Construyendo la casa de nuestros sueños basada en el estándar Passivhaus
“In the southern hemisphere, houses should be oriented to the north” I first learnt this concept way back in high school geography classes, but never thought that I would ever get to apply it to the construction of my own house. And obviously, with so much more understanding of why this is so important. So… Continue reading The Aspect Effect: using the sun’s energy intelligently
As mentioned in the previous posts, airtightness is a key factor in the passivhaus standard and the Chilean CEV Standard. This refers to the uncontrolled flow of air through unwanted “openings” (gaps) in the building envelope. This leakage has an important impact on the energy performance of the house. The concept used to measure airtightness… Continue reading Sealing the house (part 3): The long awaited Blower Door Test
As mentioned in part 1, making sure a house is as airtight as possible is crucial for energy efficiency. Most of the gaps that produce air infiltrations are so tiny that they may not even be visible to the naked eye, and even those that can be seen are usually hidden by the finishings of… Continue reading Sealing the house (part 2)
To the untrained eye, one might only think of windows from an aesthetic point of view, but this aspect of a house is far more important than one may realise. Windows are one of the main points of energy loss in a traditional house, and they are also a source of condensation in winter due… Continue reading Energy efficient windows – a necessary investment
For those of you that have followed our blog from the start, you may be surprised to see that we are still in the process of “wrapping up” the house. Parts 1 (see post here) and 2 (see post here) on this topic showed how we insulated the foundations, slab and walls of the house… Continue reading Insulating the house (part 3)
The last few days in Chile have been incredibly difficult for everyone and the situation continues to be extremely complicated, with no clear resolution in sight. No one wants to see public infrastructure such as the metro destroyed and supermarkets and shops looted, but we need to focus on the fundamental issues that have led… Continue reading Buy local, buy small – a minimum we should all practice
Apart from “wrapping up” the house (see here for more on this concept), another fundamental element of an energy efficient building is how well sealed it is. Airtightness is one of the key concepts we have become rather obsessed with since we began designing our house. This refers to the uncontrolled flow of air through… Continue reading Sealing the house (part 1)
We have been rather quiet in the blog since we celebrated the topping out ceremony, but this does not mean that we have not been making good progress. There just hasn´t been much to report apart from normal building processes. Nine weeks into the build and we have sealed the roof structure: The roof is… Continue reading Making progress
Things are moving quickly on the house, and after just 5 days for the perimeter walls, we started on the roof trusses and these were all up within two days. We chose a very simple, Mediterranean style roof, as we will be putting at least 3,6kW of solar panels on the roof. Guillermo, Alex and… Continue reading The topping out celebration
One of the first questions we asked ourselves when we started to design our house was “what materials will we use?”. In South Africa, the predominant building material is bricks, but here in Chile there is a far greater variety from wood to bricks to concrete. Coming from a country where wooden houses are not… Continue reading And then there were walls
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