Sustainable Housing: Building a Greener Future

News

24 Jan

Hi, I’m Mike Pratt, co-founder and director of Invertay Homes and Timber Engineering UK Ltd, based in Dundee, Scotland. With a background in Environmental/Clean Process Engineering and over a decade of experience in large municipal construction projects, I teamed up with Eddie Wighton in 2013 to create something extraordinary in the housing market.

Eddie, a joiner with over 26 years of experience in large-scale commercial projects nd grand design houses, shared my passion for energy efficiency. Together, we believed we could offer home buyers something better than the typical offerings from national house builders.

Our journey in sustainable house building began in 2015 with our first 30-house development site. Invertay’s mission is simple: “To provide families with modern homes that are affordable, sustainable, and energy efficient.” Since then, we’ve delivered over 126 private houses, 10 houses for social rent, and several one-off houses for private clients.

We’ve always aimed to give homeowners more for their money—bigger houses with high-quality components—while embracing energy efficiency and sustainability. Over the last decade, we developed a unique system of timber frame construction called ‘UltraKit,’ which we now manufacture for house builders throughout the UK.

UltraKit was born from a desire to incorporate a ‘fabric first’ approach to house construction. With the transition from gas central heating to non-fossil fuel heating systems like Air Sourced Heat Pumps (ASHP), we needed to redesign our houses to ensure that heating and running a home with electricity didn’t cost homeowners more than using gas. This approach drastically reduces the carbon impact over the house's lifetime without increasing build costs.

By incorporating energy efficiency and sustainability at the design stage, it doesn’t need to cost more to build. Our key consideration from the drawing board is always: “Is this a house that I would want to live in?” Once we have a desirable and practical layout, it’s relatively easy to incorporate energy-efficient concepts like high-performance insulation, larger gauge timber for bigger insulation cavities, and multi-layered breather membranes to reduce thermal bridging.

UltraKit allows housebuilders to construct homes from sustainable sources much quicker than traditional brick and block builds, with less embodied carbon. The structure can be erected and made wind and water-tight in as little as a day, significantly reducing the construction timeline and costs. This efficiency is crucial given the acute labour shortages in the construction industry.

While we pride ourselves on creating environmentally sustainable solutions, they also need to be financially viable for both the builder and the homeowner. UltraKit’s efficiency on-site translates to considerable savings for housebuilders, offsetting the additional costs of renewable technologies and better insulation.

Our journey to becoming a responsible, sustainable manufacturer and housebuilder has taught us a lot and our goal is to share this knowledge with other house builders to enable them to build more houses during a housing emergency and create sustainable homes that meet the challenges of the climate emergency, leaving a legacy for future generations.