Originally Posted By: tahir
Originally Posted By: Archeon
I'm hoping you don't mind the slight thread hijack Tahir, but I'm guessing this might also be interesting for you.


Very relevant for me. Where are you building, what kind of house?

Building near Bruges, Belgium. The house is a typical two storey building with a piramid shaped roof. This means straight walls on both levels, and as much room upstairs as there is downstairs. There's also a 7x7m attic, but that's entirely under the roof. (that 7x7 meter attic is the 'usuable room', meaning the room where an adult can stand without bumping his/her head. There also a bit more room beyond those 7x7 meters, since the entire roof is 13 x 13 meter. That 3 meter of 'crawlspace' around the usuable space is very handy to tuck wires in and to reach the level below through the ceiling with the obiligatory ventilation system. I'd have to look if I could find a decent .pdf file to put up here.

The house is entirely built from the ground up with energy saving in mind. In the ground plate there will be 15 cm of isolation (apart from the concrete ground plate which will be 20 cm thick) so the cold cannot get through the ground floor. In the walls there will be 10 cm of high-isolation plates. Below the room there will be 18 cm of isolating fabric. The house will be heated with a heatpump and ventilated with a mechanical ventilation pump with heat recovery fed with air that goes through a 'Canadian pitt' (don't know the term in English, but in essence this means that the air which is pulled into the house is guided through a 30 meter long 20 cm wide tube that is put under the ground 2 meter deep - the air that goes through this tube is thus pre-heated to the temparture of the ground, winter and summer 10°C-12°C - this has the advantage that in the winter you never draw in frozen air and thus can't kill your ventilation pump, and in summer this air can cool the house)

Also, the entire house will be run via home automation software. I've got the whole thing down, the only thing that is still bugging me is the aforementioned (digital) TV system. I also believe there is nothing cooler than seeing a nice larger flat screen TV on a wall with no cables coming to or leaving from it... but is seems this isn't possible with digital TV: you always seems to need those ugly set-top-boxes. Unless you put the box in a centralised storage room and stream the video feel over ethernet cables from there, but even then you need a set-top box per TV in the house, which I find ridiculous... I would need at least five of these stupid boxes... frown
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