Cork-clad home uses Trombe Wall & circular vents as free A/C

the people our neighbors come and visit the house and they're all surprised that we have no heat we have no air conditioning and stuff and we don't put any chemicals in our pool we didn't know about natural pools before and actually i think it's one of the best decisions we made not only are there no chemicals in the water but the water is extremely pure it's like drinking from a mountain stream the water is so pure because of the plants filtering it yeah and some of the plants you know push out into the water themselves but uh and do you have to is there upkeep for the plants no just in there just right now i'm i'm cutting them down for the winter time but that's all that needs to be done they just reproduce themselves but this pool is fantastic we're we're in it all day long in the summer time and we get all kinds of birds and dragonflies and frogs in the springtime plus your skin feels so good when you come out and when you're swimming in the pool the water is high enough that you can swim and have a view out over the whole park and stuff so it's like i just feel like i'm in a luxury hotel when i'm swimming in that pool you have an infinity pool a natural one yeah had been looking for a place in spain and we spent about 15 years looking for the house in the pueblos blancos de andalucia and we didn't find it and finally our daughter ended up moving to barcelona so we finally decided okay we'll buy some land and we'll build a house and this one was just i mean with montserrat in the in the in the background and the whole park here which is supposed to stay natural like that so we decided we'll do something entirely new we'll look for somebody who can help us build a passive house were you familiar with cork no from wine bottles no i'd never seen it on a house before and i was a little skeptical myself when we were talking about it because i thought cork you know it's very it's very wrinkly it's very rough and then we went to see one of the buildings that was clad in cork and it was just so beautiful and silky and smooth and the colors are fantastic i don't think i would have wanted anything else and it blends into the the environment so well plus it's extremely effective it's cool outside now but it's nice and warm inside the house and everybody who comes here all these houses here are freezing in the wintertime and they walk into our house and we don't have any heating but the house heats itself and in the summertime it cools itself even in these very very hot summer days it's cool inside so it's just it's magnificent so tell me about the decision to use cork because it's a lot of cork you hear about people using court for insulation or for a cork wall or but you clad the whole house in court yeah some people call me the architect the cork architect that's because i work in bio architecture so for the exterior cork is the only existing natural insulation and this material is really fantastic because the panels they are expanded cork these particles that you see here are the expanded cork so they are like cooked in an oven they are cooked so without adding any chemicals this is the magic stuff and so they create some air bubble inside and so these increase the insulation power of the material and then they are packed into panel and and then you can apply on different surfaces and the material is very good because naturally it cannot be attacked by fungi by any parasites without adding any chemicals so it's just perfect you know for this reason i always use these because basically it's the most efficient and most natural so is it are these just cladding you just put them yeah this is clouding and inside there are the expanded block that are like thomas stone is very light because it is sand with a little bit of lime and a very small quantity of cement and they are cooked at a very high temperature and so they expand and they create air bubble and so they are very light and very insulating okay so when the clients came it was a little bit complicated because it is north facing but to have a passive building we need to put the main facade facing to the south but the main view are to the north so we decided to have some precisely designed view towards the north because of course they wanted to see monserrate and all the park but we need to reduce the openings to the north to not lose energy during winter so the openings to the south are at their maximum size and on the north facade they are reduced to the minimum this is the south facade perfectly south oriented and this is the famous trombe michelle wall the wall behind is a rumored earth wall painted in black on this side and so it has a big mass this in this case it was 30 centimeters and so this is a mass accumulator a mass heating accumulator and so it works from convention and radiation so during all the day it accumulates heat and it's radiating to the interior it works with some vents opening that we have on the top and on the bottom we have three on each side and so when the temperature inside reach its maximum you open the vents and so the warm air starts entering in the interior of the house and the cold ones start entering here with this movement a circular convection movement and this process we are talking about something there is no electricity or energy you are spending or in this case for for a budget reason is everything is manual for example during summer we have this mechanism that is completely manual this one can work like a solar chimney you will open this part on the top and open the vent openings on the bottom and so you create a difference of temperature the wall works like a solar chimney so it extracts it warm a lot the air so the air gets lighter and lighter and goes up and outside from this opening that is open during the day and so the house is refreshed by the north ale that goes from the north to the south during the night in summer you close the external opening and you leave open at the vents and so through the chamber you will have more for the air for the weight the cold air that goes down doing this was a very big issue because there's no much literature about there's a little bit of literature but nobody did the atrom wall you know this is the thrombi shall walk from inside so here you can see the bricks of brown earth okay and so you can see the main vent open here and on the bottom so now you can feel the warm air can you yeah okay so now the air is entering and the cold one is going down and outside from this opening so of course this is the warmer area right now because this wall is completely sun basic from the outside so how efficient is this system we did a simulation and we calculated that during cold season they should have like two or three weeks of discomfort temperature it means under 20 degrees so for these days without sun we put the stove what we use is that little high efficiency wood stove in the winter time we haven't started using it yet it is amazingly warm and it uses a very small amount of wood so that little stove is sufficient to heat the whole house in the winter time but it's mainly in the evening we don't need to put it on in the daytime in the wintertime especially if there's sun when there's no sun for several days it can be a little chilly in here because the tromboil doesn't work as we would hope it would you were mentioning outside the feeling of cork and coming inside that you think that it actually does insulate oh it definitely