Well, if you ask me, I would not try heating with electricity...that really costs!
Solar for warm water is OK, I would never consider it as singular solution though...that is bound to cause problems sooner or later. We have gas heating and use solar to help keep the warm water cost low. In summer we might be able to produce a large percentage of our warm water with solar power so the heating can remain mostly idle. The most important bit is the warm-water storage tank in the cellar that stores the sun-generated hot water for when it's needed. The expensive stuff in our house is the stuff that is supposed to stop too much warmth from escaping (and in summer too much heat getting in).
Our walls are pretty well wrapped in Styrodur (on top of the energy efficient bricks), the cellar is wrapped in a special kind of Styrodur that prevents too much cold from the earth seeping in, especially through the floor.
The windows all have triple glazing, the only problem with that is that in a cold winter the outer galss can freeze over because too little warth is transmitted from the inside of the building...but if we close the blinds (what is rolläden in english???) at night that won't happen.
We have floor-heating everywhere (including the cellar) which should also help keep us comfortable and in the lounge we have a place where we can connect a wood-stove. We have chosen this model
http://www.haassohn.com/ProductDetai...?id=17&catId=1 because it has a nice 180° window so that we can watch the flames dance from the dining area and also from the couch. Putting a wood-stove in an all-but airtight house is a bit of a problem, but we managed to get around that be having a chimney with an extra channel for fresh air (pulled in from outside), meaning that it does not use much air from inside the house. We'll use the wood-stove for autumn and spring when it's not really worthwhile to fire up the floor-heating.
Heart and soul of our setup is the fresh-air-system. It's a rather complicated Setup from Vaillant that works as follows:
In the bathrooms, kitchen and the heater room in the cellar air is drawn out through openingsin the ceiling. It is then drawn through a series of pipes under the floors and in the walls to the main unit in the cellar. In this device there is a radiator that get's warmed be the outgoing air which leaves the building through a passthorugh in the cellar wall. The other end of the system sucks in fresh air from outside, filters it (two filters, one for bigger particles and one for small stuff like pollen) and leads it through the radiator where it gets warmed up and then blown in through floor vents in the living and sleeping quarters and the other cellar rooms. All doors are slightly open at the bottom to create an unhindered airflow through the entire building. Air is exchanged constantly but slowly and the loss of warmth should be fairly small. That takes care of several problems, most of all the problem of damp and mold that are big issues in well-isolated buildings.
A nifty detail of the system we'll get (Vaillant Recovair) is that it comes with a so-called summer-bypass that makes sure that the radiator gets bypassed in summer where you don't want the house to overheat. As soon as the system detects that the outside temperature is lower than the inside (in summer) it completely bypasses the radiator and cools the inside of the house down, mostly over night when it cools down a bit in the summer months. I could really use something like that right now since it's terribly hot in here right now and as soon as I open the windows I get attacked by a large variety of bugs that think I taste delicious...
Ok, now I'll stop with the boring details...at least for now...
