprisingly trouble-free though and afforded a panoramic view of our Ferrier Point tower block retrofit in Canning Town to the north of the DLR.
ECD’s Ferrier Point retrofit is the kickstart for the wider Canning Town regeneration development.
I am very lucky in that my role allows me to visit Ecobuild as much as I feel necessary - I have also been asked to speak at each and every ‘event’ since the first. So when you spend as much time wandering around those giant halls as I tend to, it is useful to have landmarks by which to navigate, just as in any urban environment. Ecobuild definitely started life in 2005 with a village atmosphere but it has quickly achieved city status but it was quite a different city to the last event at Earl’s Court. Gone were the open arenas in the heart of each hall, which had previously acted as public squares allowing visitors to drop in or drop out of the main plenum sessions as your journey permitted. Instead, the main conference was confined to a glass box ‘service station’ in the middle of the boulevard dividing the two halves of the city - I confess I never felt the inspiration to venture near the place. Forget the ‘public realm’, cram in more commercial outlets was the message. The usual landmarks were present – the 2-storey UKGBC hub, a SomethingZED building, a giant timber pavilion – but this city did not have the character of its previous incarnations. Whole quarters had been redeveloped for single technology suppliers – for example the PV ghetto in the north hall, where I felt I had to march through purposefully, averting my eyes from the monocrystalline merchants on either flank, lest they try to convince me their ‘SunEcoEnergy’ module was far superior to the ‘SolarEarthPower’ module over on their competitor’s stand! And since when did so many fashion models become experts in photovoltaic modules?
In any city, it’s nice to have a place to call home where you can touch base before heading out into the world. For me, I gravitated back again and again to friends at the Passivhaus Trust stand or the Green Building Store. The local landmark here was a new one – the UK Sipshouse Passivhaus mock-up, which I found to be a bit of disappointment. I just think it’s a shame that people will leave Ecobuild thinking that Passivhaus is about EPS sandwiched in OSB when it is about so much more. I did check that the SIPS had been upgraded from the usual components to incorporate thermal-bridge-free edge beams but even this was not really emphasised in the stand.
SIPs need insulated box beam perimeters to achieve the necessary psi value for Passivhaus.
Sticking with my ‘exhibition as city’ theme, I did enjoy the more bohemian quarters – the market places of the Natural, Traditional, Sustainable showcase, the Green Shoots bazaar and the TSB Innovations stands. At the latter, I caught up with Katy Duke from the Thermal Blind Company, taking a break from making fittings for some our retrofit projects, ideal where conservation constraints prevent triple-glazed window upgrades. Elsewhere it was great to see so many more Passivhaus-standard windows becoming available in the UK – a crucial component that is always under pressure to be substituted with inferior alternatives. This one from Green Building Store, the Alphawin , was well presented in a timber-framed wall mock-up.
The Austrian Alphawin window has impressive Uw and g values.
I also liked the idea of Porotherm T7 Perlite blocks – a robust, breathable clay masonry component that can achieve a solid wall U-value of 0.15 W/m2K or more with the minimum of external insulation, can be laid rapidly with almost no wastage and exceeds all acoustic and fire protection requirements.
The Isoquick raft foundation is another component I think may come in useful when trying to eliminate thermal bridges at the floor/wall junction – I look forward to the benefits of its speedy construction times and high thermal performance on future projects.
I noted a few big name absentees from the show with whom I had been hoping to drop in on to see new products I had heard about – Rockwool and Levolux to name a couple. Were there others missing I wonder? It would seem not given the sheer size of the event now. One unusual distraction for me this year was the opportunity to take a client around ‘shopping’. It was great to be able to show her planted roof options, window or door options and to be able to introduce her to the person designing her heat recovery ventilation system so that he could explain that we weren’t joking when it needed plenty of room and a good deal of early planning. It would be great to do that every year with ever client – my wife tells me that this is exactly how designers choose specifications in China.
The one aspect of Ecobuild that is never a let down is the chance to catch up with familiar faces with whom you usually only converse via email or twitter. Everybody journeys to Ecobuild at some point and with luck you will bump into many of them along the highways and side streets of the exhibition or at one of the many excellent (and free) presentations to be enjoyed. But the subordination of the seminars to the trade fair rankles – those narrow, mile-long corridors with blank partitions to each room meant that attending something that potentially involved very exciting subject matter was a rather bland experience. On the plus side though the technology worked faultlessly (always a plus side when you turn up with your presentation on a memory stick 30 seconds before you’re due to start) and the seminars seemed to be very well attended. The interesting seminars on Passivhaus and retrofit were quite often billed as ‘fringe’ though – when the event is called Ecobuild, why is it that ex-pop star particle physicists and fashionistas get top billing, whilst all those hardworking designers who have given up their free time to share their experience of actual eco-building (ie the bit that make the event the draw it is) are not deemed worthy of so much as a link to their website? And sorry to keep on but I have one more moan. The exhibition layout on the Ecobuild website was excellent, with all the exhibitor stands clearly named to help find your way to a particular destination. The hard copy one handed out to visitors however was next to useless. Unwieldy and lacking labels, it required constant folding and unfolding to get the reference code for a particular exhibitor and find on the map on the other side – it annoyed me constantly. But I’ll still be back next year.
Comments