house design elements

our entry to this year's solar decathlon is really inspired by the traditional kiwi bach it's basically a holiday home that we have here in new zealand. the way we've articulated that was really focussing on the outdoors and the environment so we had this really strong north-south access that was all about the environment, the landscape the climate in the east-west access is the living crossing across there, and what this allowed us to do was to create an energised space where the two intersect and that would be our dining space and that would be combined with much of the enviornment as we could so it was kind of responsive to the outdoors and would really create a nice heart to our home i think a key to our design is using a lot of natural materils in terms of our exterior woods... for the canopy we've used western red cedar, obviously a very beautiful timber, for our canopy support we have gluam beams and posts.

one of our key strategies was to reduce energy consumption and make the most of passive design strategoies with the large canopy above which houses all our solar panels it also provides shading to the large south glazing all our glazing is triplpe glazed to, of course, reduce heat loss. all our window frames are cedar as well and it being timber it meant that we weren't having any thermal bridging that you can sometimes get with aluminium frames. we've also got roller blings conceled in that cavity to cover those windows, mostly for privacy but also proividing additional shading. and then the large skylight has three indpendently adjustable shading systems as well, automated into our building management system we've actually used sheep's wool insulation for insulating our entire house. so we've got at least 25 cm of recycled wool insultation, walls, roof and floor... we've used about 50mm of concrete in the floor of the house, this is really just to provide a bit of thermal mass it's actually a special, new concrete, it's fibre reinforced so it doesn't crack like regular concrete

we regulated our usage of all electricity in the house to four sixty watt bulbs, so about 240 watts... so we managed to achieve that by using led lighting, so we've got about 32 bulbs in the house, all of which only total 180 watts so, we've managed to achieve quite a nice atmosphere in the house with minimum energy use. so what we've done is we've modularised our hous, so it splits into 6 different modules, 5 equal sides which can go into open top containers and then a larger central modiule which gets broken down into smaller components and flat packed the idea of that is we can get on site and everythings pre-wired, plumbed, ducted, finished and we cna basically just clip them together and do the finishing touches.

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