How to build a house in Japan Part two: Two-by or zairai?

One choice that you probably won't be given by any architect or builder in Japan is whether to build in zairai koho or two-by-four. If you're building a wooden house it's a choice that is made early in the project.

Zairai koho is the traditional wooden building technique in Japan. It consists of a framework of pillars and beams,​ fit together with joints carefully designed to avoid excess stresses, and​ originally held together without any nails or screws, hence the nickname nail-less construction. The standard section size of the pillars is 120 by 120 millimetres, and the beams are multiples of this.

Two-by-four refers to a building technique using beams of two-by-four inches. Rigid panels such as plywood or OSB are added so the structural strength is based on the walls, where zairai traditionally relies on the pillars and beams for the structure. Just to add a little confusion, 2 x 4 beams measure half an inch less by the time they've been cut and dried, measuring 38 x 89 mm rather than around 50 x 100 mm that you might expect.

The two-by-four construction technique developed from balloon framing in the 1830s in the US. It allowed standard sizes of timber to be put together with mass-produced nails by relatively unskilled wood workers.

Compared to zairai, two-by-four constructions is probably cheaper, stronger, easier to build, and easier to insulate. Since the beams are rectangular rather square in ​section, the building more efficiently derives structural strength from the wood. Insulation can be added between pillars and studs, and the wood make​s​ up a smaller proportion of wall, so the insulation performance will be better than a building with square pillars. If the same technique uses 2 by 6, 2 by 8, 2 by 10 or​ even​ 2 by 12 beams, a suitable thickness of insulation can​ easily​ be added between the beams.

It's difficult to find tangible advantages to zairai construction, but I will try.

Zairai construction is traditional.

That ​is probably enough to illicit approving nods from fans of tradition, and disparaging scowls from anyone who has been paying attention since the Age of Reason.

Zairai construction is based around standard sizes and scales that suit the human body. Measurements are in the traditional units of shaku and sun. One shaku is within a hair of an imperial foot, and was standardised in 1891 to 10/33 of a metre. Traditional Japanese units are decimal, so a sun is one tenth of a shaku. Traditional zairai beams are 6 shaku, or 180 cm, from the floor. That's around my height, and​ after a few years living ​in a traditional Japanese house I was beginning to develop calluses on my forehead and a stoop in my back. The average height in Japan increased 8 cm in the second half of the twentieth century, so I suspect for most of the history of Japanese architecture, the lintels were at an appropriate height. ​In modern houses they are higher. Of course there is nothing to stop you from using human-scaled dimensions in a two-by-four construction. Also, you may have noticed that the shaku is remarkably close to the imperial foot, and the standard lengths of two-by-four (inch) beams are all in feet.

Zairai construction is based on a woodworking tradition at least a thousand years old, which can be seen in the oldest and the largest wooden structures in the world. By building a house in zairai you are helping to keep this tradition alive. But what exactly is being preserved? Why do home builders have to pay more to preserve it? They still make temples and shrines, so couldn't the fantastically wealthy priests preserve their tradition?

The joints of zairai are all supposed to fit together without any nails, except now they do use nails.

bolts​ or other connectors for the joints. And since the traditional pillar-and-beam structures do not meet modern earthquake regulations, to get planning approval for zairai buildings, you need to add structural walls, just like they do in two-by-four construction.

The square beams were traditionally prepared locally from​ round​ trees. Now timber is usually cut in saw mills, often using state-of-the art CNC machinery.

​So is your modern zairai building just a two-by-four construction with more wood in it, and more complicated joints?

I guess you could see an advantage in it being more difficult to build, since that means you have more highly-skilled carpenters. You have to squint a bit to see this, since you are also making the job more difficult, but there are some places where more highly skilled wood workers will make a tangible difference to your house.

---

Our house uses zairai koho, and it is on the list of things I would probably have done differently. Luckily ​that​'s a short list! The point when I realised that there had been a different option to this vast array of square-section wooden pillars was at the stage in the process where it was not possible to change the building technique.

You're always at some ​stage in a process.

There had earlier seemed to be a great rush to get the structure all sorted out, coinciding with a busy time in my day job. I was a bit disappointed as I was quite interested in structures, and would have liked to have had some input into it. It seemed like a lower priority than the insulation work and the systems we were considering, so that was a battle I chose not to fight. Qualified architects in Japan, or anywhere else, can be trusted to make structures that will not fall down.

After this urgent decision had been made​ to finalise the structure​, there seemed to be a couple of months when absolutely nothing happened. Ben talks about a similar artificial deadline in his retire Japan Blog and I think this is a common technique in the building trade.

