Building to Passive House standard
This is an excerpt from an article in Sanctuary magazine issue 17.
Developed in Europe as “passivhaus”, the Passive House Standard is gaining popularity worldwide. New Zealand building designer and Passive House Consultant Glenn Murdoch explains how it can help produce energy efficient, healthy houses.
Words Glenn Murdoch
Everybody deserves to live in a healthy society. A society cannot be healthy unless its people are, and a fundamental requirement for this is that the buildings in which people live, work, play and learn are healthy.
A healthy building has many aspects; the one with the greatest impact on human health is indoor environmental quality. On average Australians spend about 90 per cent of their time indoors, so it is essential that it’s spent in a healthy environment. Even if you are outdoors most days, you still need to sleep in a healthy environment.
By applying the Passive House Standard to the buildings we design and build, we can guarantee that they will be perpetually comfortable, healthy, energy efficient, with excellent indoor air quality, extremely low running costs and a durable structure, as well as free from mould and damp.
The Passive House Standard is an international building energy performance code developed as “passivhaus” in Germany in the late 1980s. At the time the minimum building code standards in Germany were higher than those in Australia and New Zealand but were still considered inadequate. The Passive House Standard came out of a large research project and has subsequently been tested and verified to the point that it works in all climate zones.
If you’d like to read the rest of this article you can buy this issue here.
