Hopefully it will also conform to building reg’s, the relevant regulation – Document J Building Regs 2010, section 1.45, (heavily edited) states:

‘where a chimney passes through a … storage space … providing a guard…’

From Barn Conversion 2012

It wasn’t a cheap solution, although I guess cheaper than the alternatives, each of the perforated sheets was over £40, but I think it does the job and looks acceptable.

Hhmmm, wondering exactly what I did achieve in March…

Painting the door frames: I made a start on this back in February and some slow progress in March. I’ve chosen a simple white painted door lining, frame and architrave that I think looks good partnered with untreated, natural oak doors.

I used an ‘eco’ soya oil paint (I think the brand is eco2, but it’s not entirely clear from the packaging) for the first trial doorframe – the one between the kitchen and the utility room – but I wasn’t happy with the finish. In fairness the paint was a couple of years old, having been used on downstairs skirting boards then resealed, but it left a grainy finish and tended to slide off the primed architraves. So looking around and with some advice from @charliebudd on Twitter I selected Little Greene paint for the job – a combined primer and undercoat then a white oil (vegetable) based eggshell. I summary, it is lovely paint, coverage and application are great and it makes the task of painting the frames slightly less onerous (yet still hardly soul lifting!).

Early Welsh Summer: We’ve had some lovely weather of late and we all suspect an even earlier summer than usual with drizzle expected from May onwards! The good weather has driven me outside…

I’ve started to rearrange or remove some of the debris in the yard and around the garage, mainly wood and stone from the barn, with the aim being to achieve more home-like / less building-site-like outside spaces.

With some much help I also managed to remove a partly fallen bough from the large scots pine tree that stands at the top of the yard that was damaged during storms last autumn – pictures coming soon.

Our engineers are healthy and virile, active and useful, balanced and happy in their work, our architects are disillusioned and unemployed, boastful or peevish. This is because there will soon be nothing more for them to do. We longer have the money to erect historical souvenirs. At the same time everyone needs to wash! Our engineers provide for these things and so they will be our builders.

Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, 1923.

…architects can still be “boastful or peevish“, but judging by the majority of what I see our engineers are no longer feeling so “healthy and virile“…

Where will the 21st century injection of health and virility in construction come from? The green / eco / sustainable sector? Can the planners and regulators support rather than stifle?

The NPPF document opens with this:

International and national bodies have set out broad principles of sustainable development. Resolution 42/187 of the United Nations General Assembly defined sustainable development as meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs*. The UK Sustainable Development Strategy Securing the Future set out five ‘guiding principles’ of sustainable development: living within the planet’s environmental limits; ensuring a strong, healthy and just society; achieving a sustainable economy; promoting good governance; and using sound science responsibly.

Resolution 42/187 is a reference to the report ‘Our Common Future’ produced by the Brundtland Commission in 1987. The Brundtland Commission was established in 1983 by the United Nations with the goal of uniting countries to work together in the pursuit of sustainable development. The Commission was dissolved at the end of 1987 following publication of the report.

In the Brundtland definition, there are two key concepts of sustainable development:

• The concept of needs. The basic, essential requirements for human life, weighted toward the world’s poorest people, who should be given overriding priority,
• The idea of limitations as imposed by current technology and social organisation on the environment’s ability to meet both present and future needs.

The report also identifies three pillars of sustainable development – economic growth (economy), environmental protection (environment) and social equity (society).

So that’s the background. The NPPF takes this a step further with those five guiding principles:

1. Living within the planet’s environmental limits,
2. Ensuring a “strong, healthy and just society”,
3. Achieving a sustainable economy,
4. Promoting good governance,
5. Using sound science.

Those are basically, the three pillars with firm foundations of good governance and sound science. This is further spelt out in the Framework:

…to achieve sustainable development, economic, social and environmental gains should be sought jointly and simultaneously through the planning system. The planning system should play an active role in guiding development to sustainable solutions.

So far, so clear. I hoped that the framework would further explore each of these areas to provide greater clarity and provide narrower definitions that could facilitate meaningful debate. In that I was disappointed, the five principles remain bones with very little flesh on them except what we can imply from the framework. The words governance and science don’t even appear again in the report again after that opening quotation.

I know I’m being unreasonable, I know that this is a framework and there’s still plenty of work to do. But currently, the answer to the question “just what is sustainable development (currently in the UK) ?” seems to be “it depends” and that is more a lawyers charter than anything else.

=====================
* I quite like the acronym ELF – Environment, Local people, Future

“It is a matter for serious thought that at periods of financial stress it is always beauty that is sacrificed upon the altar of expediency.”

Sir Patrick Abercrombie, co-founder of the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England.

Sir Patrick Abercrombie seems a fascinating character, however there isn’t much information about him available on-line, I’d love to find some more sources of information, quotations etc…

Whilst the Government appears to have listened to the many concerned voices raised in response to the draft document, the continued insistence on easing planning controls to promote growth remains a troubling key theme of reform and increasingly a political plaything.

The CPRE’s official response from Chief Executive Shaun Spiers is this:

‘We were very reassured that the Minister, Greg Clark recognised the intrinsic value of the ordinary countryside “whether specifically designated or not” and stated that the five principles of the UK Sustainable Development Strategy are included in the document. These were critical issues for CPRE. We are pleased the Minister appears to have listened to the strong public views, which mirrored our concerns.’