When we were looking at ways to fit at least 250 mm of insulation into walls with 120 mm pillars, I had an idea of using two-by-tens as studs between the ​load-bearing ​pillars, which would have allowed one insulation layer rather than the three we have ended up with. This seemed like a bad idea as it was mixing two different techniques, and would leave a few awkward sized gaps. So I wondered about getting rid of the square pillars ​altogether ​and just using two by tens throughout.

As you will remember from lesson 4, the calculation of the thermal performance depends on how much wood there is in the insulation layer. This information needs to be added into the Passive House software, and I was checking the figure of 18.1% that we had. A more conservative estimation put it more like 25%, so a whole quarter of the wall was made up of wood, much of it by square pillars. This could have been halved by switching to rectangular sections. That would also have meant less wood​ to pay ​for​.

I suggested this to the architect who said it would take a month or two to change the structure, and he'd need to get someone else to calculate the stresses.

So we have a house beautifully built in wood, but ​we can't see any of it it, since it had to be covered to meet fire regulations.

Satisfaction questionnaire

Here is a satisfaction questionnaire for house builders to get feedback, inspired by one of the questions on the form we got when we moved in. 

Congratulations on moving into your new house!

Now that you've moved in, how does it feel to be in your new house?

Great
Wonderful
Fantastic

Were the extra building charges adequately explained?

Yes, the explanation was excellent and I was in no way shocked by the unreasonable and unexpected price hike
The explanation could have been better, but I got the general idea
Perhaps you need to tell us again

How many problems have there been since you moved in to your new house?

Only about half a dozen
Ten or so
Definitely less than a hundred

When there were problems, was it easy to get in touch with us?

Yes, the phone was always picked up quickly
Yes, the email I sent didn't bounce
Yes, I knew you were there when I came round to the office, although it did seem strange that you'd turned the lights off

How many times did you have to complain about the problems before we actually did something?

Twice
Three times
I gave up complaining after the fifth time

When we finally did get in touch with you, how good a job did we do at pretending we cared?

It genuinely seemed that you didn't have anything better to do than listen to us
I think I saw you nodding
Not sure, you were too busy looking at your phone

Did we tell you about our other satisfied customers?

Yes, I heard about them several times
You told us about one satisfied customer several times.
You have other satisfied customers?

(Note: Clicking these buttons will make no difference to anything, much like the satisfaction surveys you are often asked to fill out!)

Divest from the fossil fuel industry

Pressure is rising from groups calling for investors to stop putting money into the fossil fuel industry. For example, Stanford University is divesting from the coal industry.

People have been saying that it's a bit like the anti-apartheid campaign, when the withdrawal of investments from South African countries brought the regime to its knees, but this may be a problem on a wider scale. Oil is the life blood of our economy and fossil fuel burning is currently our major activity, thermodynamically speaking. It's going to take some bigger, more fundamental changes to get to a world like in Star Trek, even though we already have the mobile phones, tablets and dress codes without ties.

While portfolios free of oil industry stocks are part of the solution, they may not be the whole answer. These companies are incredibly rich and powerful, and momentum will keep them going in the same direction. They are fed growth economics by the economy that they are feeding and making grow. Divesting from them may work, but there may still be enough money out there that will not ask questions beyond the annual income and return on investment.

Also, these companies are run by people who are not complete idiots. They have consciences, and they have children and grand children. They will be very aware that the polar ice is melting, because it's allowing them access to more fossil fuel reserves. Global warming actually means more access to more oil. And they have sharp scientific minds that will be able to join the dots to anthropogenic climate change. They will be well aware that burning the known reserves of fossil fuels will produce far more global warming gases than even the most conservative climate scientists predict is safe.


But as the quote from Upton Sinclair said back in the 1930s: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

What the fossil fuel industry needs to do, in the long term interests of the planet, is quite simple:

• Plan a year-on-year reduction in production of fossil fuels.
• Keep a fixed or increasing amount of known fossil fuel reserves in the ground.
• Reduce the amount of fossil fuels sold to people who will burn them.
• Stop wasting money exploring for new fossil fuels. 
• Stop spending money trying to convince people global warming is not happening.

If the companies can adopt these policies, they will become more stable in the long term. Divesting from these companies may be helpful, but another tack is to encourage the shareholders of them to insist they include these policies. Since pension funds often have share portfolios, and share portfolios often have oil shares, this could be a lot of people.

Certainly, if companies in the oil industry change to these policies, they are likely to lose some of their lucrative business, but they will still have plenty of resources to manage. And anyway, there are plenty of companies that have managed to diversify into different businesses.

