WEINMANN: "But it must have called for a slightly different kind of planning?"
Müller: "Starting with how you deal with the space. When building passive houses, the aim must be to be conservative with space. I went up to Thorsten Linke from WEINMANN at the trade fair in Verona and told him that we wanted to build Europe's smallest, most flexible and most effective timber house factory. He was slightly surprised."
WEINMANN: "And did you achieve it?"
Müller: "Absolutely. We critically evaluated every last centimeter of space, reduced the space around the machines, positioned production units closer together and minimized the loading bays and the working and transport distances. All in all, these measures enabled us to reduce the volume of the production hall by more than 70 percent. Incidentally, we also optimized our workflow, so that we now have an exemplary, ultra-compact production process.
WEINMANN: "And it's mainly automated?"
Müller: "We produce on a highly automated WEINMANN compact system and insulate using a big bale system from Isocell. This is state of the art technology that has helped us to increase our capacity seven-fold. I anticipate a significant reduction in production costs. The new technology starts to pay off above 50 houses per year, but we are aiming for considerably higher volumes than that.
WEINMANN: "Does the machinery in your factory concept contribute to the heating?"
Müller: The waste heat from the machines plays a subordinate role. We use the waste heat from the vacuum suction and machine control compressor for heating. It generates around 18 kW. That is more than sufficient for our underfloor heating."
WEINMANN: "But is that only because the building structure is of similar high quality?"
Müller: "Certainly. We developed high quality yet cost-effective wall and roof elements and optimi-zed openings such as the factory gates. This means that with a total area of 5000 m2 and an excel-lent LW value of 0.5, we have an energy requirement of 57,000 kWh. This works out at a relatively economical 550 Euro/m2...
WEINAMNN: "It sounds like a model that should be replicated...
Müller: We've been thinking exactly the same thing. And we've been looking at marketing our timber house factory as a successful model for other timber construction companies. WEINMANN and Isocell would be on board, so the customer would get a turnkey passive timber house plant including training for their employees, with us as a possible joint venture partner (if the two parties wanted to work together). This would give us a way into countries that are only just on the threshold of energy-optimized building, with our state of the art passive house construction."
WEINMANN: "Mr. Müller, thank you for talking to us."