The Passive House approach takes simple principles combined together to achieve the ultimate efficiency in your home.
The Lookout, custom Passive House.
Passive Design Principles
The key goal of a Passive House is to minimize heat loss by optimizing the thermal performance of the building envelope. What does this mean?
The building envelope is the shell or skin of your home. Heat is lost through the skin, just like us. We reduce the heat loss in your home, the same way we do for humans:
- Super – insulate: wear a really thick sweater. Insulation levels in a passive house are 2 – 3 times higher than a standard new home.
- Make it airtight: add a wind jacket over your sweater. Up to 50% of heat loss in standard homes come from air leakage.
- Eliminate thermal bridges: tuck your mitts into your jacket. Thermal bridges are typically found where two materials join, like the roof joining the wall. We need to cover any cold joints with insulation.
- Design for Passive: sit in the sun, sheltered from the wind on a cold day or sit in the shade and find a cool breeze on a hot day. We use heat from the sun during the winter and shading and open windows to help stay cool in the summer in your Passive House.
By doing this we can drastically reduce the heat lost through the skin of your home. Next, we specify high performance mechanical equipment to do the rest. Hot water, ventilation and heating/cooling equipment are right size and chosen for their high efficiency.
Integrating the Passive House principles into the design process is How We Work.
A conventional heating system is not needed in a Passive House. This decreases energy bills, saves space and reduces construction costs. These savings are invested in building envelope upgrades.
Through our research and development and experience in the field, we have developed Passive House solutions specifically designed for cold climates in North America. We know from our 100+ projects that the net increase cost of building our design adds from 0-10% to the total construction budget. The bottom line is that if you can afford to build a house, you can afford a passive house.
How have we achieved this?
- First, we optimize the design. 50% of energy saved in a Passive House is achieved with smart design strategies. This is the most cost-effective energy saver.
- We use locally available materials the trades are familiar with put together in a new way that makes a passive House.
- We make buildable designs so you can work with any good builder, as long as they are willing to learn new methods
- Our Passive House building methods are designed to optimize cost. We have completed extensive research and product development to ensure we use the highest value solutions.
If you can afford to build a new house you can afford to build one of our Passive House designs.