Passiv Haus, is there a better alternative?

Wales has been slowly moving towards using the Passiv Haus Planning Package to design and construct Passive Houses (Passiv Haus). The Ebbw Vale demonstration buildings used PHPP extensively to create very low energy homes. The Lime House and Larch House at the Future Welsh Homes site show how the principles of managing air within buildings can radically reduce energy consumption. The Passiv Haus principles are fairly simple.

Make a house airtight and then use heat exchange systems to take the warm, moist and stale air out and use it to preheat the incoming fresh air.
Use the orientation of the house to utilise free solar energy to help heat the home.
Use good insulation to keep the warmth in during the winter and the summer heat out.

Using the above principles you can relatively easily create homes that only use a maximum of 15kWh per square meter per annum. This is about 10% of an average home’s energy consumption. So with the pressure on carbon reduction this is a good thing.

However, I think that there are some issues with using Passiv Haus that is not being talked about.

1. The system works by managing the whole house, so this means that all the rooms in the house are the same temperature. We are used to having cooler bedrooms and warmer living spaces, so this is a fairly major cultural change, especially if you did not build the house. This for many may not actually be a problem, but people need to be made aware of this characteristic especially in the rental market.

2. The heat recovery ventilation system is designed to manage the volume and quality of the fresh air coming into the home. So on warm days our natural inclination is to open windows, but this plays havoc with the system. So for the best efficiency you need to keep windows and doors closed. Again this goes against the way that we have lived until now and I think that again the rental market will find this feature problematic.

These might be little issues when compared to the energy saving that Passiv Haus design and construction can bring, but I fear that it will mean that people do not live in the optimum manner due to their habits built up over time living with conventional housing.

I think that there is a gap in the market for a more natural system and that this might be filled by the Bio-Solar Haus concept.

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