Building standards at WoodBUILD

Get to know your building standards with four top built environment experts at WoodBUILD 2024 workshop, 2 July, 14:00;
‘Navigating the jungle of competing building standards‘

This interactive workshop will be held at 14:00 on Tuesday 2 July and hosted by Dr Diana Waldron, Head of Built Environment, Woodknowledge Wales and facilitated by Christiane Lellig, Specialist Advisor Regenerative Systems Change, Woodknowledge Wales.

“This workshop will provide a platform where experts from a variety of building standards backgrounds and viewpoints can get together to discuss the complexities around how to deliver better buildings and which standards to follow. This dialogue will include delegates and experts. Together, we will discuss how housing developers and designers can choose which standards will be most suitable for them. We will compare different approaches, such as ‘fabric-first’, ‘system-first’ etc., with the aim of extracting the most useful information from each of the standards, to bring us all closer to achieving the one aim that all these standards have in common: The delivery of better, efficient and healthier homes.” Dr Diana Waldron, Head of Built Environment, Woodknowledge Wales.

Participants will discuss the roles of four different building standards and approaches
– AECB CarbonLite, Passivhaus, EPC SAP assessment and ‘ASHP-first’ or ‘systems-first’ approach – with a special focus on delivering new buildings, but also touching on elements of retrofit. This session aims to help clients and designers navigate the challenging space between ‘fabric-first’ and ‘technology-first’ to deliver more efficient, comfortable, affordable, and sustainable buildings..

“Navigating the different building standards and their implications can be challenging. We’re inviting professionals from social housing, architects, designers, engineers and anyone dealing with building standards in their work to join in this conversation with their own questions and experience.” Christiane Lellig, Specialist Advisor Regenerative Systems Change, Woodknowledge Wales.

About our four speakers

Tim Martel is the Standards & Certification Scheme Programme Manager for AECB and an expert in CO2 calculations for buildings. He qualified as a Passivhaus Designer in 2012 and worked on new build, retrofit, domestic and commercial PHPP models. For several years he contributed data for the AECB Retrofit course. Later he also qualified as a Retrofit Coordinator and coordinated 90 retrofits in London. As well as looking after the CarbonLite Certifiers, he also maintains and updates the AECB’s PHribbon software, combining his experience in PHPP with earlier work in research and as a programmer.

Sally Godber is Director for WARM. Sally is a Chartered Mechanical Engineer, Passivhaus Certifier and a member of the UK Technical Panel reporting to the Passivhaus Institut, Germany. She set up WARM with her dad in 2009 to deal with the performance gap she saw in her own projects and continues to be fascinated by understanding faults and how to improve upon them. She will talk to anyone who will listen about this, which led to setting up Coaction CIC training alongside other leading professionals.

Dr Simon Lannon works at the Welsh School of Architecture for Cardiff University. Simon has developed techniques to investigate the retrofit of homes to improve the energy efficiency and internal conditions. This research has considered energy use at the different scales of the built environment, from individual buildings, neighbourhoods and to regions. These techniques have been used to map fuel poverty and model decarbonisation pathways for the Welsh housing stock, and to provide evidence for Welsh Government housing policy.

Nigel Banks is Technical Director (Zero Bills & Low Carbon Homes) at Octopus Energy. Nigel is renowned among peers for his ‘Fabric Fifth’ recommendations that reorder priorities for designers and developers. He is passionate about improving our homes to benefit our health, our wallets and our planet. Having worked in housing design, construction and manufacturing, Nigel now leads Octopus Energy’s work in making Zero Bills the new standard for housing in the UK and around the world. Octopus Energy uses technology to bring lower and more transparent pricing, better service and more sustainable energy to customers globally.