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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Is passivhaus a niche pursuit for ‘energy geeks’ and ‘treehuggers’? It may have started that way but it is rapidly gaining momentum in the UK and becoming highly relevant to the mainstream construction industry.

My friend Darren Lester, the founder of SpecifiedBy, invited me to write a guest blog for his site. (If you haven’t discovered it yet, SpecifiedBy is an incredibly useful resource, the online Building Regulations section have been a life saver for me!) The readers of his blog are from a broad spectrum of the UK construction industry, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to discuss three reasons why passivhaus is highly relevant to the mainstream UK construction industry.

The reasons I discuss are:

  • Climate Change
  • EU legislation
  • Making a difference

Please visit the SpecifiedBy.com blog and have a read.

And please share the blog with friends, colleagues and acquaintances in the UK construction industry so they can learn why passivhaus is relevant to them.

Thank you!

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