SMARTLife Housing

Details

The SMARTLife initiative is a not for profit partnership between BRE and Cambridgeshire County Council. Its aim is to facilitate the delivery of sustainable growth through community training and education in modern methods of construction. It operates in Cambridgeshire, Hamburg (Germany) and Malmo (Sweden).

In addition to providing best practice, expertise and advice on how innovative building techniques can deliver high quality buildings which are sustainable and affordable SMARTLife has also developed several demonstration projects to showcase how the principles can be delivered in practice.

The SMARTLife housing project in Fenland will deliver homes built using modern method of construction alongside those using traditional brick and block. Standard house designs will be used for all systems to enable accurate comparisons. The project will assess performance of each housing type in both construction process and lifetime performance of buildings.

The measures for each system include:

• CaliBRE – a measure of resources
• SMARTAudit – a measure of material waste
• Ecohomes
• Constructing Excellence Key Performance Indicators - cost, build time and health and safety
• Sustainability Key Performance Indicators - energy and water use during construction, waste generated and biodiversity impact.

Real time information enables continual assessment and analysis of these measures. This can then be fed back into the build process and disseminated to improve skills used to deliver modern methods of construction.

Interim results taken five months into the build show that average resource input per plot is: 42 man hours for timber frame, 56 for steel frame, 94 for insulated concrete formwork and 150 for traditional construction. It has also highlighted issues such as errors caused by lack of training and lack of communication between design teams and manufacturers.

Other Information