HVAC engineering · Estonia · Milan · Spain
Northern Europe was built to keep heat in.
That is now a design problem.
Your national codes already say so. German law caps how long a dwelling may sit above 25 to 27 °C. Dutch law has capped summer overheating in new homes since 2021. Danish regulations limit the hours above 26 °C.
None of that is new. What is new is that the buildings now fail those limits, and the people who signed them find out on site.
EU household cooling energy
×2
Doubled between 2018 and 2024, from 40.5 to 80.4 thousand TJ.1
German limit, GEG §14
10%
Maximum share of occupancy time above 25 to 27 °C, by climate region.2
Dutch TOjuli limit
1.20
Mandatory for new dwellings without active cooling since January 2021.3
Under engineering contract
4,000+
Dwellings we are currently engineering, in a climate that is already there.
We are euroener. We design ventilation, heating, cooling and hot water as one system, for residential construction in Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium.
This is not a forecast. It has been measured.
Eleven Copenhagen apartments were monitored through the summer of 2023. Several went past the 26 °C comfort limit on the hottest days of June. The researchers concluded that natural ventilation alone will not hold the line in most urban and suburban apartments.4
In Helsinki, an apartment block built after 2012 accumulates roughly 2,500 degree-hours above 27 °C in an average year. During the 2018 heatwave it reached 35 °C indoors. That is a new building, well insulated, doing exactly what it was designed to do.5
Across the EU, household energy for space cooling doubled in six years, from 40.5 thousand TJ in 2018 to 80.4 in 2024. That is not southern Europe buying more air conditioning. Southern Europe already had it.1
Public-health monitoring attributed an estimated 62,775 deaths across Europe to the heat of summer 2024, with Germany among the three highest counts. That is the reason overheating has stopped being a comfort question and become a regulatory one.6
A well-insulated envelope is a very good thermos. Nobody asked what happens when the heat is already inside it.
Three questions worth answering before you sign
Not a sales pitch. If your answers are good, you do not need us and we would rather you knew that now.
01
What does your design actually do at 33 °C outside, on the top floor, in the unit with the west-facing glazing?
Do you know that number, or is it an assumption inherited from the person who drew the façade? The compliance calculation and the real temperature in that specific flat are not the same document.
02
If the answer is "we will add cooling later", what does later cost?
Retrofitting cooling into a finished building means shafts that were never sized for it, terraces filling with equipment, and a per-dwelling figure nobody put in the pro forma. It is normally an order of magnitude above designing it in.
03
Who sized your plant, and did they earn a commission on the equipment they specified?
This is the uncomfortable one. It is also the one that most reliably explains an oversized plant room and a maintenance contract you cannot get out of.
The building you are designing this year will still be standing in 2050. The cooling either goes in now, at design cost, or later, at retrofit cost. There is no third option, and the decision is being made this month, with or without us.
What we do
HVAC engineering for residential construction. Ventilation, heating, cooling and domestic hot water, designed as one system instead of four.
Engineering
The design is ours and we sign it, to your national code.
Re-engineering
The design is someone else's and it has to be corrected, adapted or partly rebuilt without throwing away what already works.
Second opinion
One project, one review, before it is signed. If you are spending millions on plant, a second reading costs very little by comparison. If we find nothing, we will tell you that too.
One system, not four
For certified passive-house dwellings we developed Passivtermia, our registered trade name: a centralised thermal unit that produces ventilation, heating, cooling and hot water from a single machine. On site the installer connects five pipes and one electrical supply.
One centralised unit
Five pipes and one electrical supply on site. Four trades, four suppliers and four warranties become one.
Four separate systems mean four sets of plant, four maintenance contracts and four people to blame when the flat is warm in July.
Work that used to take one or two months per staircase now takes a morning.
We have since built two further variants of the same idea for other residential typologies, and we have taken the method well outside housing. One recent job was the thermal design for a crane operating inside a steel mill.
The physics does not change. Only the constraints do.
