One of the United Kingdom’s best performing houses, the award-winning Moonstone Project, was designed using Graphisoft’s ArchiCAD. The house exceeds the UK’s Code 6 Sustainable Homes Guide as well as the German ‘Passivhaus’ top standards for energy efficiency by over 65 percent.
What is Moonstone?
The Moonstone Project is a 16,000 square foot house with nearly one third underground. Meeting a ‘zero carbon’ footprint is no small accomplishment given the that the house is 21 times larger than the typical UK home. The house has no heating demand and is off the grid for both water and sewage. It is also entirely lit using low-LED lighting and generates its own electricity through an array of PV panels which supply more power than the house consumes. This enables the home owners to feed surplus electricity back to the UK power grid for an estimated annual income of 3,500 British pounds.
“ArchiCAD BIM is a tool we definitely could have not lived without,” said John Croft, owner of Moonstone. “It certainly saved us tens of thousands of pounds in cost savings on the project as we were able to analyze any design mistakes, clashes of materials, know where the MEP runs were going to go as well as evaluate building performance,” he added.
A free Best Practice InfoKit is available from Applecore Designs, a Graphisoft partner in the UK that helped support the Moonstone Project design team.
To learn more about ArchiCAD visit Graphisoft online here.