3/7/2024 0 Comments Passive house design![]() ![]() A single-family home built this way can be heated on the coldest winter day with the equivalent of a hairdryer. Passive House design allocates resources differently from conventional construction-investing more in the building shell and less in mechanical equipment-but it need not cost more up front, and it yields a positive return over the life of the building. Our houses use 10 percent of the energy consumed by a conventional code-compliant house, while offering a healthier, more comfortable living environment. And we install a heat-recovery ventilation system that delivers a constant flow of fresh air while capturing 80 percent of the heat in the air it exhausts to the outdoors. We specify ultra-high-performance windows and doors and locate them where they’ll collect free heat from the sun. And because the buildings we create today will be in service long after 2050, we’ll have to start building that way now.Īt GO Logic, we follow the Passive House approach: We create an airtight building shell superinsulated to R35 at the foundation, R50 at the walls, and R80 at the roof. To accomplish that, we’ll need buildings that use dramatically less energy-or none at all. World population is on track to grow from 7 billion today to 9 billion in 2050-all of us sharing the same finite resources, most living and working in buildings, and everyone wanting to be comfortable. Standard construction practices have improved in recent years, but we need to pick up the pace. Buildings are responsible for 40 percent of the carbon emissions that are destabilizing our climate and putting the future of civilization at risk. But survival is back on the agenda, partly because of the way we’ve long chosen to improve the indoor weather: by burning fossil fuels to make heat and electricity. ![]() Those of us who make buildings are still concerned with comfort. Their primary objective was survival, but over the eons the focus shifted more and more to comfort: staying warm and dry when it’s cold and wet outside keeping cool when it’s too hot out there. It’s been that way since our Paleolithic ancestors first got into the construction business. When you boil it all the way down, a building is just a box, with bad weather on the outside and good weather on the inside.
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