PASSIVHAUS: Passive homes offer enormous energy savings through design standards and efficiency
The New York Times provides some insight into the utility of passive homes (or Passivhaus in German—where the “first Passivhaus buildings were built in Darmstadt, Germany, in 1990”), and how these super-efficient homes are changing how we live.
Passive homes are the antithesis to the inefficient, quickly built, and cookie-cutter behemoths constructed in America, and passive homes can reduce our carbon footprint, energy bills, and reliance on foreign/hostile energy sources. From the New York Times:
Architects in many countries, in attempts to meet new energy efficiency standards like the Leadership in Environmental and Energy Design standard in the United States, are designing homes with better insulation and high-efficiency appliances, as well as tapping into alternative sources of power, like solar panels and wind turbines.
The concept of the passive house, pioneered in this city of 140,000 outside Frankfurt, approaches the challenge from a different angle. Using ultrathick insulation and complex doors and windows, the architect engineers a home encased in an airtight shell, so that barely any heat escapes and barely any cold seeps in. That means a passive house can be warmed not only by the sun, but also by the heat from appliances and even from occupants’ bodies.
And in Germany, passive houses cost only about 5 to 7 percent more to build than conventional houses.
. . .
Inside, a passive home does have a slightly different gestalt from conventional houses, just as an electric car drives differently from its gas-using cousin. There is a kind of spaceship-like uniformity of air and temperature. The air from outside all goes through HEPA filters before entering the rooms. The cement floor of the basement isn’t cold. The walls and the air are basically the same temperature.
. . .
The houses may be too radical for those who treasure an experience like drinking hot chocolate in a cold kitchen. But not for others. “I grew up in a great old house that was always 10 degrees too cold, so I knew I wanted to make something different,” said Georg W. Zielke, who built his first passive house here, for his family, in 2003 and now designs no other kinds of buildings.
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
Hello!
Thanks so much for your great website and also for your article on Passive House. Great work!
Great to see Passive Houses making it big in the Times, but what they left out was any mention of the Passive House Institute US, see http://www.passivehouse.us! This organization has the United States only certified Passive House Planner, Katrin Klingenberg, who trained at the German P.H.Institute, and is responsible for training all certified Passive House Consultants in the US to date, and for certifying all Passive Houses built in the US. I will be Michigan’s first Passive House Consultant as soon as I finish my first Passive House project this coming year, which will be able to be a zero energy home as soon as we finish moving our renewable energy systems to the new house. The Passive House Standard works for commercial as well as residential projects, and you can even retrofit existing buildings per its guidelines! The standard is based on maximizing energy savings while minimizing upfront costs by eliminating conventional heating systems like furnaces and boilers. Unlike LEED certification, you are getting a guaranteed level of energy efficiency with a Passive House, which keeps paying you back into the forseeable future. You don’t buy a new car without a fuel efficiency rating, why should you buy a building without one? Passive Houses are the only buildings that are coming with the equivalent of an mpg tag, backed up by the P.H. Institute’s quality control program that is more than a decade old now. Check it out at http://www.passivehouse.us!
the passive house will be one of the building standards of the future. this kind of buildings will easily be able to get carbonneutral together with pv-solarpanels or shares of windmills or other invests in substainable energy. the energy we save, we don!t have to produce or waste !!
one sentence to the costs of passive houses.
a one or semi detached house in certified passivhouse will cost in germany almost 10%, in the main cases 15-20% more than a standard house.
if its a building with more than 8-10 dwellings, you rather can get it under 10%.
it depends on the quality of the passive house architecture,the place, the building is situated to the sun, the qualitiy of integral planning in the team, the quality of the products and the companies making it.
the item passive house is not saved !
everybody can give his house the name passive house. only a certified passive house shows, that the definitions of the passive house institute are kept.
more to this please see under http://www.passivehouseplus.eu/certification
the reason i was interested in the page was, that the red house on the right side of the picture, is one the first cerified passive houses we planned. it`s the town of aalen/germany and all buildings in the area had to be certified passive houses.
this was basic of the contract to buy the grounds. if you would have a look to our english homepage in work, http://www.herz-lang.de/ireland, you could see under references/passive house, nr. 15-20 all our houses of this area and under 17/18, specailly the red house of the right side.