SDN - Design a house
Posted: 2017-01-13 07:54pm
It's been a trifle warm around here lately, as in over 40C, and our house has a lovely ability to keep the heat in. Last night it was 34 inside the house at 2.30AM, and was still 31 at 6.30AM (shit...is that all the sleep I got? Fuuuck...).
So basically I've had it up to here with the heat.
The house is old. Quite old (amendment: quite old for Australia. I don't want to hear about someone in Europe living in a place built by the bloody Romans), old enough that electricity was a later modification, and so it has a few old bad ideas (lack of insulation), and what few good ideas they had were ruined by later modifications (the verandah sheltering the windows has been closed in, transforming it into a solar oven that heats the rest of the house).
In two more years, we'll have paid this hovel off, at which point we'll be able to save some money up to do something about the place. Now, the house is so old that it's no longer worth trying to fix it up, so we're planning to knock it down and rebuild in its place (besides, I'm looking forward to watching a bulldozer go through the house. Please, tell me there'll be a bulldozer).
I've been working on a design lately, which strangely enough has largely concerned itself with keeping cool during summer. I'm trying to avoid air conditioners, and look a lot at design and passive cooling. I've got a few ideas, but my ideas can sometimes be either (a) too expensive, (b) stupid, or (c) both, so I figured I'd open the discussion up.
Design Problems
1) Design for the long-term. I want this house to be designed to stand for over a hundred years. Whether it does is up to whoever owns it at that point, but that's got nothing to do with me. That means Global Warming (GW) has to be accounted for.
2) The HEAT! I'm sick of it! Average temperatures during summer are in the 30s (which are OK), peaking to 40s, and with about a 10C drop overnight. With GW, I'm expecting it to get hotter.
3) The property is at the bottom of a small basin, in a flood zone. Under heavy (maybe once ever 4 years) rain, we get two feet of water in the yard - the council has done extensive work redirecting the run-off from the surrounding higher land behind us to a large sports field area that acts as a sump. Before that was done, I'm reliably informed the water was over 4 feet high and came into the house (this trapped water effect was actually because of a recent-ish set of flats blocking the natural drainage, it wasn't like that originally).
This water can take over a week to subside.
However, the worst flood on record rose to 2.4 metres, in the 1960s. There's a marker on a powerpole just outside. I measured it. It happened once, it can happen again.
I'm expecing GW to make this worse.
4) FInances. We're not rich. If we were, we'd say "Fuck this" and move to somewhere cool. Like a castle in Scotland. We need to do our best to keep the build costs down, BUT ALSO the running costs down (two aims that are frequently contradictory).
5) I would prefer not to eat up more yard space then the house already takes.
Property Layout
The front of the house, facing the main road, faces basically north. A bit NNW.
The front of the property has a very small yard, a footpath, and then the main arterial road. This road is built up 1.5m above ground level (just measured it. Hey! It's sprinkling outside! And today's going to cooler...mid 30s...and probably going to be as humid as fuck), and there is no road access there. The back yard is medium-sized, and there's a laneway behind it for street access. On the sides, there's significant yard space on the east (over 8m), minimal on the west (3.2m).
The house itself is basically a rectangle and take up 12 x 8m (including the verandah).
My Ideas So Far
Put the house up on stilts, 2.5 metres above ground level. Nothing important to the house integrity is to be below there. This then creates a problem that hot wind under the house will heat the house, so the area underneath is to be enclosed with good insulating material that would break away in a serious flood and wont be completely ruined by immersion in a few feet of water for a week. I'm thinking expanded polystyrene (EPS), with render over the outside. Inside, I want a thermal mass wall, so I'm seeing lots of shelving, packed with 3 litre milk bottles full of water. Solid walls of the damn things, creating a wall of water from floor to ceiling 150mm thick, and then covered over with something (don't know what, will come up with something, not important now). The shelves will sit (not secured) on little ledges on the stilts, so that if there is a serious flood, the flood water will break the EPS and push the bottles and shelves out, and leave the stilts unmolested.
It would be nice to have air come into this basement via underground pipes, for added cooling effect, although I do have concerns about what if they get flooded. Perhaps if the outside end finished a few metres up in the air? With netting to keep out the wildlife, and a rain-cap.
The house proper is post-and-beam construction, with no load-bearing walls. The walls are made of strawbale, thickly rendered inside (acts as a thermal mass); this enables them to insulate from the outside, and moderate inside. It looks good, and I think it's within our capabilities to do the walls ourselves.
