To those people which still have concerns about the Holz100 ratings, I suggest spending a wellness weekend in the 'Hotel Waldklause' in the Austrian 'Oetztal'. This saves long discussions and so far has convinced everyone who doubted the superiority of wood.
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And we built the 'quietest wood hotel in the world' with Holz100 for the Auer Family in the Tyrolean 'Oetztal'. Every room of this hotel has an acoustic rating twice as prescribed. Please note, the building standards for hotels are very strict and some hotels cannot even comply.
5. Acoustic Insulation
For a long time, people thought a wood house, though comfortable and romantic, was just not very soundproof. Holz100 houses consist of 100% wooden elements which have excellent sound attenuation. An architect challenged me with the following task: Can you build a hotel with Holz100 that would have the best-sound proofed rooms anywhere? Cell phones of the first generation often didn't work in Holz100 buildings. Meanwhile the small percentage of rest radiation which enters through the window frames is enough for it to work.
The tenant of a Holz100 home still has the advantage that the radiation density is drastically lower inside the building compared to the outside. Laboratory tests showed that Holz100 elements blocked up to 99% radiation, depending on frequency. 4. Prefabricated House, wall 0.9cm KH-Render / 4 EPS / 1.3 Particleboard / 14 Mineral wool / 1.8 GKP
5. "Reduction of High Frequency Radiation penetration in Buildings", May 2000, updated in 02/02, by Prof. Peter Pauli and Dr. Dietrich Moldan. 1. THOMA Holz100, consisting of 2.4cm Larch rough sawn exterior wall / 37cm Spruce / 4cm interior Larch (for fire safety)
2. Concrete 16cm with reinforcement (2.400kg/m3) 3. Vertical coring brick 36cm (800kg/m3), render on one side Natural wood as we use in Holz100 achieved the best results. Holz100 panels blocked high frequency mobile phone radiation better than reinforced concrete, bricks or other commonly used prefabricated building systems. The complete scientific publication about this issue can be viewed through the Erwin Thoma Scientific Research Center.
The Munich University of the Federal Armed Forces became our scientific research partner and conducted more than 700 laboratory tests. Practically all of the well-known building systems on the market were tested for their protective qualities regarding electromagnetic radiation. The results were surprising even to their radiation experts and technicians.
4. Radiation Shielding
While building one of our first Holz100 homes, I noticed that the mobile phone reception was very weak inside the newly erected building and I decided to investigate this phenomenon further. I remember a quote by Rudolf Steiner (German/Austrian, founder of Waldorf Schools and Biodynamic Agriculture): "It is the mass of the building which creates a good atmosphere". I would add: "The best way to create a good quality atmosphere indoors is by building with natural wood."
Wood also acclimatizes a building more efficiently. Not only in winter when it acts as a heat conductor but during summer too. It is thermally slow and more effective than any other building material. This led us to build more and more roofs with solid wood panels in warmer areas which achieved much better ratings than with roof trusses, because they acted like wood frame walls.
To simulate winter in the laboratory, the outside temperature was then lowered to minus 10 degrees Celsius and the inside heating turned off, as if the tenants turned off the heating and left. We applied the same conditions to all three walls and measured the time it took the cold to penetrate through the wall and reach zero degrees on the internal wall surface.
The experiment was simple:
A wood frame wall, a brick wall and a Holz100 wall were prepared with insulation materials to achieve the same thermal insulation rating. Each wall was exposed to a constant temperature of 21 degrees Celsius. 3. Acclimatizing and cooling down time
The time it takes for a house to heat up in summer and cool down in winter depends on the insulation materials used. A bigger influence though comes from the building material itself. At the University of Graz, we tested three commonly used building systems. Consider the following: To achieve a thermal insulation rating of 0.3 Wm2K, which is the current European norm aspired to, an architect who wanted to build without insulation, would have to use the following wall thicknesses for his buildings:
- Reinforced concrete: 726cm - Average brick: 60cm - Conventional Timber and Glue-lam wood products: 47cm - Holz100: 27cm The results were a world record in thermal insulation!
Compared with all the structural building methods, Holz100 is the building material with the very best natural thermal insulation. 2. Thermal Insulation
The inside of a Holz100 element consists of layers of roughly sawn battens pressed together. This creates microscopic thin layers of air which is not circulating and results in excellent additional insulating properties. After recognizing this effect, we increased the ratings by cutting more fine grooves into the battens surface. Since Holz100 is 100% pure wood, its inhabitants need not worry about toxic fumes. With its singular natural component combined with structural capacities akin to a firewall, it is the ultimate fire-resistant building system.
Wood is a warmth shield and even after hours of external flame testing and heat, its innermost is quite unchanged. This is incredibly important for safety reasons, particularly in large buildings. Many fires expand faster via heat than flames. Even if this sounds incredible, it has been proven that engineered wood is safer than concrete.
While flame-testing a Holz100 wall element, the hottest spot on the cold side after 90 minutes was maximal only +1.8 degrees Celsius higher than the temperature taken in the start of the test.
While flame testing reinforced concrete walls, the cold side of the wall (which was not directly exposed to the flame) was showing in some areas a +400 degrees Celsius temperature rise after only 30 minutes. This happens because the reinforcement iron inside the concrete turns glowing hot and conducts the heat rapidly throughout the whole wall element.
This means six times safer than the usual reinforced concrete or brick walls offer. The ceiling ratings are even better.
Why? Wood burns well when it is thin and in contact with plenty of air. However, a thick block of wood hardly burns at all. It chars fairly slowly, approximately 0.5-0.7mm per minute. In a Holz100 house, every ceiling, wall and floor is a thick, fire-resistant block of wood that serves as firewalls. The European standard in high-tech woodblock and frame buildings (with normal, average wall, ceiling and roof thicknesses) is maximal F30. This means that the building element resists a flame at 1,000 degrees Celsius for 30 minutes. Holz100 elements reached top ratings of up to F180!
To stay within the framework of this book, I have only mentioned some short and simple descriptions for the layperson. Scientific tests, publications and building certifications were undertaken at several different universities and institutes in Austria, Germany, Norway, Japan and the USA and are available through the Erwin Thoma Research Centre.
Because the layers are stacked crisscross, the Holz100 element is solid. It can be rendered, tiled, or painted. The advantages of building with purely natural, untreated wood are mainly in the following areas:
1. Fire safety 2. Warmth and noise insulation 3. Air conditioning 4. Cooling down time 5. Radiation shielding 6. Earthquake safety |
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