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energy / volume 13 number 1, January 2011 Heating Bills? What Heating Bills? At the last John Trigg Ester Library (JTEL) membership meeting, it was decided to form a construction committee. Mike Musick, Todd Hoener, Eric Glos, Nancy Burnham, and I volunteered to form that committee. Aside from tweaking the architects’ design and getting rid of frilly corners, we asked ourselves, what kind of building do we want? We all agreed that we want a library that’s built to last. We want a building that will be there for a long, long time and that will be easy to maintain. From the earliest design discussions back in 2006, the library has been planned as a green building that will be cheap to operate and have a low impact on the land and environment. One of my concerns is that we may not be able to hire staff (at least for a while) and are totally dependent on volunteers. For a building heated 24/7, 365 days of the year, that would be a lot of delivered oil! When groups of people want to use or meet in the library, they do not want to spend the time to get a key and warm it up before they can use it. That’s what happens at Hartung Hall. We want a building you can enter at your convenience. It seemed only logical to reduce the heating requirements to an absolute minimum. My dream is to build a library that can be heated with a masonry stove which only requires one burn in the morning and one in the evening. I imagine a cabin on the library grounds in which a UAF student can reside and open the JTEL doors in the morning, make a fire, and shelve some books, and then come back in the evening, make a fire, turn the lights off and lock the doors, and get credit at the university for library studies. Mike, Todd, and I know about developments in Germany and now also in the Lower 48 to build houses that use zero or near-zero energy. To get a building that would need minimal heating, we would have to construct it to the German Passivhaus standard. This standard was developed about fifteen or twenty years ago. The very first Passivhaus was built in 1996, and The city of Frankfurt built a superinsulated kindergarten with these standards, and saved so much of the taxpayers’ money that the city now ants to build all future public buildings the same way. Now, some of you might be familiar with the term superinsulation or with LEED certification (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design). Those are systems used in the USA. Passivhaus is different and more stringent in a way. Here are the rules:
Now, how you achieve those numbers is up to your builder! Passivhaus does not tell you what kind of insulation or which refrigerator to buy. It does not include a materials standard, like LEED, only a performance requirement. Is it possible to build the Ester library to the Passivhaus standard in Fairbanks’ harsh climate? The answer appears to be yes. There are at least two houses in and around Fairbanks that are completed or near completion that comply with the standard. One is Karl Kassel’s off-the-grid house on Murphy Dome, and the other is Thorsten Chlupp’s house on Chena Ridge. Chlupp, a builder originally from Germany, was the contractor on both houses. Mike Musick and I took a tour of the house on Chena Ridge and came away impressed with what we saw. More on that, and hopefully with pictures, in the next Ester Republic. International Passive House Conference: www.passivhaustagung.de/fuenfzehnte/englisch/index_eng.html LEED: www.usgbc.org/LEED/ Passivhaus (German and English): www.passiv.de/ Passivhaus UK: www.passivhaus.org.uk/ Passive House Institute US: www.passivehouse.us/ REINA, LLC: www.reina-properties.com/ (Thorsten Chlupp) | ||
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