The Passive House approach empowers us to build better. It creates durable, resilient buildings that slash heating energy use by as much as 90% and dramatically reduce operational carbon emissions. Passive House design tools and methods make these energy performance gains both cost-effective and predictable. You know what performance to expect with a certified Passive House. Most importantly, Passive House buildings create healthy, comfortable, and quiet interior environments, full of clean, filtered fresh air.
Since Passive Homes deliver filtered, pure air through well-circulated ventilation systems, they actively kick out harmful pollutants and ensure a steady flow of revitalising air to those inside. With meticulous designing, our Passive House construction prevents moisture issues, keeping dangerous mold and mildew at bay.
No matter who you are, being comfortable makes you happy, so this at the top of this list of benefits for a passive home. Delivering consistent room and surface temperatures, along with the noise canceling walls through proper insulation, to the clean fresh air from your filtered ventilation your home will put you in a state of zen every time you step inside.
Living in a Passive House, meticulously built for peace CcZ and quiet, fosters a deep sense of calmness, security, z and contentment. This tranquil environment promotes happiness, enhancing your overall emotional well-being and quality of life.
A dust-free home offers a refreshing sanctuary where you can breathe easily, enjoy cleaner surroundings, and reduce allergies. It means less cleaning and more time for relaxation, creating a comfortable and stress-free living environment.
Who wants creepy crawlies infiltrating their home? These creatures should remain outside in their natural habitat. Passive House construction’s airtight design acts as a barrier, preventing such intrusions by all things unwelcome.
A Passive House, with its robust construction, offers —N-L exceptional weather resistance. This means you can confidently weather storms, extreme temperatures, and harsh conditions while staying comfortably protected inside. Your home becomes a reliable shelter, enhancing your peace of mind.
A Passive House embodies sustainability by significantly reducing energy consumption. This not only benefits the environment but also lowers utility costs, saving you money in the long run. It’s an eco-conscious choice that supports a greener future and your financial well-being.
Passive house isn’t just a trend, these homes have been designed through extensive research since 1988. The definitive criteria for a Passive House are set by the Passive House Institute under the direction of Dr. Wolfgang Feist who built the first ever passive home.
Could you imagine living in Melbourne and never having to use heating OR cooling? That’s possible when your home stays at a constant temperature all year round. Combine that with solar to cover all your lighting and appliances and your on your way to the epitome of energy efficiency in a home!
Collaboration is a must. Building a passive home is great achievement but its not a journey you want to be taking alone. By surrounding yourself with like minded people that are passionate about their profession, who take meticulous care in their work and pride themselves in building better, you will create anything you envision.
Building to a passive standard is like making a long-term investment in your home’s comfort, efficiency, and value. As energy costs continue to rise and environmental concerns grow, a passive home’s features—like high-quality insulation, airtight construction, and optimised natural lighting—become even more valuable.
Passive House applies to all building types and can fit any architectural style. (Don’t be fooled by the “house” in the name…in the german Passivhaus, the “haus” connotes “building”.) A Passive House can be an apartment block, a school, a museum, a firehouse, a retail store, a hospital, an industrial facility, a high-rise office tower…pretty much any building type you can imagine.
The Passive House approach is perfect for larger buildings because they have inherently more efficient geometries: as a form gets larger, the ratio of its surface area to its volume decreases. For a larger building, that means that the ratio of its envelope (walls, roof, and foundation) to its interior (the spaces that need to be thermally conditioned) decreases. Because Passive House is an envelope-first approach to high performance building, this lower ratio of envelope to interior space makes it easier to achieve Passive House performance in larger buildings.
Unlike checklist-based green building certifications with their long lists of credits covering a wide range of sustainability measures (eg. LEED® credits for bike racks and native plants), Passive House brings a laser-like focus to building energy performance and quality, specifically to three metrics: thermal energy demand (or load), total energy demand, and building airtightness.
Passive House certification requires buildings to use very little energy for heating or cooling, measured either in annual demand or peak load. Lower energy consumption and peak load reduce operational carbon emissions.
Passive House certification requires buildings to use very little total energy for overall building operations (heating, cooling, plug loads, lighting, appliances, etc.). Lower energy consumption and peak load reduce operational carbon emissions.
To ensure building durability, verify construction quality, and boost energy performance, Passive House buildings must have high levels of airtightness, as measured by blower door testing. This airtightness, combined with high-quality ventilation, delivers superior indoor air quality.
Passive house insulation is crucial.
A thermal bridge is any building element that allows heat or cool to bypass a building’s thermal barrier. It’s like a hidden thief of thermal energy, undermining performance and durability. For example: a concrete floor that continues from inside to outside; a poor window frame; or a steel beam that penetrates an exterior wall. We eliminate thermal bridges by introducing thermal breaks into those assemblies—gaps or insulative elements that stop the flow of thermal energy through an assembly.
A Passive House building’s airtight layer is like a windbreaker, stopping air from penetrating to the inside. Establishing this unbroken air barrier is central to Passive House performance and durability. In design, we do the “red pencil test” to check that an air barrier line can be drawn around each cross-section of the building without the pencil ever leaving the paper. In the field, this air barrier is built through a combination of sheet membranes, fluid-applied membranes, tapes, and sealants that transition without interruption between components of the building envelope. Airtightness is verified with a blower door test, a key measure of performance and construction quality.
With each window and door opening we make in a Passive House building, we are essentially punching a hole through an advanced wall assembly and its airtight, weather-resistant, and insulative layers. So, the performance of the windows and doors that go into those holes, and how well we tie them into the surrounding wall assembly, is mission-critical to maintaining the integrity of the Passive House building envelope.
The delivery of filtered fresh air with heat recovery helps make Passive House buildings havens of clean air and energy efficiency. HRVs (heat recovery ventilators) and ERVs (energy recovery ventilators) are “balanced ventilation” components that supply a continuous stream of fresh air to living spaces while simultaneously extracting stale air, odors, and indoor pollutants from kitchens and bathrooms. Inside these devices, a heat exchanger—a honeycomb of straws that creates a very large surface area between air streams—allows heat energy in the outgoing air to passively transfer to and warm the incoming air without the two airstreams ever mixing. (In the summertime, the opposite happens, with cool outgoing air cooling the incoming air.) Filters in the unit remove pollen and pollutants, with pre-filters available to protect indoor air from intense outdoor pollution events.
While the “free” heat from solar gain may be a hot commodity in Passive House design, it must be managed with good shading to avoid too much heat gain during warm seasons. Deciduous trees are great for this, with their bare branches in winter and shade-providing leaves in summer. Architectural elements like overhangs can also play a role. So too, can window shades and screens, especially ones located at the exterior of the building.
Building orientation and form are fundamental design decisions that set the stage for how easy or difficult it will be for a building to achieve Passive House performance.
Natural daylighting and passive solar heat gain can provide energy “freebies” to Passive House buildings.
To ensure building durability, Passive House designers study how heat and moisture will behave in building assemblies in a given climate, and create designs that manage that behavior to avoid condensation risk and bulk water intrusion.
Because Passive House buildings dramatically reduce heating energy use, another source of energy consumption—domestic hot water—becomes a more conspicuous part of overall energy consumption. Energy-efficient water heating combined with efficient water distribution reduces this slice of the energy consumption pie.