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  • This is a normal British terraced house.

  • It was built around the turn of the 20th century

  • out of bricks, mortar and a lot of manual labour.

  • Kitchen, living room and a set of stairs in the middle

  • that lead up to two bedrooms and a bathroom.

  • And although the exact details might be different,

  • about one in five houses in Britain look roughly like this,

  • all built in a row.

  • The trouble is, houses like this weren't built to save energy

  • or to keep the heat in on a cold winter's day.

  • Energy efficiency wasn't really a thing a century ago

  • and while there are all sorts of plans to modernise and retrofit houses:

  • How do you know which plans will work?

  • How do you do a controlled experiment

  • when every house is different and the weather constantly changes?

  • It would be great if you could just, you know...

  • tell the sun what to do.

  • We are in the Salford Energy House

  • which is the only whole building in a climate controlled chamber.

  • The idea really was to take a Victorian house

  • and look at different ways that we can make it more energy efficient.

  • When you test something on its own, like a boiler,

  • you sit it in a lab and you test it and it will be X% efficient.

  • When you actually put that in a whole house or a whole system

  • it then interacts with all sorts of other things

  • like the fabric, the radiators, the controls,

  • so understanding how things fit together as a whole house

  • is really, really important.

  • This isn't some close approximation of an old terraced house made with modern techniques.

  • This was a genuine end of terrace house from out in Manchester.

  • It was taken apart and then rebuilt piece by piece here

  • in an environmental test chamber at the University of Salford.

  • We had to get a bricklayer, the bricklayer was like 70 years old,

  • because actually the way that the bricks were laid in Victorian times,

  • nobody does it like that anymore.

  • He said he'd not laid bricks like that since he was a trainee.

  • We've got, I would say, hundreds of sensors.

  • Every single appliance is monitored individually.

  • What we can do here is also simulate human activity.

  • We have actuators, so robotic arms

  • which will replicate the opening and closing of doors, fridges, windows.

  • We can turn appliances on and off.

  • Here we control the weather.

  • We have a space next door with a big water tank

  • and there are layers of piping that run round

  • that will push rain onto the side of the building

  • because rain never falls down, it always comes sideways.

  • And then we also have a snow machine,

  • and we also have wind machines,

  • and we have a lighting system.

  • So that's just radiant heating lamps connected to a theatre lighting control system

  • so the sun can pass round the building.

  • All of those things can make a huge difference to the way a building performs.

  • The first really big test we did, which was a whole house retrofit,

  • we attached wall insulation, we improved the doors and the windows

  • and we improved the floor

  • and we reduced the heating energy by more than 60%.

  • There's always a trade off with experiments like this.

  • Yes, heating and cooling a large building

  • that is inside another building

  • is not massively energy efficient in itself,

  • but compared to other industrial processes,

  • it's not that bad.

  • And if spending a little energy here saves a lot elsewhere,

  • well that's probably worth it.

  • Thank you very much to everyone at the Energy House

  • and the University of Salford School of Built Environment.

  • You can see their YouTube channel here

  • or pull down the description for more about them and about the house.

This is a normal British terraced house.

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