Radian, a major provider of social housing and support in the south of England, brings together experience of building, regenerating and managing sustainable homes and environments.

With the support of the Environment Agency, Radian has embarked on a water efficiency project. They will lead research into methods of water management to reduce demand from households. As part of this research, Radian selected a new development of five houses at Five Trees, Inwood Road in Liss to trial different methods of water conservation.

Each property had separate, innovative methods of saving water installed so that they could be monitored for cost efficiency, economy, and ease of use and compared. The monitoring period started when the new occupants moved into their homes at the beginning of December 2008. The project will run for a full year and during that time, the meters on the inlets inside the property will be checked every three months.

WPL are one of the companies that worked in partnership with Radian and provided their RainRetain rainwater harvesting system to equip two of the houses in Inwood Road. Alike all the rainwater harvesting systems installed in the properties in Inwood Road, the RainRetain has a capacity of 1600 litres.

The Building Research Establishment (BRE) is carrying out research to assess whether the Code for Sustainable Homes water consumption standards are reasonable in practice. The Code for Sustainable Homes is an environmental assessment of ‘new build’ properties ranging from level 1 to level 6 (the best, carbon neutral with a consumption level of 80 litres of water per person per day). Five Trees aims to achieve level 3 of the code that requires, among other environmental standards, a water consumption level of 105 litres per person per day.

The main aims of this project are to reach an acceptable level in the Code for Sustainable homes standards, to reduce the water consumption levels of each person, and to reduce water usage within each household. WPL are working alongside Radian in this project to help achieve these goals by maximizing the amount of water that can be captured each day. The filter within the RainRetain system can capture 90% of the water that flows over it which maximizes the amount of water that is captured and therefore saved for usage. WPL also provided a developers pack with the tank to ensure correct usage of the tank.

This project is trial assessment for all participating in it and will hopefully be a good learning process for everyone. The results will hopefully provide us with information to help us develop our systems to make them more energy efficient and achieve the highest levels of standards in the Code for Sustainable Homes.