Originally Posted By: Archeon
The house is entirely built from the ground up with energy saving in mind. In the ground plate there will be 15 cm of isolation (apart from the concrete ground plate which will be 20 cm thick) so the cold cannot get through the ground floor. In the walls there will be 10 cm of high-isolation plates. Below the room there will be 18 cm of isolating fabric. The house will be heated with a heatpump and ventilated with a mechanical ventilation pump with heat recovery fed with air that goes through a 'Canadian pitt' (don't know the term in English, but in essence this means that the air which is pulled into the house is guided through a 30 meter long 20 cm wide tube that is put under the ground 2 meter deep - the air that goes through this tube is thus pre-heated to the temparture of the ground, winter and summer 10°C-12°C - this has the advantage that in the winter you never draw in frozen air and thus can't kill your ventilation pump, and in summer this air can cool the house)


That's pretty much like ours, it's designed to the German PassivHaus standard, we'll have mechanical heat recovery, and a "labyrinth" (your Canadian pit), no ground source heat pump but we've got a lot of land so will be putting in a sizeable wind turbine if we get permission from the council.

I'll post some pics on a separate thread when I get the chance, our architect does stuff on paper not electronically.