sbh's philosophy

It is all about finding the right balance. In this case we are talking about energy balance. Although we can reduce, there will always remain an energy loss, that is inevitable. So will thermal bridges. This means we need to find a way to replace the energy loss with an energy gain, which will be the sun in our case. Because loss and gain do not always occur at the same time some sort of storage is needed. Think of it as your bank account. The balance does not only go up because we cut or costs, some sort of income is required as well. Now in Europe most employees are paid monthly. This means at the beginning of the month the balance goes up and decreases more or less steadily for the next 30 days as we all have expenses to cover. Same is true for an energy balance in a building the only difference being, there is an income every day. As well as an expense. In other words, the timeframe is much smaller and must be designed more carefully. Because there will be days where we have less gain than loss, the temperature (account balance) would drop. This is where the storage comes into play. If we manage to store some energy, we can activate the storage when needed. To summarize the three factors that need to be looked at carefully and coordinated among each other carefully:

1) Insulation and thermal bridges (responsible for energy loss)
2) Size and placement of windows (responsible for energy gain)
3) Design of energy storage, the thickness and material of the floors

   (that is where most of the solar energy gain is stored)

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The way buildings are currently built in Portugal (in most cases) they already provide pretty good storage as the floors are made of concrete and have a good thickness to them. Windows tend to grow in size, compared to older buildings, which is needed to provide enough energy gain. But if the storage is not insulated properly, as shown in 'potential for improvement' it cannot store the energy gained. Instead it will be taken back by the cold energy almost immediately, making the gains ineffective. This results in a net loss and therefore the indoor air temperature will drop.

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There was a lot of talk about the design and engineering but how does SHB-Houses ensure the measures translate into the building? SHB-Houses takes on responsibility and supervises the construction process, answers questions and helps coordinating the building process. By visiting the site on a regular basis, particularly when some of those details are being installed, SHB-Houses makes sure the solutions engineered during the planing process are being implemented properly - and the results will be achieved as expected. This is probably the most underrated in importance and time consumption, but yet it is one of the most important measures.