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In the olden days yonder, the practice of making a log cabin as you main home was common, especially in Sweden and the Nordic Countries. This practice was also exported, emigration, to other countries especially the USA where a lot of old log cabins still exist today.
The main reason for this type of use was, naturally, the plenty of the material - trees. Not only were the trees a sustainable source of cheap building materials but also
harbored the essence of life, namely food!
Other countries with a high tree count also adopted the log cabin build approach and they still do today, Canada is especially good at keeping the traditional log cabin method up to scratch and alive.
Old Vs New
The old style log cabin relied on wood that was cut down, piled (removal of sap) and then hand carved into properly fitting pieces for the walls. As the buildings were in retrospect quite small (to begin with) the main insulator was the wood itself.
Wood can be measured for their thermal values in two ways, one, as a straight wood piece where lamba would be in the region of 0.37 to 0.40. Or two, would be using the ever more popular bio mass system which gives a higher value BUT the cabin has to be kept at a constant temperature (bio mass needs a given centigrade to become as efficient as possible). Today most liveable log cabins use a secondary insulator between the exterior log cabin wall and the interior log cabin finish.
The old cabins also didn’t have access to the high performance glass systems and doors that we today have. The olden cabins employed a single sheet of glass for their windows and that was that. It was not known, then, that doubling (or trebling) of the glass panels (with or without an Argon gas insulator) could yield a greater thermal efficiency. The reason for this is simple, the main source of heat was a stow that burned timber as its main fuel, and this timber came from the immediate forest which there was plenty off. Only lately has there been a need for higher thermal efficiency as electricity and oil became the main heating source!
We have selected a few images for you below.
Are you a log cabin company? If so we will soon open a few pages with ‘Log Cabin Home Designs’ and this will be linked back to your site. If you would like to be included please email us at:
homedesigns@swedishlogcabins.info.
Any image that we use is still linked to the web site who so kindly let us use them! So if you want to see the originals please click on the images!
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