Location

La Calera, Colombia

Challenge

The challenges for this project are very similar to the Refugio del Hato project, since they are located in the same county.

• The client wanted to get into the solar energy trend but didn’t know how to do it. There was a concern on how to reduce the amount of energy consumed from the grid, thus lowering the cost of living and the monthly bill.

• Also how to prevent temporary grid power downs (very common in project’s location).

• How to distribute heat to indoor spaces and provide hot water efficiently considering cold weather conditions, house architectural layout and location site.

• How to maintain the gardens and green areas in mint conditions all year round without over spending money on potable water from the grid.

Area

780 sqm

Solution

• Designed and installed a solar PV system capable of injecting 3.3 Mw per hour to the household electric grid. 12 PV high efficiency solar panels of 280w working in a single line are capable of recharging 8 solar batteries during a period of 3 to 5 hours depending on sun conditions. Once the batteries were fully recharged, it could inject up to 12 Mw per hour to all the electric consumption during daytime. Thanks to this, the project managed to reduce consumption from the grid up to 70% (compared to exact house neighbours). Prevents power cuts and energy shortage all year round.

• Managed to convince the architect to spend that extra cost from the windows and spend it on good quality thermal insulation for the house. They used it for the ground floor specially under the main room floor, main study and TV room floors. Additional insulation on the second floor in bedrooms and gym roof. Also proposed double brick walls with insulation layer on the East facade, that were in permanent contact with predominant winds.

• For heating up the indoor spaces, the idea was to install a 2,000 Liter central boiler tank system connected to 10 solar water panels located in the roof. They provided heat through cooper wall mounted radiators in the main areas. After performing calculations, I recommended splitting the main boiler into two smaller systems located closer to the main spaces on both floors. All this, in order to reduce the distance hot water had to travel from the main system to all the rooms. Less length means less heat lost in the pipelines, which comes down to less hours of heating required to work, thus less money spent.

• These two boiler tank systems also provide the household with hot water for bathrooms and laundry room, which brings the electric and gas consumption down (by at least 20% of total).

• In order to keep the huge garden green all year round, I design a mixed rain harvesting system and a grey water treatment plant. When it rains, the roof top area can recollect up to four cubic meters of water to fill the storage tanks located on garden. During the dry months, the water coming from the showers and the sinks, is treated in a wetland and reused for the irrigation system.

• Also, it reuses the treated water to flush toilets. This can reduce the consumption of potable water up to 30% from the grid.