Where the experience comes from
More than 4,000 dwellings are currently under engineering contract with us in Spain, across Madrid, Zaragoza, Valencia, Alicante and other cities.
COP 6.3
On a hospital we designed, thermal plant performance was doubled to a coefficient of performance of 6.3. That figure was certified by Bureau Veritas, not by us.
43.7%
Share of all Passivhaus-certified floor area in Spain held by Grupo Lobe, our residential client, with 7 % in Europe and 5.1 % worldwide. Their published figures, not ours. Passivtermia is the system inside those homes.
What the client publishes on their own account
Grupo Lobe describes Passivtermia by name on their official LinkedIn: centralised production with communal air-source plant, clean hydronics and aerolic conditioning working on exergy. Up to 55 % less energy than a conventional installation, central plant rated beyond thirty years, and six developments already handed over: Esparta, Sinfonía, Aqua de Quart, Aqua Mare, Vía Nova and Aqua Brisa.
“an innovation that no other developer is currently putting into new build”
Their words, their buildings, their figures, translated from the Spanish original. Passivtermia is our system and our name for it: a trade name granted in full by the Spanish Patent and Trademark Office in December 2024, with no opposition filed. Read the post
Spain is a useful place to have learned this. Cooling there is not an afterthought bolted on at the end. It is the constraint the whole design is built around, and it has been for decades.
That is the experience we are bringing north, into buildings with far better envelopes than anything we design for at home.
Where we are, and why
The European hub is in Estonia, the design office in Milan and the construction engineering in Spain. Owned in equal halves by Spanish and Italian capital.
Estonia · European hub
Head office and the centre of gravity of the company. The same working hours as our clients, and a short direct flight from Copenhagen, Stockholm and Helsinki.
Milan · Design
Next to the largest concentration of HVAC equipment manufacturing in Europe. The design runs alongside the manufacturers who will build the equipment and the bodies that will have to certify it.
Spain · Residential construction
Where the engineering team sits and where the built work is. Four decades of housing, and the 4,000 dwellings currently on the drawing board.
Zaragoza connects directly to Milan, and Milan connects daily to almost every capital in Europe. In practice that means we can be standing on your site the day after you call.
You are probably thinking three things
So let us say them before you have to.
"A Spanish firm. What do they know about our climate?"
Fair. We know very little about your winter, and we do not sell winter. What we know is the summer you are moving towards, because we have been designing for it for four decades.
Your envelopes are far better than ours. That helps in January and works against you in July. We design to your national code, and we will tell you which clause we are designing to.
"They are small."
Yes. Deliberately, and we intend to stay that way.
What small buys you is that the engineer who signs the design is the person who answers your email, and that we cannot afford a single project we are not proud of.
"Who checks their work?"
The manufacturers who have to build the equipment and the bodies that have to certify it, before the design leaves the drawing board. That is the reason the Milan office exists.
The name
Euroener started as an internal joke: the euro treated as a unit of energy.
A system that performs beautifully on paper and cannot be paid for has not been engineered. It has been drawn.
Who we are not for
- We take no commission from manufacturers or installers. We have been offered it more than once.
- We do not accept every project. If we are not the right fit for yours, you will hear it in the first reply, without a long explanation.
- If you already have an engineer who answers with judgement and no conflict of interest, you do not need us. That is a good position to be in.
- We would rather have a clear no today than a polite maybe for six months. No is a complete answer and it costs us nothing.
Talk to us
Tell us what you are building and what is worrying you. Two lines is enough:
- What kind of building, and where.
- What the problem is. A design about to be signed, a summer temperature you cannot hold, a plant room that will not fit.
The first opinion is free. No sales call, no slide deck, nobody following you up. If the answer is that your project is fine as it stands, that is what you will read.
eu@euroener.euP.S. If you have read this far and still think your design is fine, it probably is. That is the cheapest answer we will ever give you and it is free. But if something nagged while you were reading, that doubt is a great deal more expensive kept quiet than said out loud.