Glass Light and Warmth

Came across this house on MoCoLoco. My first thought was that this was a great vacation house somewhere along California's Central Coast, but I was wrong (it does happen quite often). What I wanted to know was how the architects - Simon Winstandley Architects - keep this place warm with all that glass. Light is obviously not a problem, and is certainly used for direct gain, but this is in Scotland. And Scotland gets cold.


This is from their page on the home:
- The external walls, floor and roof are insulated to a high standard and air infiltration is minimised.
- Triple glazed windows with warm edge spacer bars, thermally broken frames and inert gas filled to achieve a whole window u-value of 0.7W/m2K.
- Heat pump using a borehole as the ground source for the underfloor heating and hot water system with a closed combustion woodburning stove as back up.
- Whole house heat recovery ventilation system.


These systems don't take any crazy futuristic technology, just some common sense.


Why don't we do this here more? For those that will complain that a ground source heat pump costs more than AC and a furnace, you're wrong. Initially, yeah, it'll cost a bit more, maybe double, depending on the drilling, but it pays for itself in 5 years and lasts for 50 before you need to replace a fan.

If this was incorporated into a dense development, the initial costs go way down per unit. Shared cost of drilling, using buried cooling/heating tubes under areas of fill. Seems like a sensible alternative to the status quo.


To answer the question of "Why don't we do this here more?" - I won't list them, but if you've ever seen a new development in Irvine or Riverside, those responsible for that nightmare are to blame. Maybe I'll go into more detail on what is wrong with them some day, but for now, just check out Simon Winstandley Architects