For an introduction and background to the HHP, read this first.

I suppose this is like a lab. And presumably given the accelerating interest in sustainability, and issues like that of water management, it must open up opportunities because you're more and more interesting to people.

Yes, but at the same time it could be draining because there's only five houses. You want interest, but not too much because you have to remember these are our homes. That is always the priority, so it is a balance. Our mission statement underpins what we do. ‘To act as a catalyst for change towards ecologically sound and sustainable ways of living’. If someone came to us with a proposal for a project then we would all vote on whether we wanted to move forward with it.

Are there trends that you’ve noticed in terms of the kind of things people are interested in? I imagine you're a bit of a weathervane for things that people are thinking about in terms of challenges to the climate?

We’ve got a lot more international students coming, from Africa, Asia and South America; many more. And it's very interesting the sort of projects they are doing and the way that different governments across the world are working to support villages that are never going to be connected to the grid. Many of the students come from villages like this, and after doing their Master of Science degrees they go back and build their solar field or start other projects. It’s quite inspiring, the motivation behind them coming; there’s a lot of work happening around renewable energy.

There’s also a lot of interest in water systems because we're very unique in our system here.

Water management is incredibly important to us because we couldn't live here if we didn't get it right. All over our site we're capturing water. One of the first things that was done was to build the lake and the reservoir at the top, which is our non-potable (unsafe for drinking) water storage. Until those were almost full nobody could move into the houses. Everyone here also had to work out how much water they were going to use and so had lots of questions to ask each other: how long do you shower for and how often do you do your washing? All those questions are so important and it’s the same with renewable energy; you have to know what you need. That’s the first thing we tell the students who come here; you've got to know your client; you've got to know what exactly what your client needs. And then you can work out what their home needs in terms of sustainable architecture or renewable energy.

The water from the top reservoir is our washing water, and all the drinking water comes off these glass roofs, goes into the gutters and is channelled into storage tanks underneath our conference room. And all over the site we have swales and ditches, so we’re always collecting water. The lake also never floods because when the water levels rise to a certain level it flows into a wildlife pond, which goes into another wildlife pond, which goes into a series of moats, which end up in the Christmas Pond, which only has water at Christmas. And then that runs into a dyke. We’re never going to flood.

When people move in are they told to conserve water, to conserve energy?

We do pay a bit to the electricity company, but our bills are paid to ourselves, to the community. How that works is that I go round and read everybody's meters every three months; the water meters, the electric meter, the electric car charging meter. I put all of that into a spreadsheet to see how we’re all comparing and if somebody has, for some reason, used loads of energy in their house they'll be asked to pay extra for it. It clarifies the mind, let's put it that way. But most of the energy and water use is pretty low.

I’ve discovered that in all the years that we've been doing this the amount of non-potable water we use has stayed the same, within 20 litres per day! Households have changed, the number of children has changed, there’s all sorts of variables, but some reason it always stays the same.

How do you work out a charge for water if it's all free?

It’s not free in terms that we're running a pump; the energy for the pump has got to be calculated, and the water filters, the UV filters, there are still costs involved that we need to cover. And although our energy costs are low, we do all have a workshop and the costs of electric cars are quite high compared to what is used in our houses, given that we have no heating. You can clearly see the kilowatt hours per day figure for each house and this helps you to ask questions and tweak things; so that you might pressure cook rather than putting things in the oven.

Does everyone have an electric car?

One of the conditions of the tenancies has always been that we could only have one fossil fuel car per family. In the beginning it was very difficult and it’s only just achievable now. Our houses might be quite expensive to buy, but on a day-to-day basis most of us are not earning a huge amount of money; so, it’s been difficult to buy an electric vehicle. It’s only in the last four or five years that they have become more affordable, and we’ve got five here now. It clearly makes sense given that we’re generating our own electricity.

Do your turbines produce energy for you all year?

No; because of the climate. We need solar and wind, like just about anywhere in the U.K. The energy we need for the five electric cars here is the equivalent to the energy we need to power one house so we need to think about that. In the summer, we're absolutely fine but in the winter when you're using more lights and tend to make more casseroles, that sort of thing, we need a little more. So, we could do with generating more power.

How important is the growing side of things?

It’s essential. And it’s just for us; it doesn’t go anywhere. We can’t sell produce; although we do have people who have some of our eggs which we deliver to them. It's supporting us with organic food; with meat, eggs, vegetables. We’ve actually reduced the size of the flock because we’ve less people here interested in eating meat at the moment.

The energy cost of food production is huge, so the growing of our own food is central to the mission of the project. We’re about two-thirds self-sufficient in vegetables, fruit and eggs and we have a collective buying arrangement with the Suma co-operative to supply much of the rest, so that we know what we are eating is in season and local.

