Passiv haus
Hybrid House Book
Broadly speaking there are two kinds of green building books: one looks to the latest scientific innovations for solutions and the other looks to revive ancient techniques. Lets call them the futurists and the traditionalists.
In the futurists camp you have high tech, in the traditionalists you have low tech.
Futurists design houses with complex energy calculations. [...]
Passive House Defined
The term Passive House comes from Germany. It is not to be confused with passive solar heating or cooling, although that plays a part.
From the German Passiv Haus site:
A passive house is a building in which a comfortable interior climate can be maintained without active heating and cooling systems (Adamson 1987 and Feist 1988). The [...]
Passive House in Brooklyn’s Space Craved Brownstones
How feasible is it to green renovate a Brooklyn Brownstone along Passive House standards? After looking into it the main issue I see is the lack of space. A brownstone has a fixed building line, usually something along the dimensions of 20×40 feet. At least a foot of that is taken up by bricks, leaving [...]
Insight PassivHaus Becomes Active—Further Commentary on PassivHaus
Here is an interesting Comment by John Straube, which was responded to by the Passiv Haus people here.. His comments give good US insights into a German standard. His points are that Passiv Haus standards are not brand new and that US and Canada have had them for a while. Not that many have implemented [...]
Passive House
The Passive House building system from Germany is one of my favorite benchmarks. I have yet to renovate a Brooklyn brownstone by Passive House standards, although the Brooklyn Green Show House of ours comes very close.
We hope to do a Passive House brownstone renovation very soon though.
A recent article by John Straube of Building Science [...]
Passive House
The Passive House guidelines are the best benchmark I know of right now for building a house. According to the Passive House Planning Package, there is no requirement that a house be designed by an official Passive House Consultant.
The main requirements are:
1) Maximum of 15 kWh/(m^2a) heat load
2) Maximum of 0.6 ACH(50) air [...]
Converting Metric to Emperial R and U values
If you are a green builder in Brooklyn you are often looking to Europe for green building techniques and technologies. And often it is Germany. They are miles ahead of the US in terms of energy efficiency and green building.
The German Green Party has been a strong political party for years. Compare that with [...]