There was a company in Italy that used to make saddles, but branched into handbags, and is still in business. A stationery shop in Manhattan had been going fifteen years before changing their business to jewellery. And there's a company in Japan that had been making playing cards for around 80 years before it started making video games.

Thanks to http://www.bestoftheleft.com/

Starting to feel slightly warm in the White House

Barack Obama arrived on the Normandy beeches last week, a few days after pushing through legislation that could clean up US energy. The White house has so far been slow to realise we are in a green house, but are the Americans going to rush in and save the day, just as they did back in 1944?

There is certainly going to be a fight. The President of the most powerful country in the world has some executive powers, as does the Environmental Protection Agency, formed by unsung hero Richard Nixon. So their plan doesn't have to go through the republican-led democratic chambers, but it may have to get past an army of lawyers. 

This building still as yet unaffected by climate change - must be well insulated. at least from science

The more interesting part of the political environment where this is playing out comes in the curious bedfellows of the right: Christian fundamentalists and oil barons. 

Politics is very difficult to understand, even when it's local, but the way it often works in big parties is that you get fringes that hold the balance of power. With the Republicans, the religious right hold a lot of votes. The oil industry hold a lot of the money.

I should also mention the tobacco industry.

For several years, tobacco was fighting to save it's reputation from allegations that it caused cancer. The strategy of the industry was two-fold. First, support scientific studies that disprove the links between smoking and cancer, also known as junk science. And second, attack the scientific basis that means it is possible to prove something random and probablistic like cancer comes from smoking. 

This same tactic became very useful in the global warming "debate". Money has been spent so effectively debunking the science behind climate change, that some people actually believe climate change itself is a conspiracy. They believe that secret organisations are funding the research to topple the western economies.

Again, there is a strong anti-science element to this. To some extent this comes down to epistemology. In hard sciences, like physics and chemistry, we can usually set up experiments that will pretty much prove or disprove our theories. We can't do this with the climate. There's no way to go back and stop the industrial revolution to see if that would make a cooler planet. We can certainly carry on experimenting by burning fossil fuels, but we don't have a control group, so there is nothing to compare our results against. 

But what does this have to do with religion? Why on earth would the religious right be jumping into bed with oil company executives? Doesn't the bible warn us of the rich and powerful? Isn't there something just un-christian about making money by selling poison to people? And wasn't the eleventh commandment, thou shalt not pollute they neighbour's groundwater supply?

The only possible link I can find is connected with this anti-science. Similar to the science of climate change, biology and geology have some elements that cannot simply be proved by experiments in the lab. For example it's impossible to go back in time, from generation to generation, to see whether evolution really did happen, and whether we have common ancestors among the apes, and going further back still throughout all life on earth.

There has certainly been a backlash against evolution among the religious fundamentalists, and I don't think this is a recent thing. At the Scopes Monkey Trial back in 1925 the State of Tennessee found John Scopes guilty of teaching evolution and fined him $100. In fact it probably goes back to the time of Darwin himself, when religious enclaves across the United States were shielded from the kind of debate that took place in more secular areas, and could see the theory of evolution for what it is: an affront to the very foundation of Christian belief. If only America had been colonised before Galileo, there may still be swathes of North America where people believe the earth revolves around the sun.

So basically this is how it works:

God hates science;

The oil industry hates science (except when they need it to get the oil out of the ground);

So the oil industry loves God (your enemy's enemy is your friend). 

I may, of course, be completely missing the point. 

Also, watch out Barack, what does that say on your badge? In God we trust?

Writing a nice letter

It's taken over a month to write to the supplier of heat but not a lot of light.

This is a translation of the first letter I wrote:

==
Dear @?x@*,

Thank you for your visit to our house to look at the third incident of leaking water from the ventilation system you installed. A couple of weeks later I went into the room where it lives, and found an overflowing bucket, which made me realise that the problem had not been fixed. I was shocked to hear that you expected me to pay for you to come again, so I got the manual and looked at it myself, following the clear and straightforward instructions on removing the cover, taking out and cleaning the heat exchange unit. Instructions that would be difficult to miss, unless you did not look at them.

While doing this, I noticed that the water was not draining properly from the pan in the bottom of the machine, even when the drain was clean and water was flowing smoothly through that. Water was collecting at the front of the machine, allowing crap to build up, as you can see in the enclosed photograph. Excuse my use of an engineering term.

Using a spirit level showed that the whole system is not level, and in fact the way it has been installed, hanging from the wall, it was really never likely to be level in the first place.

I'm not sure whether this is a design fault of the system, a flaw in the manufacturer's installation instructions, or if there is any other way of passing the responsibility on to someone else, but there are a couple of ideas you could use.

