Design
On average, the houses were designed to required 44 kWh/m², 75% lower than the average 172 kWh/m² that would have been required had the houses been built to normal standards. (Analysis of 11 of the houses in use indicated that total savings made in practice was actually 60% ).The 44 kWh/m² resulted from:
- Electricity – 18 kWh/m²
- Space heating – 14 kWh/m²
- Water heating – 11 kWh/m²
- Cooling – 1 kWh/m²
In addition there was an average solar contribution designed to average 37 kWh/m², from a combination of passive solar gains, active solar, and photovoltaics.
The buildings were constructed to be airtight, be superinsulated to roughly double normal standards, and to minimise thermal bridges. Masonry and several timber framed methods were represented, along with a novel steel strengthened polystyrene block walls were used. The Berlin "Zero Heating Energy House" included a 20m³ (700 cubic feet) seasonal thermal store.
Read more about this topic: IEA Solar Heating & Cooling Implementing Agreement Task 13
Famous quotes containing the word design:
“Joe ... you remember I said you wouldn’t be cheated?... Nobody is really. Eventually all things work out. There’s a design in everything.”
—Sidney Buchman (1902–1975)
“You can make as good a design out of an American turkey as a Japanese out of his native stork.”
—For the State of Illinois, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“For I choose that my remembrances of him should be pleasing, affecting, religious. I will love him as a glorified friend, after the free way of friendship, and not pay him a stiff sign of respect, as men do to those whom they fear. A passage read from his discourses, a moving provocation to works like his, any act or meeting which tends to awaken a pure thought, a flow of love, an original design of virtue, I call a worthy, a true commemoration.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)