Cathedral-style ceiling. I've gained the impression the taller the ceiling, the cooler the room, so effectively no ceiling, just a roof. I like the bare-rafters look, anyway. It may be a dutch-gable roof, with large air-vents at the gable ends, or maybe a clerestory roof with windows that can be opened to allow heat out. I'm leaning towards the clerestory roof, as the windows will also supply light into the house (one of the things that annoys me about this house is how I've got to have lights on during the day).
The walls don't go all the way to the roof, only 3 metres or so, allowing air circulation, and light from the windows.
A cantilevered verandah that completely encircles the house (no posts to the ground). Multiple doors to it, so someone can go from their bedroom to the verandah. No way to the verandah except through the house (security).
I'm speculating that I may not need a gutter if I can drop the water 1.5 metres away from the house; gutters are a pain, they generate work.
An internal staircase goes from the basement (and front door) up to the internal front door of the house. Cool air from the basement can come up this into the house, to replace hot air lost above.
There will be solar electricity, but possibly not hot water as I'm wanting instantaneous electric, and I feel the solar loses me the temperature control that instantaneous electric gives (we've got a modern instaneous in the bathroom. You want the water 45C? Set in 45. You want 34? Set in 34. It's brilliant. But it can't cool water, so if the water's too hot already...). Mind you, if new cold was introduced before the instantaneous, it would solve that problem, and reduce the hot water used from the solar storage. Hmmm....
A sketch:
Huh. Probably should label my stuff better.
OK, the top is the ground floor, with the verandah. You can see the bedrooms, bath, toilet, etc. Kitchen, dining, lounge is open-plan.
The ticky lines rule off metres.
Under that is the basement. You can see the bottom front door, and stairs. That square marked off is the laundry. Therefore there'll be a door to the backyard around here. The basement will also be used as a workshop and gaming space, possibly even to store junk, but nothing we would cry about if it got flooded.
The laundry will probably have a laundry chute from the bathroom located conveniently above.
Underneath that is a side and front view, with a dutch gable roof
Last Words
Don't panic. I fully intend to talk to actual trained people when it comes to that, with letters after their names and everything, but it's a few years away at the moment. I'm just trying to sketch out what I want in advance.
Anyway, it's fun.
So basically I've had it up to here with the heat.
The house is old. Quite old (amendment: quite old for Australia. I don't want to hear about someone in Europe living in a place built by the bloody Romans), old enough that electricity was a later modification, and so it has a few old bad ideas (lack of insulation), and what few good ideas they had were ruined by later modifications (the verandah sheltering the windows has been closed in, transforming it into a solar oven that heats the rest of the house).
In two more years, we'll have paid this hovel off, at which point we'll be able to save some money up to do something about the place. Now, the house is so old that it's no longer worth trying to fix it up, so we're planning to knock it down and rebuild in its place (besides, I'm looking forward to watching a bulldozer go through the house. Please, tell me there'll be a bulldozer).
I've been working on a design lately, which strangely enough has largely concerned itself with keeping cool during summer. I'm trying to avoid air conditioners, and look a lot at design and passive cooling. I've got a few ideas, but my ideas can sometimes be either (a) too expensive, (b) stupid, or (c) both, so I figured I'd open the discussion up.
Design Problems
1) Design for the long-term. I want this house to be designed to stand for over a hundred years. Whether it does is up to whoever owns it at that point, but that's got nothing to do with me. That means Global Warming (GW) has to be accounted for.
2) The HEAT! I'm sick of it! Average temperatures during summer are in the 30s (which are OK), peaking to 40s, and with about a 10C drop overnight. With GW, I'm expecting it to get hotter.
3) The property is at the bottom of a small basin, in a flood zone. Under heavy (maybe once ever 4 years) rain, we get two feet of water in the yard - the council has done extensive work redirecting the run-off from the surrounding higher land behind us to a large sports field area that acts as a sump. Before that was done, I'm reliably informed the water was over 4 feet high and came into the house (this trapped water effect was actually because of a recent-ish set of flats blocking the natural drainage, it wasn't like that originally).
This water can take over a week to subside.
However, the worst flood on record rose to 2.4 metres, in the 1960s. There's a marker on a powerpole just outside. I measured it. It happened once, it can happen again.