If you, or other companies, continue installing heat exchange ventilation systems in Japan, it would be nice if you could take problems like this seriously and ensure installation and maintenance that will not lead to leaking. Somewhat counter-intuitively, heat exchangers with better efficiency have bigger temperature drops so more condensation will come out of them. If it does not have a well made path, this water will make a new one, likely through the part of the house where it will do the most damage.

At the moment I'm thinking of the best way to make the system level.

In the mean time, please don't worry about our health. We will clean this regularly to avoid an outbreak of legionnaires disease.

Yours...

==

Of course, I didn't send this. Actually I didn't really write most of that until now, but that's what I wanted to say. I know that at most it would have caused still more heat, and not achieved any of my goals, except for some short-term satisfaction.

Obviously my main priority is to get my system working properly, although I think to do that I'll probably have to learn how it works and do the maintenance myself.

Another very big priority is stopping this happening to other people. These kinds of systems are essential to highly efficient buildings, and if they cannot be installed correctly people will stop using them.

So here's the second letter:

====
Dear @?x@* san,

Thank you for coming to look at our leaking ventilation system. Two weeks afterwards I realised that the system was still leaking, so I followed the manual to clean it, including the heat-exchange element. While doing this, I noticed that water was not draining properly from the bottom of the system because it was not level. You can see in the enclosed photo how dirt has built up at the front of the drainage area. Using a spirit level showed that the system itself is not horizontal.

If you have any suggestions as to how the system can be made level, please let me know.

I hope that you will be able to avoid this kind of problem in future installations of heat exchange ventilations systems.

Yours...

====

Stick to the facts. We need to stick to the facts.

Here's the final version of the letter:

======
Dear @?x@* sama,

Sorry for the delay in contacting you.

Thank you for coming to look at the water leakage from our heat-exchange ventilation system on 17th January. Two weeks later I realised that the leaking had not stop, so I cleaned inside the system and the heat-exchange element, as described in the manual.

At this time, it became clear that the system was not level, and water was not effectively draining from the system. Water was collecting at the front of the draining pan, leading to a build up of dirt, as can be seen in the photo.

Upon measurement, the system was not level, and was out by about 5 mm in 100.

I'm now thinking of a way to make it level.

Yours,

======

The morning after sending this, a reply came back:

==

Long time no see.
I looked at the attached photos.

I can't see whether it's level from the photos, but we will think about this.
==

Maintenance, corrections and adjustments for humidity

I wrote that relative humidity doubles every ten degrees centigrade, but in fact that's not strictly true. It's more like 9.2 degrees. That's an approximation too, and in fact it's closer to doubling every 9.24 degrees at 20 degrees centigrade, and every 9.19 degrees at freezing, so it's not purely exponential. These are pretty trivial differences I know, and as a rule of thumb to understand the workings of humidity it's enough to know that it will approximately double every ten degrees.

It's also something of a rule that if you have water moving slowly and occasionally stopping, sooner or later there will be a build up of gunk. The inevitable impurities will accumulate, particles will appear and biology will happen.

This is what happened to our ventilation system. 

We called the builders, and they called the ventilation experts, who have regularly appeared in these lines. A maintenance engineer turned up within a couple of hours and fixed it, putting an end to my empirical research into the amount of water held in air. The first thing he did was take the cover off while the ventilation system was still running, which at least my manual recommends against. I wasn't watching him the whole time as I didn't want to breathe down his neck, and the next time I looked he had switched it off. I always find it difficult to balance my interest in what workmen are doing with their need to get on with their job in peace.

After a while the engineer produced a small plug that had grown into the top of the hose pipe that drains the humidity. He recommended that we take off the hose and clean inside every couple of months to stop this.  I wish they'd told me that a couple of years ago!

Since there is going to be an irregular flow of water through there, and at least some particles from the air will reach it, there's bound to be some biological build up sooner or later. The water is going at around half a litre per hour, so it's not exactly the Niagara Falls in there, and anything that builds up on a surface that is not perfectly smooth will just keep building up. There will probably be times in the year when the system is completely dry, but I suspect for over half the year there will be some water coming out for some of the day. It's at room temperature, so the growing conditions are ideal for some bacteria and fungi.

When we moved in, they had offered us a maintenance contract, and I said I'd get back to them later. At the time I didn't want to sign a contract with them because I didn't really trust them. This engineer seemed to know what he was doing. He told me that the pipe coming out of the system needed a loop in it otherwise we'd hear the noise of water dripping out. I don't know whether he realised that I'd told his company this, since they hadn't put a loop in when they installed it, and it we had dripping and gurgling noises all night.

