Eco-housing

Overview

An 'Ecohouse' is harmoniously connected to its environment and to the well-being of its occupants. It can harvest renewable resources including water and energy. It provides all the fundamental functions of a good house, namely, to offer a safe environment with multiple comforts for those within it. A good house must provide a healthy, quiet, peaceful, thermally comfortable and safe environment, and it must be affordable.

Heriot-Watt's Ecohouse team are developing approaches to house design that will create homes with these qualities: homes that run well with low energy bills, produce minimal life cycle and carbon emissions and are pleasing places to inhabit.

The development of the Ecohouse approach calls upon a wide range of research expertise, skills and resources. The Ecohouse team uses some of the best research laboratories in the UK, namely Heriot-Watt's leading acoustic, water and materials labs, wind tunnels, and its artificial sky, heliodon and climate chambers. Our specialists work in interdisciplinary groups that build on their links with government and industry to produce innovative solutions to inform a new generation of housing approaches.

Our aim is to help to produce buildings that tread lightly on the earth. Our Ecohouse approach offers the genuine promise of sustainable, durable and climate-safe buildings that can future-proof us against twenty first century challenges.