Environment
There are many advantages to timber frame construction but probably the most important is it's environmental.
When designers and developers decide to build with timber frame construction, they make a positive contribution to tackling climate change.
The benefits dont stop at the point of a homes completion on site. Using a standard 140mm stud timber frame system achieves U-values between 0.30 and 0.27 using readily available and standard insulation - and using higher performance insulation and insulating breather membranes can boost these figures even more.
This means significant carbon savings in the homes day to day use, as well as financial benefits from lower running costs.
A timber frame home is a warm, comfortable and safe place in which to live - and what more could you ask from a home that is also helping to reduce our carbon footprint.
- Every timber frame home we build saves about 4 tonnes of carbon dioxide (about the same amount produced by driving 14,000 miles)
- If all new houses built in the UK since 1945 had been timber frame, then more than 300 million tonnes of carbon dioxide would have been saved. To put this into context, consider the fact that, at current rates, it will take us another 200 years to achieve this sort of saving using the Governments latest energy regulations for new homes.
- Wood is effectively a carbon-neutral material (even allowing for transport).
- Timber frame has the lowest CO2 cost of any commercially available building material.
- For every cubic metre of wood used instead of other building materials, 0.8 tonne of CO2 is saved from the atmosphere.
- Processing timber is not a gas-guzzling procedure either. 77% of the energy used in the production of wood products comes from wood residues and recovered wood.
- Coverting timber into a useable building material takes far less energy and creates minimal pollution compared to other mainstream alternatives such as aluminium, steel, concrete and brick.
- Strength for strength, concrete uses 5 times (and steel uses 6 times) more energy to produce than timber.
- Waste and ‘end of life’ wood can be easily recycled.