Passive House-Letter to the Editor...

A few weeks ago John Dodge of the Olympian wrote a great article introducing the concepts of Passive House. I subsequently noticed a few comments on-line that prompted this ‘letter to the editor’ as a way to clarify a few points about the Passive House Standard. Dear Editor- It was strikingly dramatic for me to read John Dodge’s recent article about the Passive House movement, and even more poignant to consider that The Olympian’s readership is becoming more keenly aware of this amazing approach to energy efficient homes.  I am Tessa Smith, Certified...

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...

Best Whole-House Remodel Award...

The Olympia Master Builders graciously hosted the annual Remodel Excellence Awards (REX) this past week. There were many beautiful projects submitted and it’s always a delight to see the craftsmanship of all the fine builders in Olympia. We were greatly pleased to win the award for the Best Whole House Remodel in the $150,000-500,000 category. The home we submitted was a charming and modest, albeit, funky waterfront home that was due for some serious attention. I wrote up a three part posting on it a few months back if you are interested in the full story. The short...

Passive House Training...

Passive House Training By Randy Foster, Owner, The Artisans Group I recently completed the first three days of training as a Certified Passive House Consultant last week.  During the first day of class, I was struck by the fact that there are a lot of really smart people studying the Passive House approach.  I was impressed by that, and I felt really honored to have been accepted into this year’s training program!  Each of the 25 students in my class seemed to fully grasp the fact that designing and building a Passive House is rooted in attention paid to many small...

Architectural Styles...

Want to test your architectural style knowledge? The Oregonian has a down and dirty list of important architectural styles throughout the ages, from native long houses up to Contemporary. The list is comprehensive, but the information is simple, and concise and each style has sweet little illustrations. Each style features: The date range of popularity, the roots or origin of design, style characteristics, building materials commonly used and location in the country where the design is most often found. For those of you who have seen our building, it was loosely...

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 Remodel Portland Oregon...

I wrote a few days ago California’s first certified Passive House remodel coming on board in July. As Passive House design picks up momentum, I thought you might enjoy reading about other projects around the nation. Here is an article about a 1997 Portland based home that was remodeled to Passive stands in 2009. Coincidentally, the owner of this home was at our regional Passive House meeting a few weeks ago as a speaker, talking about the process of remodeling his relatively new home to a high performance Passive House. In closing, he was asked what it’s like...

How to: Outdoor Kitchen...

Outdoor Kitchen Project-The Artisans Group Seems like all us PNW-ers like to do ’stuff’ outdoors, whether it’s raining or not. Fortunately, our winters are mild and the other seasons are heavenly, a fair balance, I think. We also seem to like to cook food and gather with friends. Because it’s so mild here year round, it’s an ideal place for an outdoor kitchen. An outdoor kitchen doesn’t have to be elaborate or costly. In our climate, a very basic outdoor kitchen will commonly have overhead coverage, a cooking unit, usually a grill,...