The Passive House institute has developed several Passive House building techniques to suit central Europe climate. The details should be found in order to suit the climate and geographic conditions to develop a Passive House solution of each location. It can be challenging to build nearly new self-sufficient homes, but it is well defined:
· The physical equations remain the same while only the construction conditions vary.
· The methodology of the Passive House solution can be soundly applied independent of the geographic and climate circumstances.
The first step towards starting a Passive House development in your region is to use the Passive House method. This process can be used to determine the appropriate Passive House design solutions for each region and climate. The principal behind a Passive House is based on the concept by Amory Lovins of reducing investment through energy efficient design by dramatically increasing the energy efficiency of a building, using the HVAC systems it can be relatively simple to reach a certain level of efficiency.
Heating the house in cold weather is major energy consuming, the introducing of insulation, superwindows, passive solar gains simplify the heating system in a step by step process but the most significant threshold for a Passive House is 10W/m2 independent of climate. There is almost no extra benefit gained by increasing the efficiencies beyond this threshold. The definition of a Passive House is therefore that the peak heating load should be projected to a lower level than 10W/m2 which is easily achieved during warmer climates as opposed to colder climates. A Passive House has a very low energy demand for maintaining interior comfort in the heating season.
The methods used for investigating a Passive House solution are as follows:
1. Consider the use of passive technologies to reduce the peak load demand of the service in question.
2. For a comfortable indoor climate it is recommendable to use a ventilation system with heat recovery or vice versa with cold recovery, which will reduce heating or cooling demands.
3. Once a certain point of the cooling/dehumidification is reached heating or cooling demands will be less
Passive Houses should be well known as the most comfortable homes in any region and all climates. Comfort should be kept at a high level. Using very low auxiliary energy, gives a important precondition for passive solutions.
The building design and solutions used to check the results for energy demands, finiancial investments and healthy indoor climate are performed using a computer based parametric study.
Possibilities of these are:
- A simulation first principal model using programs like ‘Derob’ ‘Energy Ten’
- A validated simplified model based on EN 832 e.g. PPPN.
The Passive House Institute has broad experience in performing parametric evaluations and successfully developing appropriate passive solutions for different climates.
