With more and more world leaders, educational institutes and industry professionals looking towards creating a more sustainable future for the next generation, many have focused on the housing crises and improving the consumption and production of energy. One of these possible solutions is called ‘passive house’, and while the concept has been around since the…
Tag Archives: Passive house
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Oct
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Kebony, an environmentally safe manufactured wood product, has been used to transform a traditional Norwegian home and bring it to Passive House standards.
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The Friends School of Portland in Maine is the first Passive House modular school building in the state, and only the third in the country.  The neighboring OceanView Retirement Community is donating solar panels for the school to use, making the facility net zero energy (NZE). “One of our core values is stewardship and we…
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Hidden in the suburbs of Sacramento, California, in an otherwise unremarkable subdivision, is the ZeroHouse. The ZeroHouse is special because, as its name suggests, it uses zero net energy from the region’s electrical grid, making it one of America’s first net zero homes– and it wasn’t significantly more expensive to build than the rest of…
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40% of all the energy consumed in America every year is used for heating or cooling homes and commercial buildings. Modern insulation, fiberglass composite windows and draft reducing doors combined with passive solar design and the use of solar panels could cut that energy usage in half. So why aren’t more people insisting on higher energy…
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Oct
The importance of energy efficiency has become gospel in many parts of the world- most notably in countries like Japan, which have committed to making all new public buildings passive and net zero energy structures from here on out. In the US, companies like Turner have said that the future of the commercial market is…
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Oct
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With the rapid pace of advancement from energy efficient smart homes, to passive homes, to energy plus homes, the architecture and construction industries are leading the way in terms of building a sustainable future. Japan, however, is hoping to ensure that sustainable design doesn’t become a passing fad by pushing for all public buildings to…
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Oct
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Passive House is an international building standard developed by the Passive House Institute (PHI), which is located in Darmstadt, Germany. Â Building to the Passive House Standard recognizes buildings which have been optimized through passive measures and components such as insulation, air-tightness, heat recovery, solar heat gains, solar shading and incidental internal heat gains. Â Buildings which…
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Sep
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A home in Barwar City, Qatar is set to be the guinea pig to answer whether Passive House design will work in the desert. Â Passive House (or Passivhaus in German) design relies on the mass of a building and super insulation to naturally heat and cool a building, limiting the need for heat and air…
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Passive house design has gone from an emerging architectural trend to a firmly established movement that’s entrenched itself in the professional and public mind. Even so, most people – both industry experts and laypeople – take the term literally, and equate “passive house” with, you know, houses. The truth, meanwhile, is that the same principles…