This video is from our amazing architect, Vahid Mojarrab, and it shows the foundation and wall assembly of our passive house project in Santa Fe.
Enjoy:
While this seems complicated, at the end of the day, we won't have a furnace or an air conditioner. All the heating and cooling needed can be provided by a single mini-split heat pump.
6 comments:
We have one of those houses up in Llano San Juan. It has no furnace and no A/C. Except ours is made of mud. :)
Love the way you yanks build. About 10 times more complex than here in Australia, but then it doesn't snow here. I always get concerned when an architect is involved in building a domestic dwelling. Nearly every time they get carried away and design a complicated roof or wall which ends up leaking, either that or they build an uninspiring box. Good luck. Just one other thing, the video would have been better had the title of whatever process was demonstrated been displayed prior to the process not after.
It's passive... and has heat pump. What powers the heat pump?
LOL, the short answer is solar panels on the roof.
Passive House is a set of design specifications on energy usage, it doesn't mean no energy use, just minimal use compared to typical construction:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house
However, we are also going to net zero onsite energy use with a PV solar array on the roof. Santa Fe is one of the best spots in the US for solar.
The solar is grid tied, so that the electric utility buys our power from us and we will generate as much or more than we use.
The house is all electric, no gas line, with LED lighting throughout.
ps. it also uses some passive solar ideas, with a 14 foot by 8 foot south facing window that lets in the winter sun but has a "portal" that blocks the angle of the summer sun.
Glad to know "passive" hasn't lost all meaning. I like the P.S. but have a lot of reservations about the value of PV, as yet. Thanks for the details.
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