Year: 2014

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The Passivhaus Standard is the world’s foremost standard for energy efficient and comfortable buildings. Buildings certified to the Passivhaus Standard are often more energy efficient than conventional buildings by a factor of 10. In the face of climate change, architecture in the anthropocene must change. Buildings need to consume radically less energy to emit radically less CO2.

Buildings certified to the Passivhaus Standard are also incredibly successful at meeting design predictions. The performance gap is eliminated. And passivhaus buildings maintain their performance over time. The rigorous integrated design and quality assurance requirements of certification process for the Passivhaus Standard ensure this.

And yet there are many misunderstandings about what the Passivhaus Standard is. In some cases it gets confused with other aspirations. In other cases the standard gets accused of not being one thing or another, regardless of what it actually is! There is even a sense of the ‘tall poppy syndrome’ at play within the sustainable / green building community sometimes.

This blog will help clear up some of the common misconceptions around the Passivhaus Standard.

016 What the Passivhaus Standard is Not
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This blog post is a review of “PHPP Illustrated: A Designer’s Companion to the Passive House Planning Package” published in October 2014. Sarah Lewis, architect and Certified European Passivhaus Designer wrote this delightful and chunky volume.

The Passive House Planning Package (PHPP) can seem like a monster spreadsheet at 30+ worksheets (tabs). And the last thing most architects would consider a ‘design tool’. However, once architects understand passivhaus and start to design passivhaus buildings, they quickly realise that the passivhaus spreadsheet PHPP is an essential element of the design process. For without the PHPP there would be no passivhaus buildings as Dr Wolfgang Feist writes in the foreword:

Behind the success of the [Passivhaus] Standard lies the Passive House Planning Package (PHPP), the Passive House energy balance and design tool. A tool of proven accuracy and demonstrated reliability in predicting building energy consumption…

The next step up is to gain enough understanding and fluency with the PHPP to fully integrate it as a passivhaus design tool. And that is where the strength of this book lies for passivhaus architects.

Sarah guides the reader towards fluency with the passivhaus spreadsheet PHPP using three key tools throughout the book:

  • Common mistakes
  • Drawings and annotated screenshots
  • “The Flow Chart” (as seen on the cover)

Camden Passivhaus, the first certified passivhaus building in London UK, is used throughout the book to give real-world context each step of the way. It is also a seminal bere:architects passivhaus project and one that Sarah worked on previously while as a Director of the practice.

An unfamiliar tool can appear as an obstacle to design. Once understood and put into practice it can powerfully inform and support design decision making.

015 Passivhaus Spreadsheet PHPP Design Tool
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Climate change is one of the biggest threats we face today, as I wrote in a previous blog about ‘Zero-Carbon Buildings’. Clearly we need to reduce CO2 emissions globally to zero, or to less than zero, to address climate change. We need to approach this in two ways: radical energy efficiency to reduce demand and de-carbonisation of energy generation, in other words, a massive scaling-up of renewable energy generation.*

In some situations these two approaches are going to manifest as ‘Zero-Carbon Buildings’ or ‘Net-Zero Energy Buildings’. Even though there are many reasons why this is the wrong target (and if you read the comments you’ll find there are more than just the 9 reasons I wrote about.)

What then, is the best approach to achieving these notional targets of ‘Zero-Carbon Buildings’ or ‘Net-Zero Energy Buildings’?

Passivhaus First is the best approach and I explore why in this blog.

014 Zero Carbon Buidings Passivhaus First
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As the EU moves towards ‘Near Zero Energy Buildings‘ and the UK moves towards implementing this by requiring ‘Zero Carbon Buildings’, understanding the Passivhaus Standard as one reliable route towards delivering ‘Zero Carbon Buildings’ is vital.

Passivhaus is known as the world’s leading building energy efficiency standard. It is also a comfort standard with stringent indoor thermal comfort and ventilation requirements. The majority of industry discussion around passivhaus focuses on the technical details and energy benchmarks required to meet the standard. While this is understandable as we come to grips with the challenges of delivering buildings to such a high standard, there is less attention paid to the benefits delivered by the standard and wider aspects of the passivhaus design process.

11 Passivhaus Pointers
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This blog post is a review of “Passive Houses: Energy Efficient Homes” published in March 2012. Chris van Uffelen, who compiled this monograph, is a prolific author with over 50 architecture and design related titles to his name. The book surveys 56 single-family energy efficient homes from around the world that collectively

showcase the great variety of exciting and at the same time sustainable architectural solutions.

I first heard of this book when Murray Durbin mentioned it during his interview on the Home Style Green podcast. Murray and Lee Ann Durbin had found this book to be a particular inspiration when setting out to design their own residential Passive House in Auckland, New Zealand. They have written extensively about the process and you can see pictures of the completed residential Passive House on their blog.

It is a well-deserved recommendation. This book covers an enormous geographic and climatic range, and it showcases a wide variety of architectural styles and approaches to energy efficient homes.

013 Residential Passive House Design

“Passive Houses: Energy Efficient Homes” includes houses from the USA, Canada, England, Wales, Germany (as you would expect!), Austria, Switzerland, several Scandinavian countries, Australia, China, Japan and more. The author didn’t limit the choice to only certified residential Passive Houses, but instead selected inspirational energy efficient homes demonstrating a whole range of standards, all employing ‘passive’ techniques of one sort or another.

Out of the 56 homes showcased, at least 18 are certified to the European Passive House Standard and 6 to the Swiss Minergie Standard, which is very similar. Many examples meet a different standard such as the Califorina Green Building Standards Code, KfW40 (a German low energy standard), Energy Star and the UK’s Code for Sustainable Homes Code 6. There are also some certified to multiple complimentary standards. For example the Prescott Passive House in Kansas City, USA, is Passive House certified and also LEED Platinum.

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