Detached house solid construction - How to air condition, heat pump and underfloor heating?

Hello everyone,

I am currently planning the construction of a single-family house. Several points are still unclear, including whether to choose prefabricated or solid construction and related to that, the Kfw 40/55/70 standards. I have also not yet decided on the heating technology; oil and gas are out, leaving air-water, brine-water, ground collector-water, and air-air heat pumps, also known as comfort heating or whatever else they are called.

Very important to me is a pleasant temperature even in summer. I know I can achieve a lot through shading and ventilation (controlled residential ventilation will definitely be installed in the house). Still, that won’t be enough for me. I would like to have 20-22 degrees Celsius inside the house even when it is 35 degrees outside - regardless of whether that is reasonable or not. And while there is an incredible amount of information about different heating systems, I can hardly find anything about cooling.

Cooling via heat pump and underfloor heating is probably reasonable in terms of cost and energy, but it doesn’t bring much. I have found almost nothing about cooling ceilings and their costs in single-family houses; it seems to be mainly used in commercial buildings. Classic split air conditioning units (or multi-split) are of course an option, but they are loud and consume a lot of energy - and if possible, I would like to save myself having the units in the rooms (but I prefer that to high temperatures, so it’s a last resort). Now I have read that there are solutions where the heat exchangers in the rooms are not connected to a split inverter unit outside the house but to the heat pump, and there are also these ventilation heaters which in summer basically work like central air conditioning units but often do not have a particularly good efficiency in winter.

In short: I am totally confused. Does anyone here know about cooling technologies and can give me a tip on an affordable and ideally energetically reasonable way to actively cool my place in summer?

Many thanks and best regards
Daniel

There is a cooling function for our controlled residential ventilation that we could buy at a high cost. And the KfW also gets very excited when you install something like that. So get informed carefully beforehand, so you don’t end up with the damage afterwards.

However, we already declined the price of the cooling... we did not research further regarding the KfW.

There is the possibility to cool the supply air in summer and preheat it in winter using a geothermal heat exchanger. It shouldn’t cost a fortune, as it is not an active technology. But it won’t cool down more than 15 degrees! Additionally, geothermal with a cooling function?! I have neither, but it might be interesting for you.

Hello,

....Still: that will not be enough for me. I would also like to have 20-22 degrees in the house when it is 35 outside - regardless of whether that makes sense or not.

You don't necessarily have to cool passively or actively for this. How high is the cooling load?

best regards

I would also like to have 20-22 degrees in the house even when it is 35 outside

You don't necessarily have to cool passively or actively for this.

? Now I'm curious...

With which method can I manage to keep room temperature at 20-22 degrees even though it is 35°+ outside (over a longer period)...

That only works through passive/active cooling, right???

...That only works through passive/active cooling???

The question is not entirely unfounded. What is cooling? It is mostly associated with the use of technical refrigeration (active). Passive: e.g. constructive measures to avoid excessive cooling loads during the summer heat period. Ventilation with cooler morning outside air would rather be ventilation with a "cooling effect." If cooling is defined as the sum of all measures to reduce an excessive room temperature (heat is removed from a system or body), almost everything falls under this (h,x- diagram). However, the strategic avoidance of excessive cooling loads does not. Best regards.