Comparison To The Passive House Standard in Europe
There is growing momentum in Europe for the approach espoused by the Passive House (Passivhaus in German) Institute in Germany. Rather than relying solely on traditional passive solar design techniques, this approach seeks to make use of all passive sources of heat, minimises energy usage, and emphasises the need for high levels of insulation reinforced by meticulous attention to detail in order to address thermal bridging and cold air infiltration. Most of the buildings built to the Passive House standard also incorporate an active heat recovery ventilation unit with or without a small (typically 1 kW) incorporated heating component.
The energy design of Passive House buildings is developed using a spreadsheet-based modeling tool called the Passive House Planning Package (PHPP) which is updated periodically. The current version is PHPP2007, where 2007 is the year of issue. A building may be certified as a 'Passive House' when it can be shown that it meets certain criteria, the most important being that the annual specific heat demand for the house should not exceed 15kWh/m2a.
Read more about this topic: Passive Solar Building Design
Famous quotes containing the words comparison, passive, house, standard and/or europe:
“In everyone’s youthful dreams, philosophy is still vaguely but inseparably, and with singular truth, associated with the East, nor do after years discover its local habitation in the Western world. In comparison with the philosophers of the East, we may say that modern Europe has yet given birth to none.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“...if you are to gain any great amount of good from the world, you must attain a passive condition of mind. ...it is never to be forgotten that it is the rest of the world and not you that holds the great share of the world’s wealth, and that you must allow yourself to be acted upon by the world, if you would become a sharer in the gain of all the ages to your own infinite advantage.”
—Anna C. Brackett (1836–1911)
“The lust for comfort, that stealthy thing that enters the house a guest, and then becomes a host, and then a master.”
—Kahlil Gibran (1883–1931)
“Society’s double behavioral standard for women and for men is, in fact, a more effective deterrent than economic discrimination because it is more insidious, less tangible. Economic disadvantages involve ascertainable amounts, but the very nature of societal value judgments makes them harder to define, their effects harder to relate.”
—Anne Tucker (b. 1945)
“What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one’s heroic ancestors. It’s astounding to me, for example, that so many people really seem to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free. That happens not to be true. What happened was that some people left Europe because they couldn’t stay there any longer and had to go someplace else to make it. They were hungry, they were poor, they were convicts.”
—James Baldwin (1924–1987)