Harris Academy

Passivhaus is an international standard for designing and constructing buildings that deliver super-high energy efficiency and impressive occupier comfort. Crucially, to achieve certification, everything must be built and completed exactly as designed and to top quality standards, ensuring that building performance in use mirrors the design model and targets.
 
Harris Academy is the largest Passivhaus Secondary School in the UK. ATS were appointed to deliver the ultra high energy efficient Standard and take sustainability to new heights.
 
The school forms part of Sutton’s masterplan for the London Cancer Hub – a major project to create a world-leading life-science campus for research, treatment, education and enterprise. A collaboration between The Institute of Cancer Research and Sutton Council, this park is dedicated to research to cure cancer, with the Harris Foundation appointed as the Free School education provider.
 
Passivhaus buildings have far more high-performance elements than a standard building and the specification for mechanical and electrical performance is far higher than usual. Therefore, it was imperative that our software developers were extremely diligent in achieving the top quality workmanship and installation that the standard requires.
 
Furthermore, as the majority of plant was provided with proprietary pre-programmed hardware it was necessary for bespoke software drivers to be developed to fulfil the strict parameters that the specification laid out. A variety of protocols across the different elements of hardware meant that Modbus, bacnet and IP based networking was required together with an extensive amount of testing to ensure all certification was achieved.