"Eco-Homes" For Sale in London
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 12. 1.06
Well, they call it an eco-home. It is a solid wood Slovenian prefab system called RIKO that is made from glue laminated pine for the interior and timber cladding on the exterior, a layered system that is up to eight inches thick, all from sustainably harvested forests. The walls are panellized and shipped complete with windows and doors. Three full houses were shipped in five trucks and assembled in central London in five days.
There are a couple of eco-brownie points earned- a lot of carbon is sequestered, wood is a good insulator so fuel will be saved in heating it, as it was in building it. (Five hundred kilowatt hours are needed to produce a single cubic metre steel, 200 kWh are needed for concrete, but only 30 kWh are used for timber.) Furthermore wood interiors are generally healthy homes with good air quality.
Throw radiant heating underfoot and a green sedum roof overhead and that is a pretty green package.
Perhaps coming from the toothpick school of building as we do in North America makes me just a little concerned about the volume of wood involved in solid walls, and whether it is really the most efficient use of the material. Thats a lotta trees in there. On the market for £775,000. ::Find a Property
also read ::Lignum Homes and ::RIKO
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It looks visually interesting, but like you, I'd be concerned about the volume of tree products used.
"... makes me just a little concerned about the volume of wood involved in solid walls, and whether it is really the most efficient use of the material. ..."
I think we shouldn't be so concerned about volume of wood. We should be concerned more about quality and durability.
Here in Finland we have massive wooden log houses that are 100 years old and actually they are the most sought-after houses today. There is no sign that they would need any fundamental improvement or repair.
Massive wood structure is reliable wall structure. It have been tested for hundrets (or maybe thousands) of years. For example if it gets wet it just needs to be dried but these more efficient wall structures usually have to be replaced because you can't dry them.
It is also almost impossible to repair or replace just a small part of this kind of efficient structure because these structures are based on layers of material. So you have to replace whole layer to achieve decent result. With massive wood you just cut the bad part away and fill it with wood.
Efficient structeres are good when everything go as planned. But when something goes wrong there is huge problems. And if we talk about 100 years something will go wrong during that time.
And we have to remember that trees are growing as we speak. For any other building material you have to do something really irretrievable to get them: dig hole in ground, destroy rock that has lasted thousand of years or drill oil and transport it on the other side of the world.
So efficient is not always same as ecological.
Somehow the info page on their site just isn't giving me the intended warm fuzzies. Particularly the fire protection section. Maybe I'm just a party pooper.