No-one has posted any pictures for a bit, so with planned handover of the first homes just 4 weeks away I thought it was time for a bit of a photographic update
The common house roof is growing well, scaffolding was due to come down today or tomorrow
Inside, the wiring is still going on. We've put in more lighting options to make the space more flexible. The kitchen will go in this corner.
Terrace D is well and truly out of the ground. Back in the winter there were weeks when we wondered how on earth we were going to get to this point!
The homes at this end of the terrace will have upstairs living rooms with vaulted ceilings
The scaffolding poles provide a handy perch for the local Grey Wagtails
Here's Terrace A a month before the handover date
Plot number 5 was the first to receive its cladding. The bottom bit is being left to the last minute to avoid any damage by the ground workers. The balconies are being fabricated in East Lancashire and will complete the effect.
The services seem to all fit in the street after all.
The second fix electrics have been completed in this upstairs flat
Kitchens are ready for fitting once the flooring has gone down
Between us, the future residents of Lancaster Cohousing have many talents... which is one of the things that's got us this far. Alison knows how to tell a story -- since she joined she's been behind some of our best media coverage, and has been working with Frances on filming the project, and capturing our thoughts as we make this big transition.
She has a story of her own too of course, and she's turned the camera on herself to share a bit of her journey from London to Lancaster by narrowboat... what she's giving up, and what she's hoping for when she gets there.
Miles and I met up with Alison and Kevin on their way through Oxford, where we are still mainly based. Since we sold our house last year in preparation for the move, we've been living in what we fondly (and occasionally not so fondly) call our Interim Bungalow. Watching Alison's film made me realise what a special time this is, even with all its stresses and strains. I am inspired to try and capture a bit of my own journey on film too. So thanks Alison for sharing this and showing us what can be done!
Foundations for terrace D are now progressing well
We now have the detailed engineering design for the gabion walls, which is much more involved that you might imagine. The mini-digger is excavating where the gabion will be founded
Air tightness testing underway. Note the balloons sealing the vents and the fan in the window. See Luke's previous blog for more about this
Terrace C has windows (and PV panels on the other side)
Terrace E is now coming on ahead of Terrace D. Scaffolding about to arrive
Stairs are being installed to the top floor flats, which will make access much easier!
Excellent news from site - our first house passed the air tightness test by quite a large margin. Big sigh of relief from everyone! Passing this test is crucial for Passivhaus certification.
As can be seen on the photo, the PV panels have now been installed on Terrace C. Terraces B & E are also progressing well.
Not much can be seen of Terrace D from the other side of the river, but walls should start rising once the floor slabs have been completed.
The river is fairly low at the moment so I could take a picture from a slightly different angle to normal. It is not quite the same perspective as the artist's impression that we use for our marketing, but I was struck by how close to reality the artistic painting is likely to be.
Note: Apologies for the photo running off-screen, but it really needs to be seen on the larger setting, even if it breaks the page formatting!
Image (c) Broadband for the Rural North, via their Flickr site here
Last week I went into PC World to buy some ethernet cables. The reception from our Virgin wireless hub has been patchy ever since we moved into our interim rented home in readiness for our move to Forge Bank, and I reckoned that by cabling up every device that I could I might improve matters. The young man I approached for advice asked me where I lived. "In Oxford," I said. "Oh," he said, "in that case you'll be fine with the cheaper ones."
I ended up buying the more expensive ones. Here's why.
At Lancaster Cohousing we are making sure that all of our homes are ready for fibre-based internet services. Using optical fibre means that bandwidth is ultimately limited only by the speed of light. However, for this to happen, the fibre has to be run right up to your home (FTTH). None of the major providers (BT, Virgin et al) are offering this to consumers. The best they offer is running fibre to a nearby cabinet (FTTC), and then using conventional cable for the last leg to each home.
If that's what we end up with then I probably should have bought the cheaper cables. Just as a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, a network's bandwidth is only as wide as the cable with the narrowest bandwidth. And in the FTTC model, that cable is the one that runs from the cabinet to your home.
But we're hoping for something a lot better, thanks to an amazing grassroots internet initative called Broadband for the Rural North (B4RN). This is a community-owned organisation that is mobilising the hole-digging skills and tools already in abundance in rural areas and topping them up with the additional know how needed to lay fibre cable (see video above). Over the summer they will be laying cable just the other side of the river from us, on their way up to far more remote locations, and they have said that they are happy to run a spur off to hook us up too.
Thanks to B4RN our hope is that by the time we are all moved in we will have a fibre to the home internet service ready for us to use, delivering an internet service whose bandwidth is measured in not in megabits but gigabits per second.
There's more. We know that not everybody in our community will want such fast internet services. So we are installing our own fibre network between our offices-to-be in the Mill and our homes. B4RN will connect as far as the Mill, providing as many connections as we want. We will then share these connections out to each of our homes and the Mill offices, enabling some to have a dedicated connection and others to share between two or more homes at a correspondingly lower price per home. We can do this because we are cohousers and sharing with each other is what we are all about.
There's even more. Current convention is that we use wireless routers to distribute the internet through the home. But while wireless internet is great for convenience it is both lower bandwidth and less reliable than cabled. So to enable our superfast broadband to be enjoyed throughout the home, each comes with a ready to use cable network. And the cables used? They're CAT6E, the same as I bought from PC World. This means that if all goes to plan I will be able to get gigabit speed internet by connecting my new cables to any of the network access points in my home.
The biggest risk to our plans is that B4RN fails for lack of sufficient investment. Many of our residents have already bought shares in B4RN, and I urge anyone who believes in the transformative power of grassroots innovation to do so too.