Certain people like doing certain things. Lou likes chopping trees down and weeding, I like sowing seeds, my husband loves growing potatoes. We all get together in January and decide what we're going to grow; whether there’s anything we don't want to grow anymore; whether we need to grow less or more of something; how much seed we need for the land we've got. Everybody brings the seed they’ve saved and then we do a seed order, just one so we’re not paying postage for lots of different organic seeds. And then we might do another seed order in late spring, depending on what we've got left and what we think we might need to get us through to the end of the year.

Are you trailblazers?

I would say that if people are wanting to build a community it's worth coming to us because we've done it. And people do. It might be those who are buying a piece of land together to build homes on; or they might have a piece of land that a landlord is willing for them to build on. They want to know about how to set up a constitution for their community, because it is excruciatingly difficult.

There are other people working on this; there will be a manual that will come out and we’ll be one of their case studies. There will be links to our constitution and how we’ve come up with our rules of how we work together. It’s taken years and years to come up with these, for just five houses working together. Sometimes groups can be too big, they’ve got too many voices; and then it just doesn't work.

What is a good number of houses and people, to form a community like this?

Well, we like this number. I’m aware that it is quite small. You can always have a community within a community, and we’ve got that now we have the nine additional houses at the top which have their own Community Association. You have to construct it so that it's manageable for people to make decisions. If you've got too many people and decisions are tight, there are going to be a large amount of people that are unhappy.

Moving into a community like this seems very much a lifestyle decision. It's about saying I want to be living with the land, with a group of other people and going on this experiment together with them about what we can do and how we collaborate.

Absolutely.  But it doesn't feel as intrusive as you saying it like that. We've pretty much lived our normal lives. We’ve had a lot of friends that thought we were just living a completely different life and then they’d come to visit and realise that it wasn’t as different as they expected. Although clearly it is a different way of living. I’ll be talking to my Mum on the phone and have to say ‘I’ve got to go because I need to look at the sheep’.  

Sometimes there are gaps to be filled, and somebody has to step up and sometimes we just all look at each other and go OK, let's all just crack on together and do it. If we have a big thing, like when we've had trees down and things like that, we have a work morning where we all get stuck in. Somebody's cutting, someone’s moving it all, someone’s on the tractor, someone’s logging to put it in the log stores; so it’s all done and dusted. Then there’s the clearing of the beds at the end of the season, that’s a big job. And we always have cake.

What is the most difficult time of year to be here?

Probably the summer, because we have a lot of people who go away on holiday with their children. Everything still needs watering, chickens need feeding, you have to collect eggs and honey. And if people leave their dogs here someone has to walk them. It's us older ones that are left here!

How has it changed you?

I'm a completer finisher, that’s my character, I don’t like things to be left. That’s part of being a Head Teacher And some of the things we get involved in can take a fairly winding route, which I find a little challenging. But I’ve learnt that you can often get a better result by doing it in a more slow and measured way.

The other challenge I feel is knowing too much. We know an awful lot about the climate and the devastation that potentially is going to happen, the displacement and all the rest of it. Sometimes I feel that's a burden that I don't want to feel. I have to be very careful not to talk about it with my friends too much. It’s a thing that switches people off if you go on about it.

Deb on site!

So how could we scale up projects like this?

They're incredibly simple homes to build, much easier than those built with the Passive House concept, and they’re more effective too. The only way you scale this up is by getting governments to change the building regulations and force builders to do this; because if every household didn't require heating that would be huge for the climate. Also, if we go over to electric cars the challenge for the grid is going to be huge. You’ve got a solution here.

They don't have to be as big as these; they can be like the one my Mum lives in (one of the newly built houses). She’s a ninety year old living in a house that doesn't require any heating so there’s none of this winter fuel payment worry for her. You don’t need to have all of the water engineering that we have, that’s another challenge. You can just build homes that are in a terrace like those up there. And just think how much more disposable income people would have if they didn’t need to pay these huge energy bills.

Are the new houses built in the same way as these?

Yes. I know some think the soil on the top of these houses is part of the energy saving

Design, but it was only put on top after they were built because the planners didn't want the development to be seen from the road. Our houses are constructed of concrete and insulation. Concrete stores energy and there is dense insulation on the outside that keeps the heat in the house, that’s how simple it is. It's just the materials. Thermal mass and solar gain, making sure the heat from the sun can come into the house.

How would you like to imagine this place in ten years’ time?

As it is; but I think we need more of the younger generation coming in. We might need a few more houses; we want to have more woodland here. We could perhaps grow more crops, cereals, that sort of thing; at the moment we only have a bit of maize. I hope it would be the same as it is now in terms of the way the community works and feels, because it's a very happy place to live.

If you want to find out more about HHP then do have a look at their website.