"an ingenious central ventilation system. The warm air going out passes side by side with clean, cold air coming in, exchanging heat with 90 percent efficiency."
So that sounds good. I knew someone who made a super-insulated 6" thick walled house that needed very little heat (one small log a day) -and they had to turn on a ventilator daily because it was so air tight.
Also - in Germany - it said that the houses only cost 5-7% more to build and you essentially do not need any or very little extra heat.
The technology has been there to make well-insulated houses. Perhaps it just takes the building codes to require it - to get all of the architects and builders on board. There is a certain amount of insulation required, esp. good windows, a good south face - but there is no reason it couldn't be common.
"Mobile homes" - at least those in certain states ought to require better standards in regards to insulation and wall thickness as well. It's nuts for people to continue to spend ridiculous amounts for heat (using up coal, etc.) instead of spending more on the structure of the house to begin with. We noticed it didn't cost any more to heat a large 3000+ sq. foot old house than to heat a 750 sq. foot "mobile home" (that aren't all that mobile and are often left to rot after a certain amount of time).
The article suggests that these designs are for 500 sq. feet of living space per person. But it also said this design is used for schools. The super-insulated house I saw was probably a 2000-2500 sq. foot house. I expect that these could be made no matter what the size - but that it would be best if people did not use up resources on huge houses, anyway.
From the article:
The first passive home was built here in 1991 by Wolfgang Feist, a local physicist, but diffusion of the idea was slowed by language. The courses and literature were mostly in German, and even now the components are mass-produced only in this part of the world.
The industry is thriving in Germany, however — for example, schools in Frankfurt are built with the technique.
Moreover, its popularity is spreading. The European Commission is promoting passive-house building, and the European Parliament has proposed that new buildings meet passive-house standards by 2011...
Ironically, however, when California inspectors were examining the Berkeley home to determine whether it met “green” building codes (it did), he could not get credit for the heat exchanger, a device that is still uncommon in the United States. “When you think about passive-house standards, you start looking at buildings in a different way,” he said...
The air from outside all goes through HEPA filters before entering the rooms. The cement floor of the basement isn’t cold. The walls and the air are basically the same temperature.
Look closer and there are technical differences: When the windows are swung open, you see their layers of glass and gas, as well as the elaborate seals around the edges. A small, grated duct near the ceiling in the living room brings in clean air. In the basement there is no furnace, but instead what looks like a giant Styrofoam cooler, containing the heat exchanger....
But the sophisticated windows and heat-exchange ventilation systems needed to make passive houses work properly are not readily available in the United States. So the construction of passive houses in the United States, at least initially, is likely to entail a higher price differential.
Moreover, the kinds of home construction popular in the United States are more difficult to adapt to the standard: residential buildings tend not to have built-in ventilation systems of any kind, and sliding windows are hard to seal...
Researchers are looking into whether the concept will work in warmer climates — where a heat exchanger could be used in reverse, to keep cool air in and warm air out....
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