Do you know your Passiv from your EnerPHit?

New-build Passivhaus homes are warm in the winter; cool in the summer, with savings for the environment and your cash.

No matter what your views on global warming may be, it makes sense to build the most energy-efficient home you can. Your wallet will thank you and the planet probably will be quite happy about it as well. Passivhaus is the leading international low-energy design standard with more than 65,000 buildings worldwide designed, built and tested to its standard. It is a highly effective way of reducing energy use and carbon emissions from buildings. The Passivhaus Trust is an independent, non-profit organisation which provides leadership in the UK for the adoption of the Passivhaus standard and methodology, promoting the building principles developed by the Passivhaus Institute in Germany. The Passivhaus system has a strict quality assurance process that can be certified through an exacting quality assurance process; certification adds value to a property. EnerPHit is the Passivehaus specifications for the retrofitting or renovation of an existing property; the savings are not as good but still amongst the highest achievable.

Passivhaus uses a heat recovery ventilation system, using very little energy for heating and cooling, and giving a high level of comfort, including humidity levels. Draft free and superinsulated, Passivhaus today can call on innovative products unheard of when the standard was born out of work in 1988 by Bo Adamson of Lund University, Sweden, and Wolfgang Feist of the Institute for Housing and the Environment, Darmstadt, Germany. Add to that computer systems to run lighting and heating within the home which are far in advance of anything Adamson or Feist could have imaged when starting out. Ecology and energy bills aside, one of the most attractive features of Passivhaus design is the amount of natural light thanks to ‘active daylighting’, the strategic placing of windows and reflective surfaces so that direct and indirect sunlight can flood the property, along with ‘daylight harvesting’ – the strategic placing of lighting and automatic or computer-driven dimming and switching off. The UK trust says: ‘Passivhaus buildings achieve a 75 per cent reduction in space heating requirements, compared to standard practice for UK new build. The Passivhaus standard therefore gives a robust method to help the industry achieve the 80 per cent carbon reductions that are set as a legislative target for the UK Government.’