For Your Health and that of Our Planet
CO2
Wood uses solar energy to grow and it stores vast amounts of carbon dioxide during photosynthesis. A cubic meter of timber thus locks away around one ton of the harmful greenhouse gas. At least another ton is saved when using wood instead of other building material which require a lot of fossil energy and release CO2 during its production.
An average Stommel house with more than 50 cubic meters of solid timber, its rafters, purlins, studs and profile boards saves around 100 tons of CO2.
Furthermore, wood is a building material with a positive CO2 balance and requires less primary energy during the build. At Stommel Haus we manufacture the walls and ceilings in our factory where we apply the highest efficiency and use natural and healthy building materials.
By living in a Stommel solid timber house you are actively helping to protect the planet's climate.
Code for Sustainable Homes
The Code for Sustainable Homes focuses on the running cost of a house and it places emphasis on the CO2 footprint of the building material and manufacturing techniques. In order to achieve a zero carbon home in terms of the Code, innovative technology needs to be used such as wind turbines, photovoltaic power etc. Some of this technology is already proven, while some is still debatable, because the cost of installation has still to be justified in the long term.
Owners of a Stommel house need far less energy to heat their home, and can decide to install heat exchanger pumps (standard at Stommel Haus) to provide heat for the under-floor heating and hot water, install photovoltaic systems (optional) to provide electricity for the heat exchanger pump and link up with a "clean" electricity provider, collect rain water to flush toilets and feed the washing machine (optional), and even attach a carport to keep bicycles (option also specified in the Code) and many others to get closer to the requirements of the Code for Sustainable Homes.
Unrivalled Interior Climate
Experience a Stommel solid timber house, breathe the fresh clean air. It is not too dry and not too humid. It is always cosy and warm and amazingly pleasant and cool on a hot summer's day.
The feel-good climate of a Stommel house comes from a single source: the solid timber.
The ingenious layered walls use only solid solar spruce and other layers of natural material. The wood has 600 fine capillary vessels per square millimetre and billions of so called tracheids which have the capability of absorbing used air and bad smells and to channel these to the outside.
They supply your house with fresh oxygen and constantly keep the air humidity at a pleasant level creating a good atmosphere which offers relief to many people with allergies.
The thermo-physical properties of the walls provide a healthy climate and an unrivalled feel-good atmosphere. These properties do not wear off during the entire lifetime of the wood and therefore the house. They provide:
- Pleasant surface temperatures,
- Excellent air humidity balance,
- Neutralising stale air and bad smells,
- Anti bacterial properties and
- Avoiding electro static charges.
These are verifiable properties of the sustainable, ecological and perfect building material: timber. Stommel Haus does not use any chemical impregnation.
Timber from certified forests
Not all timber houses are alike. Stommel solid timber houses are special in many ways:
The timber used for the walls of the houses is the heartwood of slow growing polar spruce. After cutting a thick beam from the centre of the tree trunk, it is cut again through the middle and the inner sides, i.e. the heartwood of the trunk which is the hardest part, is turned to the visible side of the wall. This way we ensure that the material is used by design to make the house inherently stable and robust.
We select wood from sustainable and certified forests. In special seasoning chambers the natural material is brought to a residual moisture of 16% based on a complex process. The quality of the timber and design solutions developed exclusively by Stommel Haus avoid any unwanted twisting or shrinking of the wood.
1 millimetre of wood: 600 fine capillary vessels
per square millimetre
Heartwood for Our Walls