diy kyoto fight climate change

There’s a lot of pressure on small businesses to reduce their energy consumption and their impact on the environment these days. This may well push up the costs of many local firms. But the financial health of one friend of the Innovatory, DIY Kyoto in Penn Street, has been boosted by worries about global warming.

DIY Kyoto's list of shareholders is growing steadily, and hardly a month goes by without the business featuring on TV or in the national press.

The product attracting all the attention is called the Wattson, a tool which measures the electrical consumption of household items and helps you to estimate the annual bill for items like your kettle, your cooker or shower. The Wattson reveals startling facts about the huge and secret appetite for electricity of many household appliances.

“We have found that leaving the microwave on, just so you can use the clock, can cost as much as £50 a year,” says director Richard Woods. “The Wattson also shows that many television sets use ten times as much energy as music systems in homes. And it confirms that most items left on standby soak up just as much power as when they are in full use. People don’t know these things, and the device helps families to learn about energy use, and energy waste, while they are together in the home. We want to help households to understand and to reduce the amount of electricity they waste. The investment we have received will get the Wattson into mass production, and we intend to follow it up with new energy saving products for the home.”

The company’s team of three designers – Greta Clarke, Richard Woods, and Jon Sawdon Smith – met after graduating from the Royal College of Art.

It has taken them six years to develop the Wattson, which has two components, a sensor/transmitter and a reader. The sensor is clipped onto the power supply between the meter and the fusebox. It uses electromagnetic induction to measure the energy entering the house, and transmits the data, using wi fi, to the hand held reader anywhere in the house.

When you turn an electrical item on, the Wattson tells you exactly how much extra power you are using and what it costs. To underline its message, heavy electricity use makes the monitor glow red, and normal use blue. Up to date electricity prices can be downloaded to the handset over the internet.

“Many of our customers go round the house with their children, measuring how much leaving TV sets and computers on standby actually costs the household, and how much using the power shower adds to the family’s bills, “ Richard explains. “The data it collects on energy use - for a day, for a year or for a lifetime - can be recorded and stored, to guide changes in the household’s habits and to measure their impact.”

The Wattson was developed with support from the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts (NESTA). DIY Kyoto has also received a business grant and help with its search for investors from the Innovatory on Old Street, through the Gateway to Investment service.

The Independent praised the invention, dubbing it an “ecological tamagotchi” for the family. The Wattson has been featured on Richard and Judy’s breakfast show on Channel Four, and BBC 2’s Working Lunch.

For more information on DIY Kyoto visit www.diykyoto.com

eco buildings in hackney

The Olympic organisers and the developers in Broadgate aren’t the only people erecting futuristic buildings in Hackney. The borough is now attracting some of the most innovative architects in London, and they are using wood, straw, recycled materials and wind turbines in their attempts to reduce the local impact on the environment.

Plastered bales of straw are the main material used in an innovative new building at Hackney City Farm in Goldsmith’s Row, where a training centre designed by the environmental experts Amazonails has recently opened.

“The foundations of the centre are rammed earth tyres, and the bale walls are plastered with lime and clay recycled form the farm’s own pottery,” says Emma Appleton. “The main cross beam of the building is made of greenheart wood, a tropical hardwood reclaimed from the Norfolk sea defences. We also salvaged a teak boat from the 1930s that has been stripped down to make the desks in the room.”

“This building points the way forward for companies looking for less environmentally damaging forms of creating homes and workspace,” says Patrick Nicholson, a construction specialist at the Hackney Enterprise Network. “The materials for a house built with straw bales cost significantly less than brick and block. The outlay for a family-sized strawbale house in the UK would be about £60,000 plus the price of the land. Plastered strawbale walling has a surprisingly high level of fire resistance, and the UK currently produces 4 million tons of straw a year more than it needs. This is sufficient to build 250,000 well insulated and affordable new homes a year.”

Strawbale building techniques will be demonstrated at this year's Ecobuild show, an annual event dedicated to sustainable forms of design and construction, at Earl's Court from 26-28 February.

Hackney Council recently granted planning permission for a nine-storey tower in Murray Grove in Shoreditch which the architects, Waugh Thistleton, say will be the world’s tallest timber residential building.

The Stadthaus will be constructed using an Austrian solid timber system with wood from sustainable spruce forests, giving the tower – which will only take nine weeks to build – an unusually low carbon footprint. The stair and lift cores, load-bearing walls and even the floor slabs will all be constructed entirely from timber. Demand for the nineteen flats in the tower was extremely high and all the apartments were reserved on a recent launch day.

Waugh Thistleton’s designers are also the brains behind the fourteen storey Kinetica, fifty six apartments and three floors of commercial space to be built in Ramsgate Street, behind the Kingsland Shopping Centre, by 2010.

The futuristic tower is specially designed to harness wind power, which will be captured on its south side by four vertical turbines designed and installed by wind technology experts Quiet Revolution. Any renewable energy generated by the turbines which is not used by the residents will be forwarded to the National Grid.

The building will also have a very unusual façade – pixillated like an over-enlarged photograph - inspired by the images produced by German artist Gerhad Richter. The external surface will consist of thousands of black, grey and white panels made from waste timber.