Deciding To Go For Passive House (Phius)
From the very beginning, this house was about more than just a view. It was an opportunity to build in alignment with our values. For years, through our work at Positive Energy, we have advocated for a better way of building, one that prioritizes health, comfort, resiliency, durability, and to be energy and resource efficient.
And,...we are on a pretty tight budget. So every decision going forward about this project will be about tradeoffs. Tradeoffs run the gamut–financial, square footage, enclosure specifications, healthy material selection, durability, air quality, advanced MEP systems, carbon footprint, material sourcing, waste stream, renewable energy, etc. And knowing what we know about all of these areas makes the tradeoff decisions even harder and more nuanced. Anyone who has ever built a house knows that the process is a series of interconnected decisions. Now pretend that you’re also fully steeped in building science, in seeing a home as a system of interconnected systems. This makes the decisions all that much more complicated. We can’t “unknow” what we know so we’ll carry on and hopefully help others understand some of the considerations before us.
The first decision was relatively easy–Passive House. Passive house is essentially the fruition of the building science perspective. Passive house starts with the end goals of energy use, comfort, durability, and air quality in mind and then works backward in a holistic way to make sure you get there. In our tradeoffs matrix, we are prioritizing Passive House-level performance. If this ends up meaning a more expensive enclosure or other costly building systems, we know that we are willing to deprioritizing things like square footage, expansive glazing, fancy fixtures, finishouts and furnishings.
Our professional mission for the past 20 years has been to transform the way homes are delivered to society. Our long-standing relationship with the Passive House Institute US (Phius) through our work at Positive Energy has given us a front-row seat to the incredible benefits of this standard. We’d seen the data, we’d heard the testimonials, and we’d helped other project teams achieve this high bar.
Now, it was our turn. The myriad questions that we had only academic answers to would become more clear to us: “how much more will it cost to build to Passive House?”, “what sort of windows will I need?” , “what will the WUFI model tell me about my design?”, “will my builder have trouble achieving a low blower door score?”, “will I feel the difference living in a Passive House?”.
We are lucky and proud to work with architecture firms and construction teams focused on beautiful high performance buildings and we figured why shouldn’t we bring our understanding to creating a home that actively supports the well-being of our family and friends. When it came to our own home, there was no question: we had to walk the walk. We were going for Passive House (Phius) certification.
For those of you readers who are new to Passive House?” here is a concise overview. It's important to remember - there is a LOT to learn. Be patient with yourself. Leverage all the great free resources at your disposal. Learn as much as you can. Engage with the Passive House community. Breathe and enjoy the process!