On 29 Jan 00, at 18:16, Paul S. Hetrick wrote:
>
> Was your apartment designed to be solar heated, or are you just
> very lucky? Or are you just used to the cold?
It was designed to take advantage of solar gain. That is a positive
in the winter and a negative in the summer. It is also tightly
insulated. The trade off in fuel savings is increased costs in
electricity to ventilate the apartment adequately. Still a net lower
energy design than similar buildings of it's age and size, but to me
not a long term sustainable design. A good early experiment but no
better than that.
On paper the ventilation system should be good, and there are
improvements to the amount of electricity it uses that could be
made. In practice many apartments have improperly installed
ventilation systems, that are very hard to repair leading to very poor
air quality.
After talking to an engineer involved in showcasing this, and other
energy efficient designs in Canadian housing, I have come to
understand that there is a very narrow and single focus on
designing to decrease heating fuel consumption. Doing so leads to
the silliness of having most of the heating fuel energy savings eaten
up by increases in electricity required to ventilate, and the silliness
of buildings that are almost unliveable in the summer.
sph
Sandra P. Hoffman
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.flora.org/sandra/
