The ruralZED™ housing system is set to revolutionise the house-building industry over the coming years and has been awarded on-site Code 6 status, the highest level in the Code for Sustainable Housing, eight years ahead of the government’s targets for carbon neutral new build homes.

The house is the first durable laminated timber frame to incorporate high levels of thermal mass that will help keep residents cooler in summer and warmer in winter, state of the art energy saving building fabric, and enough building integrated renewable energy systems to achieve zero carbon status.

By using a frame and traditional materials, as opposed to plastic foam, the construction is both durable and avoids problems with off-gassing and poor indoor air quality that can be inherent with other modern construction techniques. Hence it also has none of the concerns with combustibility that have been encountered with plastic foam construction.

This housing system is available from £1,150 / m2 and £1,550 / m2 based on the purchase of six units at Code 3 and Code 6 status respectively. The low price makes it the first ever carbon neutral house kit that is commercially viable to build, and affordable to buy and live in.

The government’s recent legislation package – the Code for Sustainable Homes will make it mandatory for all new homes in the UK to be both zero carbon and meet the highest level of Code 6 by the year 2016.

Housing Associations have to meet Code 3 this year, and Code 4 requiring super-insulation and zero carbon heating will become mandatory for anyone requiring grant subsidy by 2010. Code 6 is mandatory for housing associations by 2013.

Working with the government’s planned sequence of increased standards of environmental performance – rather than lobbying against it, rural zero housing has demonstrated that everybody can benefit from this important legislation.

With the launch of this rural zero housing system at EcoBuild it demonstrated:

1 How easy it is to develop reliable, and durable zero carbon homes using building integrated renewable energy systems. This removes many of the excuses for not endorsing the Code for Sustainable Homes.

2 How these new homes will provide a high quality of life whilst still achieving a step change reduction in carbon footprint.

3 How developers and owners can fund the low / zero carbon specification using a combination of stamp duty relief and an energy mortgage. An energy mortgage simply enables the householder to divert the cash they would have spent on normal energy bills to service a loan to pay for the capital cost of the renewable energy systems.

4 How a simple building system can be designed that meets the highest levels of the Code, but can also be downgraded to meet the lower-cost entry levels of the Code. This creates a sound investment that ‘futureproofs’ purchasers’ investments by designing in upgrade paths to Code 6.

5 By employing dry construction, prefabrication and volumes sales discounts, the kit price of the system eliminates risk pricing, and creates a network of regional contractors offering installation services to help clients with cost certainty on new projects.

How stamp duty exemption can help fund these projects Carbon specification...

The Code for Sustainable Homes sets out a detailed scoring system covering a multitude of sustainability subjects. Zero carbon is just one of these subjects.

Zero carbon stamp duty exemption is, by the nature of how stamp duty is collected, a much cruder and simpler system than the Code for Sustainable Homes. Stamp duty is paid by the purchaser on any property over £125k and any property over £150k in ‘disadvantaged’ areas.

To achieve a stamp duty exemption ‘all’ the house builder has to do is:-

• Have a heat loss parameter equivalent to 0.8W/m2/k using the SAP system

• Generate sufficient power from renewable sources connected to the house/community to balance the power used by the home and its appliances

Of course achieving these is no mean feat. A heat loss parameter of 0.8 requires a super-insulated zero heating specification home with biomass and solar hot water, and generating the amount of electricity the exemption says a typical home requires will take up practically your whole roof if solar electric panels were used. However, meeting stamp duty exemption standards is not as onerous / expensive as meeting Code 6 standards.

How much does this cost...?

Upgrading the performance of a 2006 building regulation home to achieve the first requirement of the stamp duty exemption requires some unavoidable expenditure. For illustration purposes, in a like-for-like home, super insulation could cost an additional £2000, Wind assisted heat exchange ventilation £4,000, solar hot water and storage around £2,000 and a share of a communal terrace biomass boiler £2,000. A total of around £10,000.

Assuming you have a roof with sufficient South facing area, achieving the second requirement is only about how much generation capacity you buy. This in turn is simply to do with how big your house is.

An in-house solar electric package which is required to generate the total electrical consumption of a zero carbon house would cost in the region of £12,000.

So combining the two costs you can see in this illustration, the upgrade cost from 2006 building regulations standard to stamp duty exempt standard would cost in the region of £22,000.

But how does stamp duty exemption help...?

If you were buying a house for £350k, the stamp duty would be £10,500. If the house was stamp duty exempt, that is £10,500 more that can be spent on buying the property. This gives the house builder/developer £10,500 more to spend on building.

So the remaining upgrade cost would only be £11,500 (£22,000 - £10,500 = £11,500). This money would have to be spent by the house builder to get to the standard. However, we have worked out a logic through which this additional cost can be passed onto the house-buyer as a financially attractive optional extra.