Upton Site D1 (Using Rural ZED)

Location: Upton Site D1, Northampton
Client: English Partnership / Metropolitan Housing Trust
Description: 88 MMC Units as part of a 350 home masterplan
Value: £40m
Start / Completion: March 2007 - July 2009
Notes:

A New Town extension for Northampton, with the client, Metropolitan Housing Trust, acting both as developer and social housing provider. Local partner architect, Franklin Ellis architects & ZEDfactory, won a design lead competition for the site around the new town centre square, designed to meet the EP Upton Design codes. The design team are using the ZED passive standards for airtight, super-insulated building fabric, with heat recovery ventilation on all buildings throughout the site. This will reduce the requirement for heat and power to the point where it becomes affordable to meet 60 % of the total building's energy in use requirements from renewable energy sources, generated within the site boundaries. The zero heating specification homes will further incorporate a mixture of biomass fuelled heating, solar thermal, photovoltaic electric generation, domestic scale micro wind turbines, passive solar gain, thermally massive passive cooling technologies and wind driven ventilation with heat recovery to achieve full ZED status. The ZED standard homes will meet the government's long term carbon reduction target of 60% by 2050 when they are completed next year. 25 % of the development will be, thermally massive MMC construction using a dry assembled timber glulam frame system developed by ZEDfactory, with the remainder of the project constructed from more conventional, thermally massive construction. The MMC rural ZED system has proved flexible enough to meet a conventional masterplan not specifically designed around solar urban principles.