There is no doubt that the climate is changing, it is getting warmer with increasing heatwaves and extreme weather patterns. For those fortunate individuals planning to build a new home, there is an opportunity to design a house which embraces all the newest technologies to ensure that their climate impact is reduced with other benefits.
The style of this house may be varied and the degree to which it is designed to sustainable principles is also a matter of choice. One measure of sustainability is energy use, the more energy efficient the less damage to the environment.
The standard method of measuring the efficiency of a new home is to rely on the statutory method of calculating an energy performance certificate. This will give a graded performance with A being the best result and is a reasonable indication of energy use. However, it has been shown that there is always a performance gap between the desktop calculated efficiency and the actual results. This is due to many factors including, design details, poor on-site practice and a lack of quality control during the build.
One solution to this issue is to use a construction method which has been tried and tested over more than 25 years. This is the Passive House standard, or Passivhaus as it is pronounced in the original German. This standard has been adopted on a large scale by commercial house builders in Ireland. The standard has a rigorous approach to quality assurance with a certification process that ensures that any building which has achieved the standard will perform as designed and also have exceptional levels of energy efficiency.
There is also a misconception around the standard in that it is very expensive to implement and has such drawbacks as you are not able to open the windows. Both of these assumptions are not true and also the assumption that the house does not need heating in the winter. They do need heating, but a small amount compared to a conventional house. One other advantage of the standard is that the indoor air quality is superior to the traditional house with a comfort factor to the warmth of the house especially in winter.
Paul McAlister Architects designed and completed our first Certified Passive House in 2013, more than 10 years ago. We now see the adoption of Passive House as a preferred standard by local government for delivering buildings that meet the climate change 2030 targets for operation energy and energy efficiency.
If you are building a new house and want to ensure it will be future-proofed for the expected performance targets of the future, have very low energy bills, and would also like to help the environment, why not implement this standard into your new build?
