Oval Village

Oval Village is a new large mixed use development located in zone 1 of London. 

With views over the Kia Oval Cricket Ground and London’s iconic skyline, and just a short walk from the River Thames, bars, restaurants, award winning parks and several tube stations.

A Berkeley Homes development, accommodation features stunning 1-3 bedroom apartments, accompanied by excellent on site amenities such as 24-hour concierge, workspace and lounges, gymnasium and swimming pool, hydro-pool and private cinema. 170,000 square feet of commercial space is also contained within the development.

The Challenge

With the new Building Regulations, Part O coming into force in 2022 to address overheating in dwellings, all new build properties must be designed to limit unwanted solar gains within summer months and provide adequate means of quickly removing excess heat from indoor environments.

Approved Document O provides technical guidance on how to achieve this; for example, through optimising glazing, maximising window openings and solar shading. It prioritises passive ventilation solutions, such as opening windows, but there are instances when this is neither desirable, nor practical. In urban developments, understandably it may not be considered safe to leave ground floor windows open at night. Furthermore, external noise and pollution from, for example, road and rail transport, may be an issue and one which a developer has no control over. Located in the heart of London, Oval Village has these issues to contend with, plus higher temperatures than in other parts of the UK as a result of the Urban Heat Island effect which frequently sees London temperatures up to 10°C warmer than neighbouring rural areas.

The consultant on the development looked at the acoustics, the air quality and overheating when starting out on the detailed design, and did a comparative between all three. To naturally ventilate, the in-room acoustic criteria set out in Approved Document O must be achieved with windows open at night. For apartments that would not meet the noise criteria, an alternative solution had to be found in the form of mechanical ventilation.

Cooling technologies for individual apartments impacted by overheating where looked at. While split systems with fan-coils are a tried and tested option, they weren’t universally suited to all apartments in the development. Such cooling systems come at a premium price and, furthermore, are relatively energy hungry so residents have to have the means to pay to run them. With a number of the apartments at Oval Village allocated as affordable housing, the cost of cooling for the home owner was an important consideration.

The Solution

Nuaire advised of a new product recently launched into the market, the MRXBOX Hybrid Cooling System, which is a cooling extension for the MRXBOX MVHR range, delivering clean indoor air, while combatting overheating. It combines the heat-exchanger coolth recovery of an MVHR system with the cooling effect provided by a DX coil. A wall-mounted room temperature sensor senses indoor temperatures and activates the cooling module automatically when necessary. Designed specifically to address problem areas of developments, where specific apartments or groups of apartments cannot be naturally ventilated and where site wide cooling technologies are not an option, the Hybrid Cooling System significantly lowers the temperature of the fresh-air supply.

103 Nuaire Hybrid Cooling Systems, with Nuaire ducting, are being installed into one bedroom apartments at Oval Village in an area called the Zone, which are available on a shared ownership basis. These are divided across two blocks. They have been installed within utility cupboards.

The new Nuaire Hybrid Cooling Systems represent a solution to a genuine need in affordable housing schemes. It provides compliance with Part O without the energy cost of a full cooling system that occupants have to pay for. It’s a solution that does enough to keep people comfortable without having a big energy bill attached. Going forward, these units will be used more and more because changes to Part O means you can't now automatically use fan coils if standard ventilation methods don’t work.