Passive House: The Ultimate in Efficiency & Comfort.

Passive House Benefits:

When your home is a certified Passivhaus, then you can be certain that it meets the Passivhaus Standard, resulting in an exceptionally kind home by ensuring that:

• Your are warm in winter and cool in summer, using minimal energy,
• The internal air quality is excellent, even when the external air is polluted due to car fumes, pollen, or bushfire smoke.
• Your home will be quiet and vermin free,
• There will be no condensation on internal walls and windows and within the building structure, keeping your home mold free and durable.
• Your electricity bill will be very low, compared to what it would be otherwise.

Five Passive House Design Principles:

1. Extreme air tightness, at most 0.6 air changes per hour at 50 pascals,
2. Heat Recovery Ventilation (HRV) system: heat recovery and/or summer bypass is required for most climate zones in Australia,
3. High performance windows and external doors,
4. Excellent continuous insulation,
5. No thermal bridging.

Things to Note About Passive House:

• There are 3 Passivhaus standards, Classic, Plus, and Premium, that depend on the amount of generated renewable energy.
• Starting with a Solar Passive design, makes it easier to meet the Passivhaus standard.
• Solar Passive design is not a requirement for meeting the Passivhaus standard.
  • If your block of land has a poor orientation, you can still achieve a Passivhaus home.
• Thermal mass is generally not an essential component in Passivhaus design.
• Passivhaus in not necessarily a Supportive Accessible Design, which is an additional design approach that can be incorporated into your Passivhaus home design.
• Passivhaus is a Healthful Design provided that (as a minimum) you use your ventilation system correctly and are vigilant in replacing its filter.

The Passive House Design Team

Your Passivhaus design team consists of:

• Your Building Designer
• The Certified Passvhaus Designer
• The Passivhaus Certifier

A Certified Passivhaus Designer analyses the design of the building envelop, using the Passive House Planning Package (PHPP) then makes recommendations to your Building Designer or Architect concerning ways of meeting the Passivhaus Standard. These recommendations will be contained in a detailed document showing the recommended building components to be used, thermal bridge treatment requirements, shading, together with the Passivhaus assessment results if these recommendations are carried out.

• Sometimes the Certified Passivhaus Designer is the same person as the Building Designer or Architect.

The Passivhaus Solution:

As with most cases, the results of the initial Building Design did not meet the Passivhaus standard and needed adjustments, through:

• A different choice of insulation, windows, the inclusion of a suitable heat recovery ventilation system, and choice of appliances.
• An increased attention to building detailing for insuring the air tightness target and removal of most thermal bridging.

These adjustments are entered into the PHPP, and a report is produced. The report will contain all the recommendations and their impact on the energy performance of your home. The report also contains a Verification results table, produced using the PHPP package, showing the Passivhaus targets together with the impact of the recommendations on such things as the:

• space heating and cooling demand,
• frequency of overheating,
• high humidity,
• maximum allowable Blower Door airtightness results,
• primary energy demand.

Example Verification Table Results:

Following adjustments to the original Solar Passive Design the Verification Table appeared as follows:

Looking Forward:

Solar panels and possibly batteries were planned to be added in the future, to increase the amount of available renewable energy.