Pop-Up House: The affordable passive house
popup-house.com
popup-house.com
An additional issue is that there are lots of different administrative units making the rules, so a particular set of restrictive rules won't apply 1 mile away.
What you really are saying is you want a large house on a large plot in a location of your choosing for cheap.
But this project isn't really solving a problem per se, its a design project.
Or even more simple, nobody is complaining about the cost of materials.
They don't prepare the ground first? Isn't the house going to sink during the first heavy rain?
Seems like one of those idealistic almost art project houses rather than something you could actually live in.
Unless someone has lived in one for months, it's purely magic unicorn poop.
What good is 'outstanding insulation' with no heating/cooling?
A passive house is a building whose energy consumption per square meter is very low. Heating requirements of < 15 kWh/m²/year.
That's about two human bodies.
15 kWh/m²/year * 150 m^2 / ~10,000 h/year ~= 200WYou could probably get around that by pouring a slab with small stem walls and building inside that, but that's not what they're doing here...
It's interesting that when you're dealing with this high of insulation, the earth would act as a thermal bridge instead of an insulator.
fantasy island construction, but it might make a good shed if you ditch the lvl's on grade
My 7-year-old daughter just asked me the other day, "We can build a tiny house when I'm 11, right?" So I have another four years before I need to do something like this in tiny house form.
https://www.facebook.com/lists/4064803732495
ph0rque, your AutoMicroFarm side project looks interesting. It's a idea I think about often. Instead of an upfront purchase of the hydroponic system, a SaaS model might increase adoption. e.g. You charge $100 per month to manage the customers vegetable garden. Basically, it's a hack. The farmer just hacked a way to farm w/o having to own land, pay for water or utilities, and gets paid regardless if the crop fails. Farmer earns ~$100 per hour per customer, and can scale. Inspiration for idea: Our local non-tech gardeners.
– Have strong thermal insulation without thermal bridges,
– Be perfectly airtight,
– Capture maximum solar energy.Perfectly airtight? With wood and insulation?
What would be the total total cost then?
200€ = 278.08 US Dollars
1 meter = 3.28084 feet
So.. 278.08 dollars gets you 3.28084 sq ft, or about $84.76 per single square foot (278.08/3.28084)...
If I did my math right. ;-)
[1] http://www.nahb.org/assets/images/Table1_201035133529.jpg
(Maybe I'm just being a grumpy old man, but I deal with this sort of thing all the time in my day job and it winds me up something rotten).
1 square meter = 10.7639 square ft
Of that number, roughly 1/3 of it is for framing the shell. The rest is all plumbing/HVAC/electrical/trim.
There's a lot of easily-invalidated assumptions built into that number, so take it with a grain of salt.
But I cannot avoid thinking of the wolf, huffing and puffing and .. blowing that thing away. How stable is that thing?
Also, where is the plumbing and electrical?
It is not that much more expensive to build a solid concrete block home, insulate and airtight it well
I realise wood is more plentiful in US than here in Europe, but imho i wouldnt feel safe living in a wooden home.
Wood use to be much cheaper because it requires special knowledge to create strong concrete.
The wooden walls also allow for pipes and utilities to be easily ran. How do you run utilities into concrete homes? The ones I've seen are either exposed or behind a wooden wall.
The US has a large amount of brick homes, but it's usually wooden walls on the insides so it ends up costing more.
It's also more difficult to make a concrete block home look good, and since there aren't too many major storms in many parts of the US, cheap wooden homes work fine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Fire_of_London might also be a reason why Europe prefers concrete to wood.
The brick and stone homes here are actually masonry facade over wood frame. You need to have an air gap and flashing between the brick/stone and the wood, as water will seep through the mortar via capillary action fairly quickly, and stay there to rot the wood.
Yes, but that doesn't mean a wood-framed house built today wild last 100 years.
First, there's a survivor effect. Only the best wood-framed houses from 100 years ago are still around today. The rest have been pulled down over the course of that century.
The lumber used 100 years ago was true-sized -- a 2x4 was actually 2 inches by 4 inches. Today, the lumber is dimensional -- a 2x4 is actually 1.5 inches by 3.5 inches.
Houses were often overbuilt 100 years ago, because they weren't as confident in the engineering. Today, we're becoming more comfortable going to the engineering minimums. Thus, there's a lack of redundancy in the structure -- redundancy that may compensate for some construction shortfalls.
http://www.wral.com/rebuilding-begins-at-brier-creek/1331351...
The building had not yet been properly attached to the foundation and the wind was record breaking (80+ mph). The wind likely went up under the structure and lifted it enough to push it off of it's foundation. NC is known to have regular hurricanes and tornadoes.
Concrete buildings collapse too, often times with much more devastating results: https://www.google.com/search?q=concrete+building+collapse&s...
My house was all build using concrete block with only the roof and interior flooring made of wood,
This winter we had some crazy gales here with gusts up to 100 miles+/hour no issues :) I would not feel comfortable with too much wood in homes around here due to the extremely wet and damp climate on the west side of Ireland, house is airtight and well insulated with heat recovery system and solar water heaters
When building new, you may also want to consider straw bale construction. https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Straw_Bale_Construction is slowly improving.
come back from holidays
someone has stolen your houseThat last part is the problem. Insulation is a huge part in any passive home, but heating the air means keeping things airtight. Which means terrible air quality and living conditions.
An introduction: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house
You really can't go wrong with insulating the hell out of it elsewhere.
Also, passive houses do have proper ventilation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house#Airtightness
> most of the air exchange with exterior is done by controlled ventilation through an heat-exchanger in order to minimize heat loss (or gain, depending on climate)
Without tricks like that, you'll have a hard time getting below 15 kWh/m² per year.
No, you don't. Heating the structure is far more efficient, allows for proper ventilation, and is far more comfortable for the inhabitants.
>Also, passive houses do have proper ventilation:
Yes, but this is not a passive house, that's the point. This is just an airtight box of insulation. They have the least amount of ventilation allowed by code. The air quality in such houses is terrible, and they are very uncomfortable to live in.
>Without tricks like that, you'll have a hard time getting below 15 kWh/m² per year.
You can very easily get to 0 without "tricks" like that. South facing windows + thermal mass.