Also they had said that maintenance needed to be done every three years, but in fact in the manuals it recommends cleaning the filters every year. 

His advice to clean the hose is probably good, but the build up was actually not in the hose, and probably not coming from the hose, which was downstream. The problem is coming from above.

So, I need to find someone else to maintain the system, learn how to do it myself, or go back and humbly ask them. There is a more local heating engineer who may be able to do it, and I'd like to ask him, but there are probably invisible walls that would be impossible for them to cross. 

NEDO - No Deal

So the discussion of the NEDO grant started early in 2010, dangled in front of us like a piece of bait to lure the client into the contractor's trap.

We got the applications in to the Suppliers of Heat but Not much Light, and they sent them in to NEDO in May. The approval came back in July. 

From May their plan had been pretty much part of our plan, at least as far as I was concerned, and from the arrival of the piece of paper bearing the red government seal, their plan was a fixed in ours. This set the project completion date before January, since that was one of the conditions of the NEDO grant. In fact January 2011 was already a lot later than October 2010, which had been the completion date in earlier plans. I had hoped to be moving out of the old house before the winter of 2010, but January became March, and then seemed more like it would be May 2011. In the end everyone was rushing around like blue-arsed flies because I was holding the site foreman to his promise that we would be in by Christmas 2011. 

In order to meet the deadline of January 2011, we needed the windows to arrive by November 2010, so they had to be ordered pretty quickly to be assembled and delivered from Germany in time. Although we'd basically decided what windows we wanted when they made the semi-fictitious invoice for them for the NEDO application, it took a while to specify the exact details, including which way they opened, the style of the handles and whether they needed mosquito screens. Then we had to send this order to the importer, and at this point we learnt that the hinge of a window is indicated in opposite ways on Japanese and European drawings. So the order went back and forth a couple of times as we checked various things before it could be sent to Germany.

We were then rushed to hold the ground breaking ceremony in September. This is a Shinto ceremony that basically clears the way with the local spirits　for building the house. I'm not a particularly religious person, but I am quite superstitious. This is partly because other people are, and they may be upset if you don't follow their superstitions. It's also partly because however unlikely it is, there's a chance of a grain of truth in superstition, and taking Pascal's wager, the stake of following the superstition is relatively small compared to the potential cost of not following it. So it's worth getting a couple of bottles of sake and a pineapple, and putting a bit of cash in an envelope if there's a chance it will stop your house being swallowed up by an earthquake, even if there is no obvious scientific connection. Or who knows, maybe the local shrines are in league with the local mafia. 

From the ground breaking ceremony for another couple of months, nothing seemed to move, except the steady realisation that the January deadline and the NEDO grant were impossible, and that there had been absolutely no hurry at all to hold the ceremony. I'd started taking pictures of the plot everyday, and this period is a little boring. A piece of string appeared in the middle of December, then a digger was there until the end of the month. Then the hole sat there until March. 

In October, we still hadn't signed the contract with the builders, although they had been at the ground breaking ceremony and there was a spoken understanding that they would be building the house. With hindsight I think a few things were happening: The builders wanted precise plans to work out a price. The architect didn't have precise plans and the price he'd promised us was not going to be the same as the price the builders were going to come up with. I wanted a price to be fixed and expected some teamwork between the architects, the builders, the passive house lady and me to work out the exact details to proceed, so we could get on and start pouring the foundation before we decided what colour the bath taps were going to be. Also the architect was probably busy on another project and his next invoice, and not paying full attention to ours. 

This was another point at which we should probably have sacked the architect. The first time was when he said that calculating the energy efficiency of a building was too much like hard work. By this time I think we were suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. In a very real way, the architect was holding us hostage in our own house, except it hadn't been built yet. We'd already ordered the windows and felt we needed him to have a house to put them in. We should probably have told him to give us the pretty pictures and leave us and the builders to work them out. This had not been offered to us as an option, but in life we often don't understand our options until it's too late.

NEDO

It's time to tell the tale of Nedo. 

In all areas of commerce we are besieged by offers of things for free, and must beware of spending all our money in their pursuit. The world of house building is no exception, and various bits of free were dangled in front of us, from the "ecopoints" that were eventually not given to us so that our house came close to our budget, to the offer of free insulation that ended up going cold. The Nedo grant was the biggest and most exciting.

Nedo is the New Energy and Industrial Development Organisation. It was set up in 1980, spurred by the oil shocks of the previous decade, and has been developing new energy since. They have an English language website with very different content to the Japanese website, and the organisation seems to function differently domestically and on the international stage. Anyone familiar with Japanese industry will have seen how the local market is used as a test bed full of guinea pigs, where products can be developed to generate income from markets abroad.

