On water and windows in the UK today

After writing here for 16 months I have to be careful about repeating myself!

That’s me last month in London at the site of the Broad Street pump, in front of a pub named after John Snow, the doctor who figured out the connection between the water from the pump and the cholera epidemic that was killing hundreds in 1854. It’s not the real pump, and John Snow was a teetotaler and anti-alcohol activist who would have been appalled to find a pub with his name on it, but I couldn’t pass this up, given my obsessions with toilets and sewage.

When I was in London, the newspapers were filled with stories about Thames Water, the troubled utility that supplies fresh water and manages sewage for 15 million people in London and the southeast of England in the drainage shed of the River Thames. Social media are full of images of shit and other waste in rivers, streams, and oceans. 32% of Thames Water is owned by the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement Fund (OMERS), which I find shocking, especially given Ontario’s history of privatization and water.

I spent the last two hours writing about it, only to just notice that I wrote about it last year. I don’t have much new to add other than it looks increasingly likely that the investment might have to be written off. I hope that the municipal employees whose pensions are tied up in Thames Water are as upset as I would be.

I will never forget when, while rowing my single scull in Lake Ontario, my oarlock broke, and I tumbled into the water. The coach who came to rescue me was a municipal employee in the Toronto water department, and as Gary pulled up in his tin boat, he yelled, “Don’t worry Lloyd, the coliform count is only 5 per 100 ml of water today!” That was not exactly top of my mind, but I appreciated it. There are some things, like managing water and rescuing rowers, that are best done by municipal employees and public ownership.

What is value engineering?

Nick Grant on stage explaining Value Engineering (VE) in Munich

When I practiced as an architect, the two worst words in the English Language were “Value Engineering,” where consultants would come in and strip everything nice out of a design. I learned that it wasn’t necessarily so terrible from Nick Grant, seen here at the 2018 Passive House Conference in Munich. I have quoted Nick many times in articles and in both of my books.

Photo credit – Graeme Deas and Stuart Hedley via Ben Adam-Smith

Now, Ben Adam-Smith tackles Value Engineering on his podcast, House Planning Help. He writes:

Value engineering sometimes gets confused with cost-cutting but there's an important distinction to be made: value engineering can only take place at the beginning of the project whereas cost-cutting is something that takes place at the end. The efficiencies that we're talking about are decided in the early stages of the design process, not when construction is underway and we're looking to downgrade materials, etc.

He uses Slate House as an example. This is a “self-build,” the British term for a house built without a developer, by Graeme Deas and Stuart Hedley, with Nick Grant doing the Passive House consulting and the VE, and Mike Whitfield doing the building. It’s a house I have discussed often, mostly because of its simple form and its windows, which are designed from the inside out. Stuart Hedley tells Ben:

“One of the few specifications I had was that the house should look good from the outside. And part of that for me was that it did not have asymmetrical windows. So I've really fallen in love with what I initially thought was rather an unexciting box.”

I find it to be a very exciting box because of its simplicity and those windows. I wrote about it last year in my post Why we need “windows with purpose” and quoted Nick extensively in my new book, with a portion excerpted here in my post On Simplicity (and Thomas Heatherwick).

I have also written on Green Building Advisor that it’s time for Rethinking Window Size. Conclusion:

Windows are complex, multifunctional, carbon-intensive, expensive, difficult to get right, and too often they are designed primarily for aesthetics. I concur with the findings of professors Richardson and Coley: We must change how we look at the aesthetics of buildings and “drive a revolution in what architects currently consider acceptable for how houses should look and feel. That’s a tall order, but de-carbonizing each component of society will take nothing short of a revolution.”

I get together with Ben Adam-Smith every time I am in the UK; this past trip he came to London and interviewed me about my new book. A few years ago I toured his Passivhaus outside London; here he is with his HRV that has caused him no end of grief. He has also interviewed me a few times:

Why we must embrace sufficiency: Lloyd Alter explains how we can take personal actions to address our own carbon footprints, and why it's more important to do so than ever.

Key decisions that impact on the sustainability of a house build: Lloyd Alter from TreeHugger shares his advice on what we should be prioritising as 21^stcentury self-builders.

And I promise, new content in the next post, I will search the archives before I write!