Being a larger company than the one-man-show of Katou, they immediately seemed more professional. Like Katou though, they were mostly positive about the contentious issues of an upside down house using OM solar, log fire, jacuzzi, wind power and LED lighting.
The second plan that their designer came up with met a lot of our goals. We both really like the layout of the house. The area under a roof, but outside the kitchen and living room is a great extension to the inside of the house, yet is outside. The jacuzzi has been accommodated. We have large windows that look out in the right direction. There is a loft. The kitchen is sociable. All the bedrooms are large. We have a pantry and storage.
What surprised us is the washing areas are all upstairs. This works well in terms of layout, but there is a problem with heating these rooms. OM solar relies on air flowing inside the house. These rooms will not have any warm air flowing through them and thus will not get heated. Yutaka's solution is to put in heaters. I am uncomfortable with this as it will use electricity to do the job of what the OM heating should do. If these rooms were downstairs then they could be heated through vents in the floor.
On the subject of airflow, there are concerns that we do not have a mezzanine and there is not a big enough passage for warm air to rise to the upper floor. A suggested solution has been to disperse some of the heat under the 2nd floor floorboards as it is being sent down the duct to the concrete under the house. We would be able to control the percentage that is used upstairs and downstairs. At the moment we are awaiting calculations on whether this would allow for sufficient heating of both floors. As the night time heating of the house requires the concrete to be heated throughout the day, we need to make sure enough heat is getting to it.
A quote from Yutaka has come in to just about fit in to our budget (depending on survey and ground work). So now we are eagerly awaiting news of the efficiency of the OM system in this plan.
Some notable absences from this plan are the fireplace - deemed unnecessary, expensive and labour intensive by Yutaka; and wind turbine to power the 12v LED lighting, omitted on the grounds of it not producing a reliable source of electricity.
I am not convinced of the last two arguments yet.
No comments:
Post a Comment