Their motives are perhaps more in long-term profits for industry than savings for consumers, but they offered us a grant of 2.7 million yen, which at the time seemed not only a boost to our finances, but an endorsement of what we were doing. The grant never materialised, but it remains as an endorsement of our attempt to solve the energy problem in our own little way, so I'll post it here, framed in cyberspace. 

From memory, one criterion for the grant was for energy savings over and above the the next generation energy standards. The initial cost to make those savings had to be less than 100 yen per kWh saved per year. The grant was for up to one third of those costs. A kWh can cost anything from over 40 yen in peak electricity to under 10 yen in paraffin, so this means a payback in the order of ten years.

Our situation was particularly attractive to the company that applied for the grant. One reason was that our old house was really very old and our gas, electricity and heating oil bills set a very high bench mark against which the energy savings would be measured. The other attractive feature was the windows we were planning on using. Their eyes lit up when they saw the U-values, and they did not even blink at the cost. These were people who understood the balance between initial costs of energy efficiency and running costs of heating bills, and knew which way the balance tipped. 

The fact that the windows were being imported was not an issue since NEDO is an internationally-minded organisation, actively seeking collaborations with other countries and cutting-edge technology. 

The fact that we were not going to be buying our windows through the company that was applying for the grant also did not seem to be a problem, and they were happy to forge an invoice. Perhaps I should have read this as a warning of lack of accountability.

The part the company were interested in was a solar thermal system that supplied domestic hot water in the summer, and heating in the winter. I think practically speaking, the windows made their sums much easier, and contributed more to the energy savings than their system, but I'll write more about that later. 

DECC Consultation on Community Energy

Any UK-oriented armchair activists out there, here's an opportunity to make a difference to UK energy policy by responding to the Department of Energy and Climate Change. I heard about this from Energy4all, which supports community energy, mostly wind farms that are financed, owned and run by communities with support from more distant investors like me.

Community energy may not change the world in itself, but is definitely one piece in the jigsaw puzzle that is the change to a smart grid of energy democracy from the nineteenth-century model of large fossil-fueled power stations built as far from the urban rich as possible, into which nuclear power stations were neatly added in the latter twentieth century.

The closing date for submissions is 1st August 2013 so you will need to act quickly.

 

There is a long questionnaire on the DECC web site. But apparently DECC has said that it is interested in informal submissions, in particular understanding the barriers to community energy. www.gov.uk/government/consultations/community-energy-call-for-evidence

Emails can be sent here: communityenergycallforevidence@decc.gsi.gov.uk

Or by post to:

DECC

3 Whitehall Place
London
SW1A 2AW

"It is really important that as many responses as possible are sent to DECC as part of this Call for Evidence.  The more evidence DECC has the more of a case they will be able to make to support community energy, so please do take the time to reply."

UK Best in energy efficiency - apparently - Japanese buildings lag behind

The UK has Beaten the Germans, Italians and Japanese, and is ahead of the USA and Brazil, and well ahead of the Canadians and Russians, according to the US ACEEE,  the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. France, Australia, the EU  and China come in the middle of the pack, which consists of the twelve biggest economies in the world. I will leave the strange fact that it includes the EU as well as four of its constituent countries, but does not include California, part of the US, that would be the world's 8th biggest economy, were it a separate state. California would probably do much better than the US as a whole, just as the UK, Germany, Italy and France usually do better than the EU as a whole.

I found out about if from proudgreenhome, who have a more succinct take on it than the original 100 page pdf, although you really have to read that to find what's going on.

The ratings are worked out by looking at four areas each with a different number of possible points: buildings (28), national efforts (25), industry (24) and transport (23). Each area is broken down into different factors with a different weighting.  

The ratings depend on both actual results and policies or frameworks that will presumably lead to results in the future. For example, the UK does better on results than on policies, while Germany does better on policies than results. Both countries do well though.

There are obvious difficulties in comparing these twelve economies fairly. The report demonstrates this by comparing two tables of oil consumption among the twelve economies. One is per capita, in which China come second from the top, with the US and Canada at the bottom, consuming around five times more. The other is per billion dollars of GDP, in which China comes second from the bottom, below the US and Canada, using about twice as much oil to generate each dollar of its GDP. Should we measure the efficiency of an economy by the number of people it supports or the number of dollars it makes? Perhaps the answer would be different depending on whether you're asking in the US or in China.

In energy efficiency of buildings, China does the best, by a long way. Japan comes near the bottom, beating only Brazil, Canada and Russia. 

