Good House Building

You can do that....it just costs a lot of money....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_heat_pump

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_thermal_energy_storage

Ah but pumps and fluids Don t make a passive inexpensive solution.

It's not a passive situation...To heat when it's cold and cool when it's hot, takes mechanical assistance...Unless of course you want to live deep underground where the temperature is constant....but that comes with its own set of problems....

Passive homes stand above the rest (I'm bias). The sun is out even when air is cold. And the earth retains heat 24/7. 5' well insulated usable crawl spaces with a gravel floor works very well. Utility bills are lower (sometimes much) in passive home. A well built home does not have to be so "active" to be in the comfort zone.

It is done routinely in many parts of the world. A good percentage of the homes on the NE coast of lake Zürich, in Switzerland, for example use ground-source heat pumps for this very purpose.

Next!

As a plumbing contractor in Colorado, I have installed geothermal systems and made them work well, but completely out of the price range of most, so back to low cost passive homes that are "owner" friendly. (Which means allot).

Insulation diminishes ground/house heat transfer. Crawl spaces are good black-widow spider hangouts.

On the other hand, direct slab-on-ground construction functions pretty decently in the desired way. My apartment is built like that, and I can almost do without heat in some rooms.

Slab on grade is very limiting to a single story home. Basement slabs are great "heat sinks". We used to put in floor tubes in the floor on larger two story homes. Then we would install the "mechanical room" first instead of last. Get the boiler running and have heated floors all during construction. Saved allot of snow shoveling and we set a porcilin toilet for the crews. They loved it , no temporary power or portapotties.

I have one of these.

Uses the roof space as a temperature regulator and using only a fan pumps hot air into the house or vents hot air into the roof space to regulate building temperature. About as simple as it gets.

Yes but fans are very noisy and break down, and what about outgassing all that insulation into the house, plus all that convective dry air. Also what do you do with the excess heat build up in the attic? Thermostats add wasted cost , and drive up air conditioning and heating costs. In a good passive home you spend 80% of your money up front and 20% forever after, instead of most houses, 20% up front and 80% forever after (with high and rising utility costs.). Passive homes are stable homes.

This is in addition to employing a passive home design where possible (like installing proper insulation).

There is no excessive attic heat build up as the attic already heats naturally due to the solar heating of the roof, then distributes this heat into the cooler house when needed to raise its temperature (for example at night). The air entering the living space passes through a filter and a thermostat uses negligible energy. Also the motors used in modern circulation fans are quite, reliable and maintenance free.

The attic can and will overheat. Filters will clog up . Cooling this home seems a problem. A well built passive home is a low maintenance comfortable home.

Let me tell you a story.

Down here in NZ we have just had two major building contractors go out of business with outstanding debts to contractors of around 200 million dollars because our building industry is so flawed that companies are COMMONLY having to win bids at BELOW cost just to get the work. In addition we have contractors going around trying to save money by doing such things as going around building concrete house foundations and excluding all the steel reinforcing resulting in foundations cracking within the first year.

In addition we are still reeling from our largest building supplier supplying incorrectly treated wood between 1994 and 2004 to the industry resulting in what we call "leaky building syndrome" (we have our own Wikipedia page) which has effected all houses, apartments and commercial buildings that were built with the wood resulting in them rotting and having to either be demolished or expensively repaired, often NOT I repeat NOT covered by insurance resulting in effected home owners each losing tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars, and resulting in a total bill of 11.3 BILLION dollars, most of which building owners have had to pay out of their own pocket (or through taxes resulting from a partial government bailout) while the building supplier managers kept their jobs and their bonuses.

So you will excuse me if some of us have more important things to worry about than a clogged filter.

Wow!!! I have heard of some very shoddy contractors (used car salesmen) larceny in their blood ,before, but these guys take the cake. Sounds like a very corrupt planning , zoneing, inspection burocratic cabal. Will only change when they are thrown out on their asses. Building codes are there for a reason, tried and tested. Buyer beware. Good luck.

It was incompetence of those that wrote the building act allowing the flawed timber treatment (among other things), that and a failure of common sense.

Yes, the same in my country. The cabal, the "general" contractors. But they are only "major" malfunctions. The generals are stuck in the 50's. Good luck

There's a lot of new construction in my area. Everything is sheeted with particle board - the cheapest and worst material you can get. Vinyl siding is also the rule. A winter storm last year tore rows of shingles off their roofs. Many of them had not even felt under the shingles. Not to mention siding that flew away.

At the same time the price of new homes is very expensive. The real estate values are all out of whack.

Is it as bad as down here? My home has doubled in value over the last 8 years since I brought and I brought at the high point in the market at the time and 50K over my set budget.

If I lived at home for example and saved up those last 8 years I would have a mortgage twice as large as I have now. Standard prices for houses in our area are over a million dollars (that's over 640K USD). At one point my home was gaining value more than I was earning, and unlike the American housing market it is not common for people to borrow against the home equity and there is a constant housing shortage so the house prices show no signs of going down dramatically due to a crash.

Crazy.

Our values soared due to the oil industry boom some years ago, and there's a slight downturn now since the bottom fell out of oil prices a couple years ago, but still the price of housing is way out of line with what people earn. Maybe not as bad as you guys, but it's bad, no doubt about it. Yes there are million dollar homes, which would have topped out at about $250 K ten years ago.

Hi, you are right, and some companies have already use such technologies. For example, when I bought an apartment from this company https://www.parc-clematis.com.sg I was shocked by the price for water cost and cost for electricity were low. As it turned out, it was not because the low prices in general, but because these technologies were used when this company began construction phase. Due to this, now I save great amount of money on municipal services ;)