from the ground up - The Tyee

1979 paper.“Truly superb insulation,” Shurcliff observed. “Notjust thick, but clever and thorough. Excellent insulationis provided even at the most difficult places: sills,headers, foundation walls, windows, electric outletboxes, etc.”Shurcliff continued: “Envelope of house is practicallyairtight... No conventional furnace... No weird shapeof house, no weird architecture.” And he noted howthese buildings were pointing the way toward affordablegreen homes.“No big added expense,” he wrote. “The costs of theextra insulation and extra care in construction arelargely offset by the savings realized from not havinghuge areas of expensive [windows], not having hugewell-sealed insulating shutters for huge south windows,and not having a furnace or a big heat distributionsystem.”After the researchers finished their monitoring and thecurious departed, the Saskatchewan house was soldas a residence. A garage was later added at the backof the property, and the solar thermal collectors wereremoved once maintenance became untenable.Guido Wimmers, a Passivhaus consultant who trainedin Europe but now lives in Vancouver, visited thehouse a few years ago. Wimmers was surprised tofind that the current owner knew little of the home’slegacy.“He was somewhat aware that his house is a little bitspecial,” Wimmers said. “But he was not aware thathis house is actually kind of a milestone in buildinghistory.”Airtight buildings that sip energyA decade passed before professors Bo Adamson andWolfgang Feist began refining the concepts pioneeredin Saskatchewan, Illinois and Massachusetts into whatwould become the Passivhaus standard.“[Adamson] insisted on really building one,” Feisttold journalist Martin Holladay in a 2007 interview.“At the time we knew about other similar buildings --buildings made by William Shurcliff and Harold Orr-- and we relied on those ideas.”They coined the term “Passivhaus” to express the ideathat these buildings would include no traditional “active”heating or cooling systems. The first building,a row of four townhouses, was built in Darmstadt,Germany in 1990.Feist founded the Passivhaus Institute in 1996. Andfrom 1997 to 2002 he conducted a research projectcalled CEPHEUS (Cost-Efficient Passive Houses asEuropean Standards), which collected data on 221superinsulated housing units at 14 locations in fivecountries.At the heart of the Passivhaus standard are two requirements:1. Every building must pass a blower-door test demonstratingexceptional airtightness. The Passivhausairtightness standard (0.6 AC/H @ 50 Pascals) makesthe Canadian R-2000 standard (1.5 AC/H @ 50 Pa)look lax by comparison.2. Every building must consume no more than 15kilowatt-hours of energy per square meter of floorarea. While R-2000 and most other green buildingstandards govern only energy used for heating andcooling, the Passivhaus standard applies to all energy-- including lights, appliances, entertainment and hotwater heating.How a building meets these performance requirementsis left to the discretion of its designers andbuilders. However, it is not possible to meet thePassivhaus airtightness standard using windows anddoors manufactured to lax North American standards.They leak too much air. So triple-paned windowsmanufactured to the Passivhaus standard are de factorequirements. Likewise, it is virtually impossibleto meet the Passivhaus energy requirement withoutsuperinsulated roofs, walls and foundations. Woodframedbuildings usually have 16-inch-thick walls.The Passivhaus Institute therefore recommends ashort list of strategies for achieving its standards.These include: high levels of insulation, reduction ofthermal bridges, use of “energy-gain” windows and(shown above) a heat-recovery ventilator (HRV).39