schalung

1. _

karabina

heating/cooling

one of the major decisions when designing and building a house is the heating/cooling issue.
our main prerequisites:

energy efficient
economical exploitation
green
modular and easily programmable
integral (one solution for underfloor heating, radiators and fan coils)

this list is not a easy one, so after some research it became clear that an air to water heat pump is a desirable option. We dismissed the geothermal heat pump because AirSourceHeatPump differs in three crucial respects:
• it doesn’t require digging and rolling out 100s of meters of tubing
• instead it works by taking heat out of the air
• it’s cheaper and easier to maitain compared to GSHP

ASHP systems are relatively new, but what they claim to do is so desirable that I see them as the next big thing. Air to Water HP is not a renewable power source, as it uses electricity, but because the way heat pumps work, it will use about a third of the electricity an electric immersion heater would use. That means that our proper insulated 200 m2 house will be heated with just 3 KW/h. Wermutstropfen is that you need:
1. Really good insulation, because the heat pump delivers relatively low temperature heat - water with 45-55 degrees Celsius which is unsuitable if your house wastes a lot of energy trough the windows and poorly insulated walls. In our case this should not be a problem.
2. The efficiency (COP & EER) tends to decrease when it gets really cold, like below -10 degrees Celsius. In that cases in is not unwise to install an alternative backup heater. So for the coldest days we intend to use the fireplace as a backup.

Air to Water heat pump systems:

1. Daikin Altherma
2. Hitachi Aqua Free
3. waiting Mitsubishi Aircon and Toshiba to produce something similar.

betonplatten

beton

fundamentals

more diging

under construction

geotextile

clay tiles on curved roof

Initially we planned to put a sheet metal covering on our roof because that is the conventional wisdom for a curved roof. Everybody we spoke to in the planning phase has agreed that such a roof can only be covered with sheet metal or shindra. But critical thinking has proven once again, well critical, and it turned out that one can easily and without much trouble cover a curved roof with clay roof tiles. The smallest radius for our roof is approximately 10m and roof tiles are usually 30-36 cm long. that means that on the most critical, most curved part of our roof a tile will have a declination of just 4,5mm from the ideal position it would take on a flat roof. Because I find that to be insignificant, the only other problem with our roof in regard to covering it with clay tiles is that on the upper section, it does not match the prescribed minimal descent by the manufacturers (15 degree). My intention is to build a watertight underconstruction, ignore the recommendations and go with a slope of only 9 degree on the uppermost part.

support

key actors

loch

digging