German Passive House

I was lucky enough to go to a Peak Oil conference last year with my friend David. (See the Community Solutions website for downloadable presentations)  This conference focused on a "Plan C" for preparing for peak oil and with respect to global climate change and covered these four areas: Food, Housing, Energy and Transportation.

In the Housing stream, I was introduced to the German Passive House standard through a presentation by Katrin Klingenberg.  This is the strictest, most efficient house design that mandates a very low energy use per square meter of living space.  One achieves this by using thick double-wall construction with no thermal bridging, solar south facing windows and thermal mass to absorb energy.  They employ an efficient heat recovery ventilator and no furnace or air conditioner.



Wall design is an impressive aspect of a passive house.  It is built up like a gore-tex jacket - in layers providing some breathability.  The layers go from most-breathable to least from out to in, but no plastic sheathing is used.  Instead, one or two layers of OSB is used on the inside, taped seams.  A wall cavity of at least 12 inches is filled with insulation (foam, denim, batts, etc) then another layer of OSB or plywood, an air channel and some exterior wood cladding.

Windows are ultra high efficient, and properly sized for the house.  One highly recommended source for windows is Thermotech in Ottawa.

If you're interested in building a passive house, contact me and I'll put you in touch with Malcolm Isaacs, an architect based in Wakefield with a wealth of knowledge and experience with PH.

Passive House examples:
Saskatoon Passive House (pdf)
Katerin's Illinois PH (pdf)
Time lapse video of a house going up (youtube) The house tests at 0.44 ach (air exchanges per minute).  The "Energy Star" rate is 2.5.
Green Building Advisor (good site)