- ultra-efficient insulation (including floors and ceilings)
- triple-glazed windows with selective coating (will let solar heat inside but won’t leak the heat outside)
- specially selected building materials
Theoretically, no active heating system is necessary providing that the inhabitants will move around, prepare meals, do chores etc. Human body and his/her everyday activities constantly emit heat.
The annual heating demand of a passive house is 15kWh per sq. metre! For a traditional building it will be in the region of 100 to 150kWh. For houses built by cowboy builders, up to 300kWh. So, living in a passive house would save you 90 per cent or more off your heating bill. If we cut a heating bill of £500 per season down to £50 per season there’s not much space for talking about fuel poverty in the UK.
Apart from the specified annual heating demand level, a house to be officially classified as passive, should have the total energy consumption (heating, water, electricity etc) of less than 120 kWh per sq. metre; and leak less than 0.6 of its air volume per hour.
The thing is that building a passive house is not massively expensive. You can build one from tyres and earthbags; by rethinking the whole approach, you can even build a passive wooden frame house. The most expensive part of your passive house will be the green clever windows and the ventilation system. Everything else is simply packing and caulking the green home properly and positioning it correctly according to the four quarters so that no heat leaks to the outside.
So, a reality or not? Definitely a reality – in continental Europe (mainly Germany, Austria and Switzerland) they build a couple of thousands new passive houses every year. The UK and the States are lagging back, however, the potential is there and the interest is there. The problem with passive houses in the UK is that when we really go serious about building them, there will be EU pen pushers coming across the channel and telling us that our houses don’t meet the stringent EU standards.
Pic by Dru Bloomfield
Good blog.
Passive House design is most certainly a reality. Not only that but it should not cost a crazy amount per square meter. It can be constructed using any building material. It just a matter of physics and the skill to deliver it.
Thank you for posting your positive blog on Passive House.
I wonder what you mean by UK passive houses not meeting EU standards because such houses are built in Germany, Austria and Sweden, and they are all members of EU. If they can do it and still meet building regulation standards, so can Britons.
Yeah, I mean that we sometimes tend to do things differently and when we do, someone always comes across the channel and says “tut-tut” 🙂 Saying that UK houses don’t meet some of the standards, I don’t mean that our houses are worse than their – it’s just that they’re slightly different.