I'm expecing GW to make this worse.
4) FInances. We're not rich. If we were, we'd say "Fuck this" and move to somewhere cool. Like a castle in Scotland. We need to do our best to keep the build costs down, BUT ALSO the running costs down (two aims that are frequently contradictory).
5) I would prefer not to eat up more yard space then the house already takes.
Property Layout
The front of the house, facing the main road, faces basically north. A bit NNW.
The front of the property has a very small yard, a footpath, and then the main arterial road. This road is built up 1.5m above ground level (just measured it. Hey! It's sprinkling outside! And today's going to cooler...mid 30s...and probably going to be as humid as fuck), and there is no road access there. The back yard is medium-sized, and there's a laneway behind it for street access. On the sides, there's significant yard space on the east (over 8m), minimal on the west (3.2m).
The house itself is basically a rectangle and take up 12 x 8m (including the verandah).
My Ideas So Far
Put the house up on stilts, 2.5 metres above ground level. Nothing important to the house integrity is to be below there. This then creates a problem that hot wind under the house will heat the house, so the area underneath is to be enclosed with good insulating material that would break away in a serious flood and wont be completely ruined by immersion in a few feet of water for a week. I'm thinking expanded polystyrene (EPS), with render over the outside. Inside, I want a thermal mass wall, so I'm seeing lots of shelving, packed with 3 litre milk bottles full of water. Solid walls of the damn things, creating a wall of water from floor to ceiling 150mm thick, and then covered over with something (don't know what, will come up with something, not important now). The shelves will sit (not secured) on little ledges on the stilts, so that if there is a serious flood, the flood water will break the EPS and push the bottles and shelves out, and leave the stilts unmolested.
It would be nice to have air come into this basement via underground pipes, for added cooling effect, although I do have concerns about what if they get flooded. Perhaps if the outside end finished a few metres up in the air? With netting to keep out the wildlife, and a rain-cap.
The house proper is post-and-beam construction, with no load-bearing walls. The walls are made of strawbale, thickly rendered inside (acts as a thermal mass); this enables them to insulate from the outside, and moderate inside. It looks good, and I think it's within our capabilities to do the walls ourselves.
Cathedral-style ceiling. I've gained the impression the taller the ceiling, the cooler the room, so effectively no ceiling, just a roof. I like the bare-rafters look, anyway. It may be a dutch-gable roof, with large air-vents at the gable ends, or maybe a clerestory roof with windows that can be opened to allow heat out. I'm leaning towards the clerestory roof, as the windows will also supply light into the house (one of the things that annoys me about this house is how I've got to have lights on during the day).
The walls don't go all the way to the roof, only 3 metres or so, allowing air circulation, and light from the windows.
A cantilevered verandah that completely encircles the house (no posts to the ground). Multiple doors to it, so someone can go from their bedroom to the verandah. No way to the verandah except through the house (security).
I'm speculating that I may not need a gutter if I can drop the water 1.5 metres away from the house; gutters are a pain, they generate work.
An internal staircase goes from the basement (and front door) up to the internal front door of the house. Cool air from the basement can come up this into the house, to replace hot air lost above.
There will be solar electricity, but possibly not hot water as I'm wanting instantaneous electric, and I feel the solar loses me the temperature control that instantaneous electric gives (we've got a modern instaneous in the bathroom. You want the water 45C? Set in 45. You want 34? Set in 34. It's brilliant. But it can't cool water, so if the water's too hot already...). Mind you, if new cold was introduced before the instantaneous, it would solve that problem, and reduce the hot water used from the solar storage. Hmmm....
A sketch:
Huh. Probably should label my stuff better.
OK, the top is the ground floor, with the verandah. You can see the bedrooms, bath, toilet, etc. Kitchen, dining, lounge is open-plan.
The ticky lines rule off metres.
Under that is the basement. You can see the bottom front door, and stairs. That square marked off is the laundry. Therefore there'll be a door to the backyard around here. The basement will also be used as a workshop and gaming space, possibly even to store junk, but nothing we would cry about if it got flooded.
The laundry will probably have a laundry chute from the bathroom located conveniently above.
Underneath that is a side and front view, with a dutch gable roof
Last Words
Don't panic. I fully intend to talk to actual trained people when it comes to that, with letters after their names and everything, but it's a few years away at the moment. I'm just trying to sketch out what I want in advance.
Anyway, it's fun.