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Swedish Housing: As Snug as a Cocoon
| Article
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11776 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
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4 / 1987 |
2,022 Words |
| Author
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Miles Cunningham
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Swedish housing has something in common with auto imports: The Swedes have made substantive improvements in the way houses are built.
When the energy crisis of the 1970s prompted homeowners to turn down the heat, Sweden kept the thermostat high and turned to technology perfected since the end of World War II.
Energy efficiency is an integral part of the Swedish house, not an add-on or optional extra as with many conventionally built American houses.
The following is excerpted from a report on Swedish housing called "Coming In from the Cold," commissioned by the German Marshall Fund of the United States and the Swedish Council for Building Research:
"The snug, well-lit interiors of Swedish homes provide a cheerful defense against the chill and gloom of winter. Yet these homes use less energy for heating than the housing stock of any other temperature-climate country. Adjusted for climate and the size of homes, the average energy use for home heating in Sweden is barely two-thirds of that of other European and North American countries. This is even more impressive when one considers that Sweden has both higher indoor temperatures and more central heating than other countries."
The factory-built shell is put up on the site in one or two days in Sweden. (The Swedes prefer "factory-crafted" to "prefabricated" housing.) Therefore houses can be build year-round since most of the work is indoors, whereas the conventionally built house may be open to the weather for weeks or even months. Pilferage, a problem with on-site built houses, is also minimal with factory-made housing because few unattached building materials are necessary on the site.
Site or stick building is likely to disappear over the next five years in Sweden, where the factory-built home is recognized as the custom product. U.S. inroads - where site construction dominates - is not projected.
A Swedish house appears similar to a well-built American house. The technology that makes it energy efficient can be applied to conventionally designed houses, condominiums, office buildings, shopping malls, and churches.
"In this country, we simply build a loose house so that there is natural ventilation. Therefore we are paying for it in fuel," says Paul F. Kando, founder of the Center for the House, a Washington-based, non-profit organization dedicated to better housing.
"You can build a house as shoddy as you want and then defend it in terms of ventilation,"says Kando. "Swedes want to control what gets into a house, and they don't want to leave it up to the weather."
The Swedish building code recommends that no more than a fifth of the air in a house be replaced with fresh air from outside in an hour. "This natural ventilation is supplemented with air drawn into the house under controlled conditions. The number of air changes per hour occurring naturally in Swedish houses is about half that of typical new U.S. houses and about a quarter that of the U.S. housing stock as a whole," states the
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