The Gruen Eco Design blog about how to convert your dream of an energy efficient home into a reality.
It’s such a great feeling to finally have momentum on site.
Sanctum Homes have been busy painting colourful lines in the dirt.
- pink for electrical
- blue for plumbing
- yellow for footings
- green for pegs.
Doesn’t it look great?
They did leave some trenches open for the moment while there busy digging footings to make it easier for the machinery operators to avoid hitting any pipes.
While the site is getting prepared for the footings, we had to do some last-minute fine tuning with the passive house calculations. The PHPP.
In an ideal world you should wrap the insulation all around your footings. At the slab edge, below and up on the other side.
However, as most of you are probably aware, with Covid and the increase in material costs, this has affected the price of the insulation. Therefore, we trialled out 4 different options and if and where we could reduce the insulation somewhat. To see what impact it would have and if we will still comply with the passive house criteria.
And it turns out that even though there will be more heat loss by reducing the insulation and not wrapping it around the edge beams. We will still comply. And save quite a bit of money.
Great outcome all around.
Surprise, surprise.
We still don’t have money from the bank. We’re still trying to settle on a payment schedule. I will talk more about this once we have it sorted. I will explain why it can be harder to get a functional payment schedule sorted with the bank when you are building a high performing home. Or anything other than a standard stick frame home.
Stay tuned.