Cascade Built Blog
June 2, 2009
Passive House
Posted by admin, 6:20 PM
How would you like to reduce your home’s energy consumption by 85%? It can be done, according to the Passive House Institute of US with an upfont cost premium of about 10%. So far I only have an understanding of how the concept applies to new construction.
Fascinating stuff. I thought I had a good thing going by reducing energy to a third of average. This method gets energy use so low that carbon neutral is just a very small solar system away. This level of performance is not achieved in the US, except for a few isolated homes, schools, etc., but the word is spreading.
Who knows if it will catch on here, or if we’re just going to keep on building Mc Mansions. It would be so relieving to know that you own the home completely and dont’ have to subscribe to the utilities year after year. It has caught on in Europe – they have built 10,000 of these homes in Germany. The mechanical engineering and architectural rigor is astounding. It would take a disciplined crew to execute each and every measure, no thermal bridges, and 0.6 ACH @50 pascals air tightness. Who’s up for the challenge? I’ll build one, if you’ll buy it! The current economic situation would dictate that it should be done very inexpensively. I wonder if it can be done for $400K in city?
