ᐅ House Construction Planning: Solid Brick and Mortar House or Prefabricated House? With or Without a Basement?

Unfortunately, my partner made the nasty suggestion a few days ago that I should lose some weight again. The absolute last thing I need right now is a thread about diet chips.
When you don’t have children and find a 120 sqm (1290 sq ft) apartment too small, the only practical solution I can think of—even with the worst imaginable floor plans—is "decluttering."
Have fun, everyone, I’m out.

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i_b_n_a_n schrieb:

Well, my brother-in-law is a building services engineer with 35 years of experience and wanted to install a system like this for his son (also in the industry, but with a Bachelor’s degree 😉 ). Planning started around 2019. I’m not sure if the system you mentioned was already available back then. It is definitely still experimental, but that’s no reason to dismiss it! They also had offers of similar scale at the time, but with hydrogen tanks installed outdoors. It ultimately failed due to binding commitments regarding consumption and performance. I did a plausibility calculation myself (photovoltaic yield, hydrogen energy density, electrolysis losses, etc.) and found hardly any way to bridge cold months without gaps (the calculation very clearly showed it wouldn’t have worked!). I can hardly imagine that much progress has been made in two years, but on paper even “snowball systems” initially look good. Also, as others have already pointed out, I see clear discrepancies between desires and budgets.

There’s a company called HPS Picea in Brandenburg, near Berlin.
They now provide guarantees.
There are already videos online where users of this system report that it can easily cover an entire year.

Our planned system with the 110 kW is already calculated to be above average in size.
That means we would end up with around 6–8 external hydrogen storage tanks, initially powered by the energy from the roof to store the hydrogen.
This means we intentionally want to oversize the storage capacity here in order to bridge dry spells.

In other words, we want a larger system than the one calculated by HPS because we think the same way you do: attractive numbers, but better safe than sorry.

Normally, a system costing around 60,000 € would have been sufficient for this house concept, but since our electricity consumption alone will likely exceed that of most others, we want to play it safe.

For emergencies, the electrical connection will at least be laid into the house.

However, the system would pay off considering our electricity consumption.
Besides that, our house’s CO2 footprint would be virtually zero…
So we would even be doing something good for the environment.

We are not environmentalists, and of course that is not the main reason.
However, if we make the house as energy-efficient as possible and rely on electricity with mostly just maintenance costs instead of steadily rising monthly and yearly fees, we save a huge amount of money.
If the house is sensibly and efficiently built, we won’t waste anything. Thus, heating costs are effectively zero. My parents and their friends pay on average 400–500 € per month for electricity and gas in smaller homes. We, on the other hand, have much larger floor space and would face much higher costs that we can keep at zero (apart from the loan for the system).
I’d rather put that 400 € per month without any price increases over the years into a loan and then theoretically be cost-free in retirement, except for maintenance and repairs.
(It’s clear that such systems also age, but by then these systems will surely be cheaper, and we shouldn’t forget the savings on electricity and heating 🙂 We’d rather invest that in elaborate hobby-tech ^^)

I’m reading a lot of requests here and still no bank that has commented on it yet ;-)

i_b_n_a_n schrieb:

At that time, I did a feasibility calculation (photovoltaic yield, hydrogen energy density, electrolysis losses, etc.) and found that it would hardly be possible to cover the cold months (the calculation clearly showed that it wouldn’t work!)

There is apparently at least one house in Germany where the entire off-grid system works. At least, that is what the YouTube video I watched claims... But yes, the effort involved is significant. Building-integrated photovoltaics, just to mention one aspect.

11ant schrieb:

Unfortunately, my partner made the unpleasant suggestion a few days ago that I should lose some weight again. So the absolute last thing I need right now is a thread about diet support.
If you don’t have children and already find a 120 sqm (1290 sq ft) apartment too small, the only promising solution I can imagine for poorly designed layouts is one, and that is "decluttering."
Have fun everyone, I’m out.

^^ Not everyone has to be the same 🙂
Everyone has their own needs and wishes.
Those who need less space are perfectly fine too.
We know ourselves that we are different from most people.
But in the end, everyone is different and has their priorities elsewhere.

As silly as it sounds, we just don’t want children, and as everyone knows, children do cost money (rightfully so, they should be well provided for).
But since we want to spend our money on ourselves — call it selfish or whatever — and don’t want to adopt children, maybe there’s simply more money left over for our own needs.

If you have children, of course, they would logically come first.

As I said, we like children and also enjoy taking care of family members’ kids from time to time.
But we simply cannot imagine that long term.

Again, everyone is different.

We are a bit unusual, and maybe that’s exactly why we shouldn’t have or adopt children ourselves — before passing that on.

minimini schrieb:

I’m reading a lot of wishes here but still no bank has said anything ;-)

We haven’t gone to the bank yet ^^
But we know how much we have saved and what our income is.
And my sister even works in this industry ^^
Since the topic has come up several times, we have a rough idea of the loan amount we could get.

Honestly, I find it quite uncomfortable to share exact figures about our finances.
We have saved well because, as I said, we hardly have any expenses besides the high rent.

And in the end, we don’t want to come across as strange.

Maybe I’m just not good at presenting this well.
That’s why I say, we know ourselves that we are a bit different from others.

For us, it’s mainly about gaining experience and finding out what others consider useful when building a house.

Especially regarding the basement or traditional masonry ^^
No one has really given clear advice yet on which is better. 🙂