How to Manage the Whole Sustainability Shebang in One Easy Step

Managing the Sustainability Health and Wellbeing of you and your projects – The whole shebang – the hot potato – the big piece of chocolate cake – the full experience

How do you manage your design stage and prior-to-construction sustainability and match it up with the compliance some two years later when you are left holding the Building Regulations Part L baby?

Council requirements and conditions vary across the land. The labels they give to the reports they require can differ making the process very confusing. Building Regulations can also vary depending on the project. Both are equally important and must mirror each other in order for full compliance to be met at the end of the day.

Sustainability and energy efficiency are not a planning stage thing. They exist beyond the planning decision notice and where they can appear to go away for the duration of a project you can be very sure that at practical completion when the building control officer comes for sign off, they will reappear in the ugliest form like the calories of a very large piece of chocolate cake that you thought you could work off with a couple of laps around the garden. As we all know, nothing could be further from the truth. The full weight of the denial consequences can be truly frightening, highly stressful and very costly.

Over the last 10 years the team at EAL Consult have experienced all of it. Architects up in arms, project managers experiencing inordinately elevated levels of stress, builders lost in translation, developers in meltdown and counting the cost of a lost sale having to confront the expenses of all that extra renewable technology and its installation implications having felt confident that none of it would be necessary – not to mention the disappointed buyer – so near and yet so far from their new building or dream home.

Its tears all round. Heart breaking for us especially seeing the writing on the wall when we are commissioned either right at the beginning of a project or right at the end because a project has changed hands more than once or been passed along the production line where sustainability has simply fallen off the conveyor belt due to oversight, ignorance or pure chance.

It is easy to connect the dots when you know what to expect. Imagine two towers of Sustainability;

TOWER 1 the tower of pre- construction or RIBA stages 0-4 inclusive

TOWER 2 the tower of Construction or RIBA stage 5.

Whatever is established, in the first tower has to be born out in the second. That is the simplest way to visualise the sustainability compliance process and to stay on track for a seamless passage from the planning approved design to a smooth construction process and easy building control sign off at practical completion.

Once you know what to expect by having sight of the planning decision notice and the conclusion of any report from tower 1 (at least its conclusion), no matter what stage you come into a project, you will be able to align it with Building Regulations and avoid all the common pitfalls.

Embrace the two towers as one – the whole shebang. Savour that big piece of chocolate cake having considered and planned its construction and execution thinking positively about how you will burn off the 350 calories by going that extra mile and reaping all the rewards.