 | | The finished product! |
The new year is already 4 weeks old. What is happening at the ecoDepot? The building is open for a start. Staff moved in during the second week of December. The solar panels are generating energy. Potted plants have appeared and, no doubt, the first cup of coffee has been spilt on the brand new carpet. So is our story at an end? On the contrary it is just beginning. Over the next few months a whole heap of stuff is happening. The wind turbine is finally on order and we’re hoping it will be installed by the end of March. At the moment there is only a stump in the middle of the car park, like the first stubby shoot of a spring bulb. I am also working with council officers to ensure that all the data we are collecting on the building’s performance is available on the Internet. This is trickier than you might think. While the council is happy for the information to be made available there are issues about firewalls to protect the information from being tampered with. We also have to work out the best way of communicating the data without it becoming the kind of thing only engineers will swoon over. I’ve been in rooms full of energy managers, and I can tell you they often struggle not to send each other to sleep!
 | | The brise soleil |
Last week I was in the ecoDepot to see the first visit by school children to the Interpretation Room. It was fantastic. Two classes from Fishergate Primary School came, over two days, to learn about the building and also to provide us with material for the ecoDepot film, which is currently being edited. It was great hearing a bunch of kids singing songs about saving the planet while they made paintings of their dream house of the future. They all got to hear The Three Little Pigs and the Straw Stick House, my reworked version of the folktale. We only had a handful of the finished pictures ready to show them, but the artist is slaving away and I am meeting him on Friday to see the finished work. Then it’s off to the printing press so that all the Primary Schools in York can have a copy. I was told that the heating is only on for two hours a day in the ecoDepot. The building is so energy efficient, because of the straw cladding, that the place hardly needs heating. Of course, this first winter will see a great deal of experimenting to work out the best way of heating and ventilating the building. While I was there the windows suddenly opened automatically a couple of times for just a minute or so. In earlier blogs I included photos of the under floor heating system going in. Over the coming weeks I am planning to sit down with the engineers to discuss the heating and ventilation at some depth in order to produce a couple of detailed blogs, for those of you with a specialist turn of mind. | "We came perilously close to the headline ‘Lib Dem Leader spearheads York’s Ambitious Plan to Reach the Moon’!" | |
It is strange to turn up on site and not meet Paul Cunningham, the project manager. For almost a whole year we met up regularly as the building took shape. We last met just after the last blog, when Sir Ming Campbell came to open the building. The day was so windy that the hospitality marquee erected outside in the car park practically took off just a few minutes after he had gone. While we all hope a VIP visit will generate some publicity, we came perilously close to the headline ‘Lib Dem Leader spearheads York’s Ambitious Plan to Reach the Moon’! Anyway, Paul and Carillion, the contractors, have moved on to new projects but I am hopeful we will be meeting up at awards ceremonies all over the planet! Which reminds me. This humble blog, and the ecoDepot and York, is now being celebrated in Europe. We have been chosen as a shining example by Energie-Cites, the pan-european energy efficiency organisation. Energie-Cites designed the display posters you can see up in many schools and in the entrance to Edmund Wilson Swimming Pool, to show how energy efficient a building is. You can learn more about Energie-Cites and their great practical ideas for tackling Climate Change at their website:
Energie-Cites >
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And you can see how great they think our ecoDepot is at: Nice eh? Cllr Christian Vassie, 29th Jan 2007 | 
