Gallery, Projects and General > The Design Shop

Tiny Homes and Living Spaces

(1/3) > >>

sparky961:
If you haven't heard of a tiny home, you've probably been living under a rock the past few years...which, to some creatures is a tiny home, so forget that idea.  But I digress, as usual. I've been thinking more and more about the engineering requirements of such a building to sustain comfortable living in a Canadian winter.

Among my considerations are to maintain the following environmental factors:
- Atmospheric gases to safe and healthy levels (O2, CO2, CO, etc)
- Humidity in perfect balance for comfort, minimize fungal growth and insect habitat, keep skin and building materials from drying out
- Temperature maintained within a wide but reasonable level for personal comfort and safety, and with maximum efficiency

Some of the requirements are in conflict.  For example, if making a small space air tight and well insulated, there will be problems with air quality and water vapour.

What am I not yet considering?  I'd love an extremely simple solution that takes care of everything passively.... oh, to dream.

mattinker:
Heat exchanger to warm incoming air for ventilation!

sparky961:
Yes, that does seem to be the common solution.  But in terms if simplicity, do you think there would be a way to integrate it into the building itself? What about doing away with fans and controllers and making something passive?

mattinker:
I may be wrong but I suspect that you would have to move the air with an outside source of energy as heating the incoming air will probably cancel out the thermo-syphon effect. It would only take a very small amount of energy to move the air through.

PekkaNF:
How that works depends strongly least on following factors:

Climate/location: Do you need insulation for heating, cooling or both? When cooled or heated, does moisture condensates on the structure? Does building code dictae certain structures or energy efficiency that pretty much dictate forced air exhange vs. free/gravitation?

What materials you can use? Solid log or brick buildings tend to be more straight forward to build and they work pretty good, but multilayer structures with membranes, insulations, building boards, palstic covered tapestries etc. can conspire against you.

What is your life style? Old log cabin style dwellng works fine - until you bring dishwasher, shower and lanundry inside. If you have wood fired firepalce, use it every dayi n the winter and open windows for 20 mins, you can cope well without any other technology. But if you build "passive" house, there is no way you can keep the moisture out of the house, insulation without some sort of active energy/control system.

There has been very much recearch on that topic and much politics and even more building codes, but very little awareness where it all leads.

Pekka

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page