Energy use of residential buildings gets five points, and of commercial buildings also gets five points. The unit is British thermal units per square foot (a unit that I'm sure they even had to convert into from Britain's data, as well as those more recent parts of the British Empire: Canada and Australia) so once again we could question how efficient the buildings in different countries are, as there are radical differences in average area per dwelling and average area per inhabitant. This is weighted in some way to take account of different climates. I suspect it does not take account of the temperature inside, and how efficient the buildings are at delivering a comfortable temperature.

China gets full points for both. Australia gets full points for residential buildings, but its commercial buildings are not so energy efficient. Japan almost gets full points for residential buildings, but scores badly for commercial buildings, which will surprise nobody who has been into a Japanese shop. Germany scores badly for its residential buildings, but very well for its commercial buildings. 

Energy use makes up 10 of the 28 points. Another three points each are given for residential and commercial building codes. This seems a good idea as codes will presumably determine the efficiency of new building stock. For residential buildings, they looked at insulation in walls and ceilings, window U-factors, shading and solar heat gain coefficients, lighting efficiency requirements, heating and cooling requirements, and air sealing. Many countries scored full marks, Japan lost a point for having no air sealing codes. Japan did get full points for commercial building codes, for which air sealing is not considered.

The report admits that they "did not evaluate the effectiveness, stringency or enforcement of these requirements", which would be a major challenge. At the moment, each score is just a "yes" or "no". The appendix for Japan notes that while compliance is high at 88% among commercial buildings, "at least in the design stage", only 39% of residential buildings comply to building codes. My impression, at least for the house I built, is that there are no mandatory energy efficiency codes, and that the design stage is not faithfully reflected in the building stage. 

The number of standards for appliances gets up to 6 points, and the US gets a full six. Once again, this does not include the level of compliance to these standards, how stringent they are, or the percentage of consumption that these standardised appliances consume, which makes me wonder why such a large score was given.

Building energy labelling gets another 3 points, of which Japan gets only one point as labelling is voluntary. The local electrical shop labels the energy efficiency of each appliance, and presumably at least some people look at that when choosing an appliance, so once again the challenge of comparing these different economies is highlighted. 

To quote the report on the prospects for Japan: "In the longer term, the most important opportunity for energy efficiency for Japan exists in the building sector." I hope somebody over here is reading that. It goes on, "Energy consumption in residential and commercial buildings almost doubled from 1990-2009".

Looking at a map of the twelve economies, it looks like the main factor in the efficiency of the economy is the area of the country, with the only country seriously out of step being Brazil, so they may just have found an elaborate way of showing that the UK is smaller than Japan, and Russia is bigger than the US.

The report is a good effort that should raise awareness of energy efficiency, and as they frequently note it is a first effort that will be refined and built upon. Look forward to next year's!

Decisions decisions decisions

There are times when things seem to be following some master plan, and rather than being a series of random events, there appears to have been some purpose to my life. For example, when I started on this building project, the things I'd learnt twenty years ago about finite elements, thermodynamics and electricity found a practical application. The threads of life start to tie together, and make me worry that the credits are going to start rolling up and I find I've been in a Hollywood movie. Thinking about decision making is another thing that ties together some ideas about how I can get my students to speak English, and why usually they don't.

I've been aware for a while about differences in decision making between Anglo-Saxon and Japanese models, or to generalise even further, Western and Eastern norms. These difference lead to cultural mis-communications and misunderstandings, and can waste a lot of time. One way of looking at it is in terms of democracy, consensus or dictatorship; another is in terms of high context or low context.

The fundamental ideas behind democracy are that each person's opinion is equally important, and that the majority should make the decision. This comes from ideas about equal rights of individuals to having opinions. The west has a long history of democracy and individualism, going back to the Greeks and probably beyond. This leads to dialectics and voting. This leads to meetings where people advocate their points, disagree or challenge other opinions, and concede, albeit often grudgingly, to the majority when they are in a minority. It also leads to low-context meetings where the agenda is transparent, and the issues being decided are explicit. Ideas and opinions are brought to meetings, and people leave with decisions.

Consensus, on the other hand, is based on ideas of harmony, and the importance of the group. The east has a long history of collectivism, rather than individualism. Japan has a sense of wa and expressions such as "the pole that sticks out will be hammered in". This leads to lengthy discussions, and goes with long-term relationships. Meetings are high-context, so the important issues are the relationships between participants and the hierarchy among them. The agenda is less clear, and issues being decided are vague. Opinions are usually left out of the meeting, ideas may be generated, and the participants leave in harmony with a stronger group. The actual decision may be made after the meeting, and may be arbitrary. 

