Passive House

What is a passive house?

A passive home is an extremely comfortable, healthy, economical, and sustainable home, designed and constructed to use up to 90% less energy than a traditional home. What’s more, these efficiency gains aren’t due to some constrained design approach. Passive homes are elegant, comfortable living spaces that can be designed to meet your lifestyle, aesthetic tastes, and stylistic preferences.

Up to 90% reduction in energy use?

Passive homes are very well-insulated and virtually air-tight, which greatly minimizes the loss of heat. This means no furnace (you read that right) and extreme energy efficiency. All of the heating in a typical passive home can be met by a single 1000-watt heater. Heat from people, lights, appliances and the sun does the rest.

And in the hotter months, the home stays delightfully cool without the need for air conditioning. Shading and well-planned window orientation helps to keep the house at a comfortable temperature.

An energy recovery ventilator provides a constant, balanced fresh air supply. The result is an impressive system that not only saves up to 90% of space heating costs, but also provides healthy indoor air quality.

Unlike “point accumulation” green building standards, Passive home certification is based on actual performance results that require the that the home uses less than 1.4kWh per square foot for annual heating demand and total annual source energy cannot exceed 11kWh per square foot. In addition the building shell must be airtight with less than 0.6 air changes per hour at 50 pascals.

Some of the features that make all of this possible include:

• High performance triple-glazed windows and doors
• Super-insulation
• An airtight building envelope
• Greatly reduced thermal bridging (which normally allows hot or cold air to travel through walls)
• Energy and heat recovery ventilation
• Optimized passive-solar and internal heat gains

View our Passive Brochure to learn more details about passive homes.

Talk to us about building your custom-designed passive house:
Sean Misskelley, Director of Construction
Tel 650.322.7069 x30