No Energy Bills,
No Maintenance;
the Easy Life
At Sero Homes, we believe you’ve got better things to do than juggle bills and sort out maintenance. Our zero carbon homes are built and maintained by us, so you don’t have to. And paying for energy? So long as you don’t want every room heated like it’s a Swedish sauna, that’s a thing of the past too, you’ll just have a fixed fee for our active management.
Our homes are true grid zero carbon
And that means paying nothing for energy too, assuming normal usage. True grid zero carbon means that over the course of the year, our homes and all our residents living in them emit no CO2 or similar climate change gases. So that’s not just heating, hot water and fixed equipment counted as zero carbon, but also TVs, mobile phones, kettles and all the rest that goes along with a normal family home life.
And we’re not just guessing that our homes are true grid zero carbon – we log every single kWh of energy in our neighbourhoods. When our homes’ renewable generation is powering the National Grid, we record the carbon we’re helping them avoid, so that when we need to draw a bit of power back, we can balance their Grid emissions from those we’ve avoided beforehand. That all equals out to be true grid zero carbon, or even a bit beyond. All of which means our residents don’t pay for kWh of electricity, just a small fixed fee for the active management of the home’s energy system.
Zero Maintenance
Our residents live maintenance free lives. We carefully build our homes properly, with good robust or repairable materials, so that they will be low maintenance with a long life. Then once we’ve built them, because we don’t sell them, we maintain these homes throughout their lives.
Living in a Sero Home means no arranging a boiler servicing, no cleaning gutters from a precarious ladder, no repainting the fence. We just give you a call, drop you a text or send an email (your choice), and arrange a convenient time for us to come and sort it out. Plus, if you’re interested, in most neighbourhoods we’ve got options to keep your garden trimmed, your car washed and your house clean and tidy too!
High Quality Build
We build quality homes – we know, because we check. A lot. Because Sero Homes don’t sell, we know that building badly is simply giving ourselves a problem for later down the line. This makes us especially careful about our design and construction – we check every stage of the process to make sure no hidden issues are accidentally included in anything from foundations to rooftops, floors to fittings.
This hands-on attention to detail means we get homes that avoid the construction “Performance Gap”, and which can be operated to give the best levels of comfort to our residents. Plus, for us, it means we know that the future maintenance of our homes is as straightforward as we planned.
Low Energy Fabric
Our homes are designed to demand less energy first and foremost. We go beyond current building regulations to build highly insulated homes that avoid cold spots and minimise draughts – in construction terminology that’s very low U-values, very low thermal bridging ϕ values and very low air leakage at less than 2m2/m3/hr to give low overall heat demand. This means our homes need much less energy to be warm and comfortable.
Because we build our homes to help fight climate change, we also think about how they will perform in our future climate. Overheating can be a real issue, which is why our homes include thermal mass that helps moderate overheating on hot days by absorbing the warmth to keep the rooms nice and cool.
Low Embodied Energy
Our homes are true grid zero carbon in operation, including the typical energy usage of our residents. That’s a huge step towards tackling the climate emergency.
But we’re trying to go further – we’re not there yet, but we’re working towards making the construction of our homes zero carbon. We’re already working on how we can trap carbon emissions in the fabric of our homes, and over time aim to be able to demonstrate all our construction emissions are captured in the homes and their landscaping.