For the design process we started with an analysis of the local climate. The map below represent the temperature of the Netherlands. On the right you see the tempreture differences during the 12 months of the year. And this is the location of Honselersdijk.
What can we learn from this? The annual mean temperature is only 10 degrees Celsius. People typically set an indoor temperature of around 21 degrees, so the climate actually is too cold by 11 degrees. So most of the year, even with climate change, it is important to capture the sun and preserve the heat by thermal insulation.
It also means that the soil’s temperature will fluctuate only limitedly around 10 to 11 degrees, and that you can use the soil for pre-cooling in summertime and for pre-heating in winter. If you want to learn about underground preserve energy you can click link below:
the map below show the climate map for precipitation in the Netherlands, with the location of that house and again with monthly differences on the right.
This house receives 850 millimetre of precipitation, mostly rain. The house has a roof of 50 square metre. This means a total amount of 42.5 cubic metres of water will run off. This is equal to what is currently used for the toilet and garden.Looking at the wind map and pattern, we see that the coastal region of the house has very strong winds. 6 metres per second on average, which is 21.6 kilometre per hour, or 13 miles per hour. This seems like a good business case for wind turbines, which is true, but in this part of the country there is a lot of horticulture, among which no big turbines are allowed. And smaller urban turbines are relatively expensive for what they produce.
Bioclimate Design Approach
In the skin design, both orientation and adaptation have been taken into account as bioclimatic strategies to improve the climate performance of the existing house. The main design approach regarding orientation is having glass and photovoltaic panels on the sun-side, for harvesting heat and energy. On the other hand the cold side of the house contained extra insulation to minimize heat losses. Furthermore the skin is adaptable to maintain air quality and comfortable temperatures all year around. In winter the skin is closed, during spring and autumn the skin provides indirect natural ventilation for the house and in summer the skin is completely open to maximize natural ventilation using the stack effect, maintaining a comfortable temperature.
Solar panels are more effective. So let’s have a look at the sun. If you want to learn about sun chart please follow link below:
Good to know that the solar intensity on a horizontal plane in this part of the world is around 114 watts per square metre, which is exactly one thousand kilowatt-hour of solar energy. So the total amount of passive solar energy – for instance through one square metre of glass roof – is also one thousand kilowatt-hours. If we produced hot water through a solar collector, the efficiency would be approximately 450 kilowatt-hours, and if we used photovoltaics – PV – around 150 kilowatt-hour of electricity would be generated in a year’s time.
Now looking at the chart, the red line is the orientation of the garden of this house. And the blue line is the street side which means that if we want to do something with solar heat, we should use the garden side.
This house has timber-framed floors and roof slabs, next to a non-insulated cavity wall of sand limestone on the inside and masonry on the outside. The windows have single glazing. In the first step – reduce – we added post-insulation to the house. Internal roof insulation and ground floor insulation were the easiest parts. For a thickly insulated north-western façade, we knocked out the outer gable wall, added twenty centimetres of vapour-permeable insulation, and covered the exterior with brick slips, as you have seen.
On the south-eastern façade, the cavity of the wall was filled with vapour-permeable insulation.
As another measure of step 1, we replaced the single glazing by the best-insulating double-glazed windows. And we introduced daylight-catching solar tubes. Now, this was a more complicated step of our re-design.
As you can see from picture below, the fresh air is let in through pipes in the underground, taking on the stable temperature of the soil, before it enters the house. A heat exchanger establishes a maximum heat recovery from exhaust air. Going even further, step three, the generation of renewable energy, can be divided into electricity and heat, both linked to the most radical intervention we did: the greenhouse.
The structure of this greenhouse contains solar cells in-between two glass panes, the power station of the house. But the greenhouse also captures solar heat, which rises and forms the source of heat for an adiabatic collector between the original roof and greenhouse, which extracts the heat, hence cools down the air and solar cells, and transports it to a hot water tank, where a heat pump boosts the temperature to 55 degrees Celsius.
This hot water can be used for the radiator heating and for showering.
The greenhouse and roof are also used for rain water collection, which is stored in a tank under the extension. This water is used for toilet flushing and watering the plants.
In this project a green roof is added to the north-west, introducing plant species suited for the local climate in the front and back garden, and by proposing the growth of herbs, fruit and vegetables, also in the greenhouse.