Dictatorship is a much less partisan system that can flourish whether the society tends towards individualism or collectivism, whether East or West. In terms of decision making, dictatorship is the most straightforward; one person makes the decision and everyone must follow it. In both democratic and consensus-based systems, one person can take control of the whole show. Dictators often have long, successful careers if they give the impression of democracy or consensus. 

What's the price of freedom? Perhaps not strictly relevant to this discussion, but John Philip Curran, Ida Wells, and Thomas Jefferson would all tell us that it is eternal vigilance. I seek the freedom to live in the house of my dreams and desires, but will only get it through eternal vigilance.

So whether the meetings that have been held between us, the architect and the other players in our evolving charade have been a battle between democracy and consensus, or whether they are a battle between two dictators, I'm not sure. 

Publicity - Probably not for publication

A couple of banners have appeared on the North and East of the house, visible from the the road.

Before	After

It may be a coincidence, but the day before this, during a meeting, the architect casually announced that the insulation contractor was going to be showing some people around the site next Wednesday.

The boss of the builder didn't take too kindly to this, saying that he should have contacted me first, with it being my house. I suggested they should have contacted him first as it was his building site.

Heirarchical politics within building projects

We had a meeting with the architect and the site foreman yesterday. The boss of the builders turned up too.  It felt a bit like he was our dad, come to check we were all playing nicely together. A couple of things have brought this to a head, but from my perspective it comes down to the heirarchy of the project management. 

In Japanese, the word "sensei" is applied to architects. This loosely translates to "teacher", but is also applied to doctors, lawyers and politicians. It encompasses some of the confucian notions of seniority and respect. As far as the architect is concerned, and I think this is architects in general and nothing personal about our architect, he's at the top of the tripod. In one direction below him is the client. The client is important as he is funding the architect's creation of an artwork. In another direction is the builder, and in the other are the subcontractors. Architects bring work to builders, so there is a sense in which the builders are working for the architects, and some respect and gratitude are due. The contractors have to work with the architect's plans, and part of the architect's job is apparently to check that the building is built to his plans. (I'm afraid architects are usually "he"s.)

Behind their backs I've heard carpenters call artchitects egakiya (picture drawers) and complain that it's easy to put things in place on a bit of paper, but not always possible in the real world.

In terms of relationships, the one between the architect and client is likely to be short-lived. Very few people will build a second house, and if they do they are likely to use a different architect. Clients may recommend an architect to their friends. 

The relationship between the architect and builder is much more important as the architect needs the builder to turn his drawings into buildings, and the builder needs the architect to bring in business. The architect may meet the same contractors on various different projects, and those relationships are long-term too. Obviously the relationship between the builder and contractors is important, so the three legs of the tripod are not all independent, but, as far as the architect is concerned, the relationship between client and builder should be kept to a minimum, ideally just the handing over of as much money as possible, and there should be no relationship between client and contractors.

The architect is reluctant for the client to talk to the builder because it makes the flow of ideas and the making of decisions much more complicated. Also, architects are human and do not know everything, and conversations between client and builder may reveal some weaknesses. 

So the way it's supposed to work is that the architect talks to the client and decides what kind of building he can get away with. He then takes these plans to the builder. The builder gets all the contractors together and builds the building. The architect checks this when necessary, or when he's not too busy on the next job--after all architects usually need to be starting working on their next project by the time the building starts on the last one. Then the keys are handed over to the client, who lives there happily every after.  

It's difficult to say, but I'm sure a massive percentage of clients are not really happy with the houses that are built for them, but with people in Japan being such stalwarts, and gaman being much more of a national institution than a stiff upper lip ever was in England, they usually don't say anything, and probably often enough don't even realise that their ideas and their ultimate welfare has been largely ignored in the process. 

We have presented challenges to this status quo in a couple of ways. For example, I want as much involvement in the building as possible, and not just in deciding what colour the walls are, but deciding where the wires and hot water pipes are going to go, deciding on the construction of walls, placement of insulation and puncturing of the thermal envelope to get wires in and out. 

We've been meeting the architect on a fairly regular basis for almost two years now, in a long and painful process of getting our ideas from vague notions, theories and preferences into concrete, through the filters of his extensive knowledge of building and his sense of style, and within the constraints of physics and economics, and all of our tenuous understandings of those. 

Before the concrete was laid, we started to have weekly meetings with the builder and the architect. These seemed to go well for a few weeks, but at some point petered out. We went back to the situation of meeting the architect, and the architect meeting the builder. This came to my attention acutely on Friday when we had had a meeting with the architect in the morning to discuss the lights in the house, and in the afternoon, when I went for my daily visit to the building site, I saw him talking to the foreman about installing the shutters, and saw the electrician putting in the wiring, based on a wiring plan that I had not even seen.