The Building Structu

- A light framed superinsulated structure (Minimum of 400mm of Warmcell in
the roof, 250-300mm in the walls, heavy foam in the floor if a concrete
slab).
- Face the house south to capture passive solar energy.
- Calculate the pitch of the roof for maximum insulation at your latitude.
- Calculate the roof overhangs to keep the sun off the windows and walls in
summer.
- Have the north side with few windows.
- Triple glazed with low "e" glass.
- Eliminate thermal bridges. These tend to be where the walls meet the
ground and the roof, or one material meets another. Use nylon tie bars if
cladding in brick
- Use SIP panels or TJI "I" beams. The void in the "I" beams can be filled
with Warmcell cellulous insulation (re-cycled newspaper). The Warmcell makes
the structure air-tight.
- Have all of the south facing roof being a solar panel heating water from
the sun. That is a large surface generating much heat.
- Could have a full width conservatory on the south side. Better if full
width and full height. This will help but not essential. Nice to have
though as bedrooms could have a balcony opening into the conservatory.
- No letterbox in front door. All doors heavily insulated and sealed (the
Swedes do the best doors).
- Specify a study for home working.

Heating, Vent, Thermal Storage:

- Store the heat in a large thermal store, which would have to be sized to
suit. Better have a battery of small cylinders, so if one leaks it is an
easy and cheap job of replacing.
- The heavy thermal stores can be at ground level. They could even be in a
separate building with superinsulted underground pipes between it and the
house if need be. The thermal store should hold enough energy to heat the
building over 3 or 4 cloudy days.
- Use "very" low temperature underfloor heating.
- In winter not a lot of very hot water will be generated, but hot enough
for very low temp underfloor heating.
- This low temperature water can act as a preheat for DHW.
- If hot water is generated, hot enough for domestic hot water, then this
water should be suitably stored for ready use rather than merging into a
large low temperature water store.
- The controls will be off the shelf and all be using the odd pump here and
there.
- A backup heat source can be incorporated when cloudy days extend over 3 or
4 days.
- The water system is understandable by any intelligent plumber.
- As underfloor heating is being used, bets have an extract only vent
system. Heat recovery is expensive. The thermal store should store enough
energy for the heating system to compensate for vent losses.

Water reclamation:

- There are large water tanks that fill from the roof available ready made.
The BENELUX countries have these as standard in new builds.
- The water tank is under the garden.
- The water is used to water the garden and flush toilets, reducing water
consumption drastically.

PV Cell:

- Don't bother as they are still super expensive with very long payback
times. If the hosue done as above then little elecricity will be used.

Low Energy Appliance:

- These tend to be German like AEG, etc. Find out which of these is the
most economical in energy and water consumption and put these in the spec.

Comms:

- Wire the place out in CAT 5 to accomodate computers and home working.

The above is the basic concept. Then, depending on site, size of house, etc,
it is a matter of applying numbers to size up the thermals store, heat loss,
How much energy the solar roof will generate, sizing a "very" low temp
underfloor heating system, etc.

Best of luck. I hope you get it and you build the house. We need more people
like you around.

Some good stuff there. Just one thing though, the walls are the best
solar collectors (for space heating) due to the angle of the sun in
winter. So you'd have small windows on the south side too but the
walls would be built using glass on the outside (or maybe
polycarbonate), and a black collector surface behind. The heat that
builds up here would (by convection) be collected in another cavity
behind the first wall which contains drums of water as a thermal
store.

This article on solar closets explains it better than I can:

http://www.ece.vill.edu/~nick/

Nick.