insulates but it's very thick it's five centimeters thick plus they're the um etone blocks which i think the the term in english is uh cellular concrete so these are the aerated blocks as well for budget reason we didn't cover it we just painted them with this lime paint this is an ancient lime paint that was used years ago here in catalonia nowadays not very used and we recuperated it and why use a wine because it is transpirable is completely natural and the old for example these these paints they are mineral paints so they are made from stones reduced into dust and so this is mineral based and the white one on the blocks is lime based but both of them are completely natural without any addition so this is the third drum wall this is one that just works from radiation and so you can really feel the worm oh you do feel it oh it's warm yeah that's great and you know the the surface for this quad small room it's calculated to have a continuous radiation during all the day so what would be the difference temperature between this part of the wall and the next part of the world is the difference you can notice of course this could be several degrees difference yeah i think something less than 10 degrees because this is not cold but almost and this is very warm any other cement or no these are are they irrated blocks so this is like celex expanded celix it's like a pumice yes yes the feeling is like pumice and the blocks are big but they are quite light because they are full of small air bubbles and you mentioned that that's important as well right yeah because this block alone without the cork is very insulating from here you you can see the depth of the cork panel so did that make it simple just to add a panel on the outside yeah that's it for installation yeah because these blocks are already insulation if not we will need a lot more so this room is projecting you towards the exterior and this was intentional because this is the east orientation so it's difficult to keep on sleeping with this view you know okay so here here is uh you know the bedroom projects you into yeah project so you cannot go on sleeping you have to wake up i propose to do a trampoline so you get up and that would be a trampoline that was my personal dream have you swallowed this not yet smudged eh no this is a epdm epdm is like the most natural rubber layer that exists on the market okay so it looks like plastic but it's not really plastic it's a polymer okay and very very lasting one so is an entire piece that they shape on the excavation hole and then you feel it and the idea is that in fact you can see that now you cannot see the black everywhere because after one year and a half a biofilm like a layer of small algas algae exactly they are covering the surface and this is the aim of a natural pound so at the end it will completely cover it and you won't see the rubber material this material makes you want to touch it yeah yeah and the beautiful thing it won't change in 50 100 years it will be exactly the same yeah this is one of the good properties because for example all the plastic insulation they lose density after five ten years and of course they cannot be exposed to the exterior but this is a natural material it will be the same for years it protects the tree and it'll protect yeah exactly wow you can you can notice the difference of the temperature yeah wow yeah yeah because this is radiating all the time wow it's so much warmer yeah i think uh is i mean outside will be 13 i think here is more than 20. it's a november day it's not that warm no i mean yeah you feel good i mean you feel very sitting close to maybe a heater yeah nice but it's nice and really it's quite warm it is yeah yeah yeah and on a day that's not sunny it takes a little bit the worm of the day of one of two days after two days without sun you need to put on the stove but you know here the weather is always very sunny so we calculated the house considering the local weather and based on this specific condition of orientation of the neighbors and so for example all these openings are south faces and they are working with the greenhouse effect so they are working together with the drum walls to heat the place are the cement floors a heatsink yes this was as well for the budget because we hadn't budget for to add a floor on the slab so this is just the slab polish it with the corsum in summer is very good because it has a big mass and so during the night it takes a low temperature and gives gradually during the day so it's good for a mass cold accumulator during summer now we sort of see that this is it's not a box house yeah so the the idea was to adapt to the slope of the terrain so we have just these uh difference this quote difference and so the idea was having a view toward the monserrat mountain and so this is the most beautiful view of course we had to reduce those openings so they are very short because of the energy loss during winter yeah so we try to minimize on the north facade so so that's why these can be a bit you don't worry about that heat loss on this side but you do on that side yes because this is the main day they living and the interesting thing is that from each room you can have a completely different angle of view so from this space it's more a contemplation spot you have your shoulder covered that is very important psychologically the housing is like sheltering you i participate with this material yeah because it's soft and as well with all the small holes inside it breaks the sound so when you you sit here you are just a little bit sound insulated so the sensation of the material is really different not only the touching sensation as well the listening you know is different the sound sitting here is different yeah you hear a a little bit like a cotton you know cotton head sound something like that here you see the two the contrast to the two right the cork on the outside and the yeah and the blocks so the two of them work together really well and insulate uh extremely well and yeah i think that it's sort of in agreement with the spirit of the whole house there's this unity between the aesthetic and the functional this is the water tank under the parking what's the capacity 20 000 liters so the water comes down off the roof through that copper pipe and it goes into the tank underneath there and so when it rains it collects the water and then reuse for the garden and for the pond let's see do you have it i did it once wow we can help you yes well yeah there's quite a lot of water and then now already because it rained a lot it's probably about half full you know how huge it is oh my gosh you could go swimming in there if you if you were missing an indoor pool yeah it's an idea so the idea was having a small complete ecosystem like the house inside the wood is a small ecosystem so it works with its own resources you know you

Channel: Kirsten Dirksen

Views: 498,164

Keywords: trombe wall, cork house, cork home, cork insulation, cork cladding, natural building, bioclimatic house, natural ventilation, passive house, passive solar house, natural swimming pool, natural pool, plant filtered pool, aerated concrete, cellular concrete, aerated concrete blocks, lime paint, natural paints, thermal storage wall, mass wall, solar wall, felix trombe, garraf forest, hvac system, free energy, natural home, permaculture, natural climatization, bioclimatism

Id: 90X_698x2q4

Length: 20min 10sec (1210 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 09 2021