Passive House Heating 101-Energy Efficie...

Passive Houses are so energy efficient, it often it takes mentioning a few times for the reality of this statement to sink in: “Passive Houses are built without central heating systems“. It’s so curious and novel and almost unbelievable, in this day and age where the greatest part of our monthly utility bill goes toward space conditioning. How this actually works is quite simple when compared to a thermos bottle, since a thermos is so well insulated the contents retain most of its heat, sidestepping the need to constantly produce new heat to keep the...

Passive House Fine Home Building Article...

For those of you that want a snap shot of what it means when someone says “Passive House Design“, this is the article to read. Authored by Jefferson Kolle, in the March edition, Fine Homebuilding did a great job featuring two new Passive House projects, one  in Massachusetts and one in Minnesota. The Minnesota project employed the use of other renewable resources, such as a photovoltaic system, to get the Passive House in a net-zero mode. Both of these projects are aesthetically beautiful homes. The article is really a superb summary of the Passive House...

Passive House Building Materials...

People often ask about and are surprised to find out that the building materials to build a super-energy efficient Passive House are the same as what may be used in a typical or traditional home. Tessa, our designer, wrote a little editorial on the subject: “Are the materials to build a Passive House the same as a traditional house?” Emphatically yes!  That is the beauty of the approach, it is open to developing technologies, but entirely achievable with common place American building materials.  The simple answer is we just end up using a bit more of those...

Passive House History...

In the last two weeks, I’ve had several folks ask me about the origins of the Passive House Standard. Rather than build a better mousetrap, I grabbed the text below from Wikipedia, reputed to be very accurate.* See full Wikipedia post. Passive House History The Passive House standard originated from a conversation in May 1988 between Professors Bo Adamson of Lund University, Sweden, and Wolfgang Feist of the Institut für Wohnen und Umwelt (Institute for Housing and the Environment ). Their concept was developed through a number of research projects , aided by...

Passive House New Construction...

This is a link to a short article in USA Today. It’s about a recently certified Passive House in Salt Lake City. Passive House design can take on many architectural styles to suit the varied tastes out there, (note the Portland Remodel post), this Salt Lake house embodies a clean simplicity that ‘feels’ good to look at. The homeowners started a project blog that is fun to look at, especially the performance numbers if you are into that sort of thing. One of the primary numbers Passive House nerds like to discuss is ‘how many ACH?’ which...

Passive House vs. passive solar house...

Unfortunately, the words Passive House often, incorrectly, evokes images of out-there home designs of the 70’s and 80’s… sporting Trombe Walls and double-pane windows that fill with styrofoam beads when the sun goes down. For clarity, there’s a Passive House and there’s a passive solar house (what I described above goes with the latter). A Passive House is designed and built to exacting standards, performance tested, then certified versus a passive solar house built to take advantage of the sunshine that we don’t have. Here we go, in a...

Passive House NW Regional Meeting...

Last Friday, three of us from The Artisans Group attended the first regional meeting of Passive House Northwest. (Randy Foster, Owner, Tessa Smith PH Consultant, and me Zeta Kelly, Marketing Director.) (If you are up on these standards, skip this note in italics: Passive House standards, out of Germany, are the most rigorous energy efficiency building standards in the industry today (not to be confused with a passive solar home). A home built to Passive House standards can be certified once the completed building performance is measured and verified. As a result of ...

Mike Reynolds-Authentic Architecture...

I’ve always been interested in folks who pursue the ‘unexpected’ and if it’s ‘functional’ all the better. I met Mike Reynolds, architect, sometime about 25 years ago. At the time, I was traveling around the U.S in the style of most motivated and insolvent young folks, one adventure to the next. I had always been interested in building science and nature, which can often times seem mutually exclusive. During that particular adventure, I was  interested in seeking out non-traditional residential buildings. That year, I met folks who lived...

Fuel Cells: The Bloom Box...

This is an interesting article on the next generation of de-centralized fuel cells… like much of technology, it won’t be long before we all have our own clean power sources generated right at home!… I hope. Christian Science Monitor. Click here to link to the original article. By Husna Haq Correspondent / February 22, 2010 It’s being hailed as the Holy Grail of clean energy: a refrigerator-sized personal power plant that produces energy cheaply and cleanly and may one day replace the traditional power grid....

Green Home Guide-USGBC...

The US Green Building Council recently launched GreenHomeGuide.com. For homeowners or potential homeowners (those seeking their next home) who are making the move to green, this site is a good clearinghouse for answering many questions, it’s also a great aide towards helping a homeowner to ask good questions. The site features exclusive content written by experienced working professionals from across the nation, many architects, designers and other industry folks. The first page opens up with a rolling set of relevant and provocative questions all pertaining to some...