Sustainable Products - Sustainable Flooring - Eco Building - Tranquility Houses for Low Carbon Living

A project reducing our impact on the planet and providing
sustainable, comfortable, inexpensive living through ultra low energy.

The products we already offer are:

And we are hoping to offer wood burners very soon

We will only offer products we can argue are honestly sustainable and with the lowest carbon footprint we can manage, but they must also be beautiful, practical and truly affordable - we don't have to live in an ugly world to live sustainably. Unfortunately many products are now marketed as 'green', 'environmental', 'sustainable' or 'low carbon' when often nothing could be further from the truth, and this muddies the water for the public. How to tell the honest from the unscrupulous?

Our Ethos document fully explains our position and how we decide to offer what we do.

We are not trying to be a retailer, so when we don't make the products - we will probably only offer one brand but that brand will be chosen carefully. It is the product we can recommend and put our name to and everything will be at the best price we can manage.

Full details and explanations of each product group are on each product group home page, from where all the information we have is available but first a few notes here on the timber.
We start by receiving the felled trees so know where each one grew and why it was felled; we mill them, air dry and then kiln the timber, and make them into the products available on this web site. Our sources are primarily the National Arboretum at Westonbirt; major local private estates (the Duchy of Cornwall is one such); the National Trust; hopefully soon the Forestry Commission and other known local woodlands. Each tree is tracked from where it grew to the customer so we can supply an arboreal label with each floor and table specifying the botanical and common names of the species, and the trees provenance - exactly where it grew. We are very confident we have the very best provenance of any timber product you can buy.
The timber in Westonbirt trees travels not more than 50kms from where it grew to where it is ready for delivery as finished product, and we are hoping to radically reduce even this figure in the near future. In contrast rainforest timber will travel in the region of 10,000 to 20,000 kms and even southern European timber can travel the 20,000 kms. This is because many of the production processes are done in China, so the timber can travel to China and back - not that the flooring suppliers will tell you this.

Having discovered by 2002 that the planet is in big trouble with or without climate change, that our conventional energy supplies are certainly running out but that the climate is with almost certainty going to be the biggest problem of all - the best thing to do was to design and build the lowest energy building I could.

Hence Tranquillity which is rather big at 5,000 sq ft yet heats for about £60, hot water costs less than £10 and water itself is provided for less than £10 - all figures are for a year. So dramatically better than anything else, but it was designed from first principles and everything in Tranquility had to be cost effective rather than 'the flavour of the month' and had to work. Saving energy and carbon were the requirements. Installing gizmos was not. And the cost of moving to this level of efficiency is about 5½% over normal build costs - or about 6½% to reach full zero carbon. While many apparently authoritative bodies say it is impractical to reach such a performance and that it would cost an unaffordable fortune - Tranquillity has done it.

What surprised me was that nothing installed in Tranquility turned out to be conventional. Not surprising by itself as all the systems were designed and built for the project but Solar PV was rejected as was a Heat Pump of any sort, normal Solar Hot Water, and anything to do with a site or house wind turbine. These are not only very expensive and not cost effective, but they don't save carbon. Papers on these products are now on the Information section of the web site. A newsletter is also now available and you can sign-up to receive future editions by email.

There is a great deal of information available on this site which is all connected in some way or another with the Environment and it is all the result of Independent research. There are no vested interests here to mis-represent reality. The leading subjects are Climate, Energy, Food & Agriculture, Timber & Forests, Water, Economics, Population and Politics - the last as we need the best decisions taken quickly which our political system seems unable to deliver. All the renewable energy options for our houses are under 'Energy'.

Everything to do with Tranquility will have the highest integrity and be totally honest, so information will include both sides of an argument. There is a huge need for information to be correct, and being right is the most important thing, so the information here will be changed if it can be shown to be wrong - or not quite right! It is intended to be a centre of excellence.

Understanding much about all these subjects allows the interactions between them to be predicted as few things in the world now operate in isolation. Taking land to produce biofuel necessarily means there is less food available in the world. It seems there are two major issues with available 'information':

Most comes from Vested Interests which must be ignored - so disregard what the banking industry tells you about banking; the alcohol industry about alcohol, or the GM industry about GM. The first thing to do is to look for the provenance of the information.
Or from what I will call 'mono-academics'. These are often brilliant people but so focussed on an area of expertise they cannot understand what their 'solution' to a problem in one area will do in another.

The information here is in 3 forms:

Blogs - which are brief documents covering just the essentials. But most subjects cannot be really covered so briefly so:
White Papers - which take a subject; develop it fully mostly with a lot of data and some argument, and lead through to a conclusion you may or may not share. But they are substantially argued and often break new ground so are many pages long but a complex subject cannot be covered briefly. Many will probably say "I thought so" when they have read them but some (mostly manufacturers) will be upset.
Reports or Books as all the Tranquility written work will be published through this site. Both i. and ii. above are free, but there will be charges for Reports and books. The reports will contain significant amounts of data probably available nowhere else.