The CPRE article has a very useful Green, Amber, Red classification of the main areas of the NPPF. The traffic light designation is used to denote the CPRE’s level of concern. In summary, this shows approval in the areas of intrinsic value (of the countryside), local plans, light pollution and tranquillity, some concerns over the definition of sustainable development and any weakening of the levels of compulsion for developers to build on brownfield sites and then real concern over the Green vs growth debate and the housing pressure being placed on the planning system to provide a five year supply of housing land, plus an additional ‘buffer’ requirement of 5-20% on top of this.

Interesting stuff and certainly worth a read.

The presumption in favour of ‘sustainable development’ remains and therefore so does the need I’d commented on earlier to properly define what we mean by ‘sustainable development’. I like this quote from Craig Bennett Friends of the Earth’s campaigns director:

[the new regulations] must spell out what is meant by ‘sustainable development’ – to ensure the right buildings are built in the right place and in the best interests of local people and our environment.

…and the Campaign To Protect Rural England, The National Trust and most concerned bodies agree…

Anyway, the document is now available from the communities.gov.uk website and there’s plenty being said at the BBC and the Guardian, I’ll post again once I have a chance to ruminate further.

Here are a couple pictures of them in their ‘before’ state. I suspect there won’t be a great deal of visual difference ‘after’ as all I intend to do is paint the door frames & linings white and leave the doors as they are, but we’ll see.

I’m using Little Greene undercoat and eggshell paint following some advice I received via Twitter user @CharlieBudd, so far it seems to be a nice product. I’ll provide a more in-depth report later on.

My summary is:

• Confirmation that the Deal will be launched this autumn.
• Not only aimed at ‘a whole range of home improvements beyond insulation’…
  

  The Green Deal will act as a catalyst to stimulate innovation so that more and more energy savings products come to the market.

• Interesting statistics:
  

  The UK building stock was responsible for 43% of total UK emissions in 2009.
  We estimate that this year up to 4.1m households will be in fuel poverty in England alone.

• The Green Deal varies from previous schemes in the breadth of the measures that should be eligible for it:

  The Green Deal has been designed to finance the installation of a broad range of measures across the energy efficiency market. Our goal is to enable the property to benefit from all the improvements that can create savings.

  The heating, glazing, lighting and Microgeneration industries will all be able to use this innovative financing mechanism.

  Less we-known measures which improve energy efficiency, such as flue gas heat recovery and waste water recovery systems will also be eligible for finance under the Green Deal.

  The key is for measures to be self-financing – able pay for themselves over their lifetime. However, even partially self-financing measures can still be part-financed under the scheme as part of a package of improvements.

• The Renewable Heat Incentive and the Green Deal will operate side-by-side. Some technologies covered by the RHI will be eligible under the Green Deal as well. Work will be undertaken to further integrate the two schemes and how they are marketed.
• A new Green Deal advice service goes live on 2nd April
• Some of the hurdles to entry for providers have been removed or diluted. The requirements for Green Deal providers to have a surety bond in place prior to authorisation, for them to provide an independent conciliation service and to hold warranties for the length of the plan have been removed. Instead of the independent conciliation service “we are procuring a bespoke Green Deal Ombudsman to deal with any Green Deal complaints” – whatever that means!
• The British Standards Institution recently published a new set of standards for Green Deal installers. Companies wishing to install measures under the Green Deal must be certified to this new standard.
• There’s also mention of the Big Society (cringe!). With a expectation of collaborations within communities delivering change.

No mention of delays in launching the Green Deal, although DECC officials have recently been speaking of a phased launch or a slow start to the scheme.

What’s a Raspberry Pi?
The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard. It’s a capable little PC which can be used for many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays high-definition video. We want to see it being used by kids all over the world to learn programming

As someone with a history of fiddling with computers since the ZX81 in the early 1980′s the Pi held an immediate appeal for me. Additionally, something at the barn that has always frustrated me is the disjointed nature of the heating system – The inputs; a multi-fuel stove & solar thermal hot water panels, are not well coupled to the outputs; underfloor heating (UFH) and upstairs radiators. The water in the thermal store is heated and is either vented to an upstairs radiator if it exceeds a predefined temperature or preferably to the UFH or radiators by pushing up the required temperature on the in room thermostats to a level above the current room temperature. I want to add a little more ‘intelligence’ to the system – if there’s a tank full of reasonably hot water then dump it into the UFH if it’s cold downstairs or switch off the UFH if the water temperature is too low in comparison to the room temperature and so on.

The Pi, as a small low-cost, low power computer, using the kind of software I’m comfortable with may be just the ‘brain’ this system requires. I just need to learn some electronics.

The Pi has only recently been launched, trending on Twitter more strongly than Lady Gaga at one time! So I thought I’d mention my idea to the people from Pi…

barnconversion
@Raspberry_Pi got an idea to use a R_Pi as a controller for my complex heating system – now just need to a) get a Pi & b) learn electronics!
Mar 08, 4:39 PM viaTwitter for Android

To which @Raspberry_Pi replied:

Raspberry_Pi
@barnconversion Have you visited our forums? If you post in the projects section, we’d love to help you get started.
Mar 08, 4:41 PM viaweb

So off I went to the forum and discovered several useful threads…

1-wire sensors for heating control
Smart home energy monitor
Thermostat

Those gave me plenty of areas for further research…

• 1-wire
• I2C connector
• DS9490R USB adaptor for 1 wire
• GPIO-based 1-wire driver in the kernel
• LinkUSB device
• I2C bridges attached to the Pi’s I2C interface
• http://openenergymonitor.org/emon/ – Nanodes
• Central Heating / Water controller … hardware interfacing using GPIO pins

Looks like I’ve got my hands full. Plenty to research. Lucky that there’s such a long waiting list to get your hands on a Pi – plenty of time for homework.