poseva
I'm actually a structural engineer with a passion for passive houses and went into programming 8 years ago. I designed and built a lot of houses and I know what you're talking about.. the house builders chase profits disregarding any laws.
IMHO the best thing is to buy a lot and build yourself the house, this way you are sure that you get what you want.
Why don't you consider buying the house with a bank loan? it's the best decision to do so even if you have all the money... if you talk with a financial consultant you'll see why.
Housing prices are not out of control, we are lagging years behind other European countries in regard with house prices. If you look on the numbers you will see that this is actually a good time to buy a house in Romania.
As I have a small child and use a lot the telemedicine services I do have a fear that I will be blocked soon.
A drawback to this is that cloudflare does not allow you to forward to multiple email addresses.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveil...
2. I would change the windows, with at least triple pane. The windows must be mounted correctly (see RAL montage) and also must be placed aligned with the outside face of the wall.
3. I would take out the floor, and do hydronic underfloor heating with EPS150 or XPS as insulation substrate.
[0] https://www.rothoblaas.com/products/airtightness-and-waterpr...
[1] https://www.rothoblaas.com/products/airtightness-and-waterpr...
I saw an example at some point in one of PassivHaus presentation and it was like this:
0.3 ACH -> 1.74 kWh/m2year (for a 100 sqm house means, 174 kwh per year for heating)
0.6 ACH -> 3.49 kWh/m2year (PassivHaus limit)
1.0 ACH -> 5.81 kWh/m2year
1.5 ACH -> 8.72 kWh/m2year (Low energy house limit)
4.5 ACH -> 26.5 kWh/m2*year (typical house)
This is for the same house with the same insulation. Of course you cannot achieve this kind of airtightness without careful planning and using a lot of self-adhesive tape (SIGA, ROTHOBLASS and other manufactures that can guarantee its effectiveness up to 50 years)
Recently in Romania it really took of building houses using CLT (cross-laminated-timber) but it costs so much more than a regular brick and mortar house that few people afford it.
When -15 outside and 20 degrees inside, my house requires 2000W to keep the balance. This kind of simulations are done using PHPP package from PassivHaus Institut.
L.E. What I wanted to point out, thermal mass can have a huge impact on the house energy footprint.. to give you an example, today and tomorrow will be sunny days and this will drive my interior temp to about 23-24 degrees, this heat will heat-up the masonry and slabs and then give me back the heat in the next days when there will be no sun.
To be honest this was the biggest "complaint" that others had in regards of how a built the house, the general knowledge says that the earth is warm and you don't need to insulate against it... but the earth is maybe 5-10 degree, of course warmer than outside -5..-10 but still a lot colder than what we want inside the house, 20,21 degree C.
The house is elevated from the ground on 12 concrete columns so that I can insulate under the foundation beams using glass foam, insulation on walls is 30 cm of EPS graphite, underfloor 45 cm EPS and on the roof, 50 cm and the orientation is full on south. For heating it consumes about 1500-2000 kWh per year (December, January, February and a maybe a small part of March)
What is the big difference between houses built in North America and Europe is that the European houses are built using concrete and masonry which give them a lot of thermal mass which is crucial to this kind of builds.
Have a look here [0], this is the first PassivHaus in my area and is nicely documented. The cost of building a PassivHaus in my country typically goes about 20-25% more than a traditional one.
As for the prices...in 2014, 2 Advance Steel licences were something like 12000 euros and one Tekla license was about 18000 euros.
It started with Autodesk Structural Detaling. They bought the software from a small company, renamed the product... and that was it. It had the same bugs release after release... we as customers tried our best to report the bugs, but nobody listened.
We stopped using ASD and moved to Graitec Advance Steel and Advance Concrete, for a couple of years everything was great, quick support, remote sessions in case you struggled with something, new features, bugs fixed... and then... Autodesk bought it. I still remember the morning when I read the news... I was horrified. I remember talking with some guys at Graitec and they were shocked also.
After this... was Autodesk Structural Detailing story all over again. Just a product rename... and that was it. No more bug fixing.. no more new features.. they killed Advance Concrete in favor of Revit (which is one of the dumbest thing ever... because Revit was years behind Advance Concrete as a concrete detailing sw).
For concrete detailing we switched to Allplan. I think Allplan and Graphisoft's Arhicad have a bright future together.