Why people, buying or building a house, do not think about how much its operation will cost? Indeed, in our climate, it is the cost of heating a house that is the largest of all costs for its maintenance!
Choosing a house project, comparing construction technologies, future homeowners look more closely at the options for planning the premises, finishing materials, often without paying attention to the issues of insulation of the house. I am able to understand that many investors do not delve into technical details due to the fact that they have no idea about construction and how, in fact, everything should be.
In such a situation, the owner will not appreciate, or he will consider a five-centimeter layer of polystyrene with sufficient insulation, especially when a cunning contractor claims what he always does, and this is good. It would be just wonderful that in every project of the house in the most prominent place there was information about how much it will consume energy per year.
How much the house will consume heat?
How to find out how much the house will consume heat? In the case of acquiring new buildings houses, this is not at all difficult to find out. Since January 2014, an energy passport should be issued for each house, commissioned. This document is transmitted to the owners along with the keys to the house.
In it, the buyer will find information about how much the house requires energy in the form of estimated electricity or gas consumption for heating per year. This is not a specific size in numbers, but a methodology for calculating the energy efficiency of the house. Being a single building for all buildings, the technique on the basis of calculations allows you to compare the costs of heating different buildings.
Heating cost in a house under construction
The situation is much more complicated if the house has not yet been built. If you buy a project at the architectural bureau, especially if it is a project to order, ask to provide information about how much the house will consume heat. Project developers must be able to calculate this. This can be done independently in special programs, but only after the acquisition of the project.
The calculation of the general need for warmth in such programs requires entering information about all walls, windows, roof, type of foundation, ventilation. For each partition (walls, roofs, floors), you should specify the thickness of all layers (plaster, parts of the carrier wall, foam). Data that is difficult to get before buying a project.
How to calculate the cost of heating a house?
Already having information about how much heat the house will consume per year, we can easily calculate the cost of heating the house. We simply change the annual heat consumption, expressed in kW /h to the cost of energy generating depending on the coolant (fuel, electricity, hot water from the city heat supply network), and we get the cost of heating, expressed in monetary equivalent.
How to reduce the cost of heating a house? In a nutshell: choose not too big house. Choose a house if possible without balconies, auditory windows. Take measures to increase the insulating layer of walls and roofs. Replace the windows with warmest windows, with a decrease in their total number and size. Focusing the house under construction to the south to use free solar energy.
