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Feature: Results of Brain Candy Part 1 2007 - move or revamp?

Brain Candy - Part 1, a survey held in the North East of England by Northern Architecture.

Question: In order to lower your carbon footprint, would you prefer to move to an eco-friendly, sustainable home or to revamp your existing home with all the new energy saving technology? Feel free to say why!

25% said … move to a new eco-friendly sustainable house
75% said … would revamp their existing home

Exactly 75% of you would rather revamp your existing home in order to reduce your Carbon footprint than move to a new eco-friendly sustainable home. A lot of you even gave us a why! Some of these reasons are given below…

WE LOVE OUR HOMES!

Our homes are our castles and for many of us who want to lower our carbon footprint, we are prepared to adapt our homes to stay there.

WE LOVE OUR COMMUNITIES – a number of you mentioned this, whether it was about wanting established local schools, or concern about there not being enough well developed local services, the perceived lack of community found in new build development disheartens people.

However, many people rightly pointed out that it would be unsustainable to neglect the current housing stock, and there was a common feeling that people would rather be responsible for the conversion of their homes to eco friendly homes than leave it to the next owners who may not be as interested in or willing to invest in improving the house’s carbon footprint.

Downside

Some of you, although sure you would stay in your homes, expressed doubts about updating them. There was concern that the retro-fitting of technology is expensive and disruptive, some saying that they would need a financial incentive to do it and some saying that they were concerned that the technology wasn’t really up to scratch yet to give a good enough return on investment.

And some of you aren’t sure how to do it…if so please join us for this lunchtime archi-talk, one of five running throughout architecture week (15 – 24 June)

'How to make your home greener’ with David Kendell of JDDK architects.
Monday 18th, 12.10pm – 1pm
Free, no booking required.

All lunchtime archi-talks are held at Eversheds Offices, Central Square South, Newcastle City Centre.

25% WARRIORS

There are a few of you warriors out there though who were keen to try the pastures new. Behaviour patterns is one of the biggest barriers to reducing our carbon footprint, one of our responders felt that moving to a new eco-friendly home would be a way of changing a mindset and breaking bad habits. Another felt that the negative impact that adapting their home would have on it’s original design would be incentive enough to move to a new eco-friendly home. Generally though people mentioned cost as the factor that would ultimately encourage people to move on. With the current cost of new technology people felt a revamp would be unrealistic.

The question is simplistic, granted, but the principle behind it is that there is not an option to do nothing. It is interesting, if not surprising to see the result but more so to see the reasons. With the result in mind though, are you prepared to answer the Brain Candy part 2 question?

‘In the next twelve months, what one thing are you going to do to reduce the carbon footprint of your home?’

Email your answer to info@northernarchitecure.com


Visit http://www.energysavingtrust.org.uk/ for some tips, advice and a free home energy check.

For interest see Low Carb Lane project by Dott 07, http://www.dott07.com/go/energy/low-carb-lane