• Welcome to the Zero Carbon and Passivehouse
• Introduction: Global Warming, Passivehouses and Zero Carbon
  • 'Zero carbon'
• New Passivehouses
  • Passivehouse Principles
  • Scandinavian Homes Passivehouses
    • Single-Storey Detached Dwellings
      • The Atlantica Range
      • The Baltica Range
      • The Nordica Range
      • The Hibernia Range
    • Two-Storey Detached Dwellings
    • Semi-Detached and Terraced Dwellings
  • Large Passivehouses
    • Care Homes
• Building Renovation - IRULES™
  • IRULES™ - Incremental Renovation to Ultra-Low Energy Standard
• Passivehouse Heating and Ventilation
• Software
  • Meteonorm
• Energy Performance Certificates
  • What's an EPC?
  • How to get an EPC
• Get off the grid!
• Passivehouse Events
• Passivehouse Literature and Downloads
• Niels' Take On...
  • Niels' Take On Wind Turbines
• About Us
• Contact Us

Associated links

The Nordica Range

The Nordica range of Scandinavian Homes is the most popular and best selling type of family homes, easily accommodating families of four or five members (according to EU recommendations a dwelling should have a floor area of at least 35m² per person). Typical Nordica sizes range from 80m² to 150m² living area.

With an external width of a little over 9m (internal width approximately 8.7m (28.5ft), depending on wall construction) these houses are extremely well proportioned. The Nordica 94 is the most cost-effective to build and the most energy-efficient to live in of all the house types. Like the other Scandinavian Homes the Nordica series can be built in (external) lengths corresponding to a multiple of 1.2m + 0.411m, e.g. the Nordica 94 mentioned above is 9 modules long (floor area appr. [9 x 1.2 x 8.7] ≈ 94m²).

The picture shows a fantastic 146 m² Nordica with an Atlantica as an extension and a beautiful terrace. This house has its own electricity supply as well as solar hot water generation on the roof.

Scandinavian Homes offer great flexibility when it comes to extensions, the only requirements being that these are designed in modules of 1.2m metres length and 0.6m width.

The pitch of the roof is normally 30° if there are no rooms in the roof, and 40° if the roof space is used as part of the living space (as in the photo above).

The reason this range of dwelling is so energy efficient is that the houses are wide enough to provide a family size house with a footprint that is close to square. This provides for a reasonable ratio between the area of outer surfaces exposed to heat loss (foundation, walls and roof), A, and the volume of the house, V. This ratio should be as small as possible. If you have passed a GCSE in maths you will be able to verify that a sphere has the smallest A/V ratio of all possible geometric shapes. However, spherical dwellings are very costly to produce and a cube offers a realistic compromise. If you combine this target with living space requirements and apply a bit of math, you can see that the range of dwellings ranging from the single-storey Nordica with or without rooms-in-the-roof to the two-storey Stockholm range, again with or without rooms-in-the-roof, offer an unsurpassed build cost/operating cost combination. This is certainly true for detached dwellings where a reasonably sized plot is often available.

In many cases this will still hold for semi-detached dwellings. With regard to terraces this argument, though environmentally friendly, will no longer win because of the cost of access roads, and you will need long, more narrow houses like the Kalmar range, in which a number of models have been developed specifically for the UK market, including housing associations.