The Home For Life is one of eight experimental homes financed by VKR Holding in a plan to construct sustainable buildings called Active Houses throughout Europe. VKR Holding is working in collaboration with VELUX, VELFAC, SONNENKRAFT and WindowMaster, along with AART Architects to design and build the Home For Life. The home itself is a 2,045 sq ft two-bedroom, one and a half story home, that is designed to integrate sustainability and functionality into one cohesive project.
The slate roof is covered with a photovoltaic solar system and a solar hot water system, which when coupled with a heat pump and a super energy-efficient design can produce more power than is needed. In the winter, about 50% of the heating is provided by passive solar heating from the energy optimized windows. In the summer, an automatic natural ventilation system opens windows to control airflow through the house when needed. Daylighting plays a huge roll in the design of the house — and every room has windows on at least 2 sides.
After the home was completed the Simonsen family moved in and has been keeping track of how livable the home is. They keep notes about the home on their family diary blog (only in Danish), explaining how the automatic controls do or don’t work. It’s one thing to design a super efficient and automatically-controlled “smart home,” but it’s quite another to live in it. The Active House project is collecting all of this information from the family and will then apply that to the next houses they build.
Via IEEE Spectrum
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This striking modern home located near Aarhus in Denmark packs an amazing array of green building strategies into a small footprint, allowing it to actually produce more power than it consumes. Designed and built to be super energy-efficient, smart, eco-friendly, and powered by the sun, the zero-plus Home For Life is an experiment in creating the sustainable house of the future. A family has been living in the home now for 14 months and reporting on their activities and the home’s performance in…
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The Home for Life is one of eight experimental buildings created by VKR Holdings to develop the sustainable home of the future.
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The home is designed using the Active House principle, which has a strong focus on energy-efficient design, daylighting and renewable energy generation.
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Every room has at least two walls with windows on it, so the home makes great use of natural daylighting.
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Intelligent controls manage the home’s energy usage. Automatic systems turn off lights when rooms is not in use and open windows for natural ventilation.
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During the cool seasons, mechanical ventilation with heat recovery is used so the cold air can be heated without the use of additional energy.
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The home’s windows cover 40 percent of the total floor area, which is twice the area of a traditional house.
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An Active House takes similar principles of Passive House design, but incorporates more daylighting and utilizes “smart home” devices to optimize the use of energy.
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It is one thing to design and build a smart and energy-efficient home, but little research has been done yet to see how livable they are. Data collected from this experiment is very important to future designs.
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The family reports on how comfortable they are with the automatic controls — when the climate was just right for them, and when the controls made it too hot or too cold.
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The south-facing slate roof includes the photovoltaic system, solar hot water system and skylights.
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The home’s energy systems are all optimized and work together to minimize energy use.
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The roof is key to the design — it incorporates renewable energy generation, skylights for natural lighting, and operable windows for cooling.
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