More Best Practices
More and more frequently while speaking with building professionals, reading industry literature, and viewing product marketing materials, I am struck by how passive houses are held up as the pinnacle of residential construction—something for other homes to aspire to.
This is great to see, yet there tends to be a “but” following that statement. This hesitation comes from the perception of a passive house as necessarily containing superthick walls, a complicated origami of control layers, small windows, high-carbon materials, and—as a result—additional and unnecessary costs. And all of this is for the purpose of saving the last possible few Btus of operational energy.
At my firm, Birdsmouth Design-Build in Portland, Ore., we have been building certified passive houses for almost 10 years. This type of building strikes our team as the best science-based approach to delivering high-quality and environmentally responsible buildings that our industry has come up with to date. I have seen firsthand how the passive house approach has evolved over time, and in my opinion, today there is little daylight between any high-quality home and a passive house.
When I hear the aforementioned hesitation, it occurs to me that a lot of folks are stuck in an outdated understanding of a passive house. In North America, we’re now on what I’m calling “version 3.0” of the passive house building methodology. It’s time for our industry to shake the old image and move toward this latest version.
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3 Comments
Josh,
Great article. A comprehensive and fair history. The sort of definitive account I'll keep to re-read. It's been really heartening to see Passive House evolve, when it looked for a while like the initial rigidity would lead it into a dead end.
Thanks for the informative article.
A few questions...
If you're getting the certification money back and then some through local incentive programs, I'm curious where the local incentive program funds come from?
If your last five homes have been certified to the Phius standard, and at this point it's become just building for your staff, is it still the best use of $4000 per home to continue the certification process? (Especially if the incentives are paid by local tax revenue?)
I bet Josh will be around to reply to you soon, and I'm not speaking for him, but I will share that a lot of the professionals I speak to who continue to pursue certification long after they've proven their ability to design and build such a house, believe that third-party verification is a good thing for the industry and for homeowners.
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