From the category archives:

Passive House

Passive House Ventilation Design

January 20, 2010

We thought it would be a good idea to review our new ventilation strategy and design implemented in the recent Passive Project. The ventilation strategy in the 100K House was different than most typical houses and the Passive Project took things a step further. We’ll start with the outline:

Use a very efficient mechanical ventilation system [...]

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Building Gaskets and Air Sealing Tape

October 30, 2009

Yesterday we looked at some lessons learned from our aggressive air sealing goals on the Passive Project. In doing so we mentioned that we will be utilizing building gaskets and air sealing tape to help obtain the very difficult building air tightness goal of 0.6 ACH @ 50Pa that is required by the Passive House [...]

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Passive House Air Sealing – Lessons Learned

October 28, 2009

It’s been a while since we posted on any technical aspects of the Passive House we are trying to build in the Passive Project. We recently tested our air sealing with a blower door test prior to drywall at the homes and I figured it would be a good time to bring up some thoughts [...]

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Super Efficient Windows for the Passive Project

September 11, 2009

In addition to insulation levels and air sealing details, the windows and external window shading in the Passive Project is upgraded from the 100K House Project.
There is a lot more to windows than insulation levels, but in order to keep things simple we will focus on this aspect and cover energy efficient windows in more [...]

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New Passive Project Page

July 15, 2009

The goal of the 100K House blog is to facilitate learning about sensible, green building on the interweb. So many times when we find a good project out there, little details are provided on the construction especially in one concise format. That’s where we are trying to fill the void with the 100K blog.
To that [...]

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Passive Project Foundation and Slab Insulation

June 11, 2009

Many have been waiting for us to start posting on specifics of our Passive Project which contains two homes – one of which is seeking the stringent Passive House certification for extreme energy efficiency. We have been waiting to post until we have completed each section of the build. This ensures that we post once [...]

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The Philadelphia Passive Project – 100k and the Passive House Standard

January 30, 2009

We just realized that we have been uncharacteristically quiet about our next project. We are due to break ground in just a couple of weeks, and we have barely written a word about it. This is very unlike us, and I will begin to remedy the situation right now.
Our next project is similar in scale [...]

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Possible Modifications based on Passive House Standard

April 15, 2008

Since studying the Passive House standard of energy efficient design, we have been trying to determine what we can incorporate into our project without blowing the budget. Below are some of the ideas we have so far to improve the energy efficiency of the home after consulting the Passive House Standard.
Insulation

Increase SIP wall panels to [...]

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Passive House (Passivhaus) Standard for Energy Efficient Design

April 10, 2008

…Passive House Savings Diagram

The basic idea of a Passive House is to reduce the energy usage of a home by 90% over traditional code built homes. I grabbed this definition off of a site which will hopefully become clearer later in the post: “A Passive House is a building for which thermal comfort can be achieved solely by post-heating or post-cooling of the fresh air mass, which is required to fulfill sufficient indoor air quality conditions without a need for recirculated air.” [...]

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