The biggest energy savings are actually passive measures, such as insulation, or better still, designing your house using materials with high thermal densities etc. Here in Australia, we are pretty terrible at designing inherently energy efficient houses. We build the house to look as good as we can, as cheap as we can, to be as big as we can afford, and then any energy efficiency measures are usually only the mandatory ones, or token measures. I would like to see it the other way around where we make the house as energy efficient and the best use of space possible, and think about aesthetics secondly. We're getting there with commercial buildings - domestic still has a looooong way to go. I blame project builders - people don't put any thought into houses because they just pick a design out of the catalogue with no regard as to it's inherent efficiency qualities or integration with the surrounding environment etc.
The "green" thing really has turned into a bit of a farce in a lot of ways,
end rant.
Well WIR35, Talk about hitting the nail on the proverbial. Owner builders finance permitting which is very iffy at the moment, we are building almost exactly what you are ranting about. Apart from efficient space use, as the covenant here requires Mcmansion dimensions, we have plans for a high mass, sandstone or limestone clad, solid concrete walled house with real generous eaves and some internal concrete walls for more thermal mass. We are owner building because no balloon framed, brickveneered, no-eaved, built to a price, cant take a risk, highly leveraged builder will do more than say, good luck with that.
To use the forum vernacular, before you all "jump on me" about vapour transmission and other concrete issues have a look at Dincel Construction System. Google it. too late to do hypeduplinks.
I think you are dead on the money. The greenwash industry is skewing the whole conversation away from the truth.
As a SEQ solution it is clear to us that being thermally connected to the ground is the way to go. We currently live in a two level townhouse that has one side subgrade to the neighbours by about 1.6 metres. This earth connection across about 11 metres of our loungeroom keeps the whole downstairs liveable for most of the year. The upstairs is unbearable in summer. (ex Vic boy, i'm soft i know). Even for a soft ex Victorian, true dinks, we run the split sys a/c maybe five to ten times on the worst stinking humid days and that's it.
getting back to the thread topic, solar for us is a later consideration as we are investing a bit extra to build a house that actually suits the climate. Our ground temp in Greenbank is a cozy 18C year round at 60cm below the surface. Using the poor insulating properties of concrete we should be able to connect that ground mass to the walls, thereby passively cooling the internal air.
