Today we looked at some of the building details and systems used in the 400sq. ft. passive house "out of the blue" in County Wicklow, the dwelling is a 2-stoery single family detached structure, the first of its kind to be built in Ireland and is owned and occupied by architect Tomas O Leary and his family. The dwelling was designed, specified and supervised through his own company MosArt . The house is officially certified as a passive house by the German Passive House Institute. The external walls are 560mm thick with U-values of 27 W/m2K taken for the BER certificate purposes, the exterior walls consist of block clad and 315mm expanded polystyrene insulation supplied by greenspan products ltd.
The windows and doors were a very complex section of the dwelling in both sourcing and installing, Optiwin Ireland was the chosen company to conduct the procedure as they sourced all the required certified data and calculations from the Optiwin company in Austria. The windows are a triple glass pane cavity 12mm thick filled with Argon, and provides a glass U-value of 0.6 W/m2K and a Frame U-value of 0.73 W/m2K.The Ventilation system installed in out of the blue dwelling is a high end Paul HRV (heat recovery ventilation) unit and was installed by pure renewable energy.
O' Leary first became interested in the Passive house concept at a conference in Co Kerry when a Swedish architect explained how he designed houses without any conventional heating system even in the coolest of climates, many Passive house do not install a heating system at all, but Tomas installed a Calimax pellet stove with a back boiler which heats a small number of rooms and bathrooms through radiators if required. The radiators and stove heated proportions within the house via the pellet stove are exceeding the 30% required by the Deap, so the stove must be entered as the principle heating system.
In Out of the Blue however, there is a Calimax pellet stove with a back boiler supplied by Greenheat. This back boiler heats a small number of rooms/bathrooms with radiators, if required. Quite inadvertently, these few radiators, along with the space heated directly by the stove means the proportion of the house heat-able by the pellet boiler is over the 30% required by Deap, and so the stove can be entered as the principal heating system.
Retrieving the relevant certified, translated, accredited test data for all the different products installed was a very strenuous task, but Tomas persisted with the view of a clean, low energy house for his family’s benefits’, compared to the conventional terraced house they previously lived in.
No comments:
Post a Comment