2023 - Why you SHOULD and SHOULD NOT Build a Passive House

hello this is Brandon Farr from level up strategies and I want to invite you into a super important conversation this is all about pacifos and whether you should or whether you should not build one see as a licensed Builder a few years back we looked at the world of High Performance Construction and we decided that we needed to participate but we didn't know where to begin so a few years later we're certified passive house designers we understand some things that we think will be helpful for you so if you're thinking of building a passive house or you just want to know more about it this video is for you and on two pages we hope to clarify everything you need to know to make an informed decision which path to follow so jumping right in why you should build a passive house you know for starters passive house is the gold standard in high performance energy construction they've been doing it for over 25 years it's based in Germany there are brilliant people that have dedicated themselves to understanding building science how to build that energy efficient homes and then simplifying that for you and I all around the world because passive house passive houses are built everywhere in every continent so it is possible in your neck of the woods and the confidence that you can have when you're looking at building a passive house versus any other organization is that there's some substance there you're getting reputable when that badge means something it's understood all around the globe and and part of the reason for that is that passive house sets a performance standard for homes which means that it sets the bar right here and and there are some standards that are high well passive house is really high so if you are building a passive house home the standard is super high and it's recognized for that but it's also consistent all the way around the world which we'll get into why that's a drawback later but it just sets the bar so if you achieve passive host you've you've hit the minimum criteria which they highlight in in their website I'm not going to go into the nuances of what what constitutes that but just to say they set Targets on what you need to heat for heating and cooling and how much how much you use per meter squared in your house so the size of your house they have limitations on how much you can actually use in a year they set really tight standards to air tightness and they have really high standards for the hygiene criteria which is a safe thing for you in terms of mold and condensation and wall assemblies but more practically what you're going to feel is thermal comfort and and just to clarify what that means if you ever walked into like an old school house and it was really warm on one side of the room and you move over and next to the windows and you can feel the cold on your arm and you want to move away from the windows because it's too cold to study that's there's actually ways to calculate thermal comfort and how and the difference in temperature in a room and pacifo says you can't you can't be cold on this side of the room and hot on this side of the room you don't get to take the average you get to take real-time temperature in the whole Space which makes it really comfortable for you and I to live in that space so another really neat advantage of the passive house standard is that it's super easy to go from that super high passive housing to Net Zero if you want to offset your passive house with Renewables you're going to be able to do that and a great way to think about it is if you want to go net zero on your classic home that was built in the early 2000s you might need a solar panel array that's this big but if you had a passive house you'd only need one this big and that's just a metaphor to go hey if it's already super thermally efficient you don't need a ton of energy to operate it it's primarily run on electricity so your solar panel size can be smaller so it's cheaper for you to buy it's cheaper for you to maintain and it's super easy to get to those Net Zero targets which we're all aiming for as greenhouse gases and emissions and carbon footprint are are becoming more present for us as a community in North America so which means whether or not you go Net Zero regardless you're gonna have a super low cost on your utility bills because it just doesn't use a ton of electricity most of the utilities would be your furnace your hot water tank your air conditioner they might be running on heat pumps it's going to be primarily electric is it possible to do gas yes it's just not as efficient so you have to hit these standards of energy consumption so if you use alternate fuels like gas you're just going to have a harder time to do it because it's not you can do it you just there needs to be compromises in the whole system you can also get a fireplace there's passive host rated fireplaces and super thermally efficient and and all that does it add some complication to this thing yes but it can be done so you'll be spending a little time a little money but it can be done so a super interesting piece that is over overlooked perhaps for most of us that are used to walking into a house of all shapes and sizes I grew up in Winnipeg and some of those houses were giant old buildings with sawdust in the walls and single pane glass and wood shutters on the outside you're used to walking through a house and there's warm spots and there's cold spots and there's a warm spot again and then there's condensation on the windows and and we're not used to the just right temperature on the hottest day of the year a passive house is going to feel nice and cool on the coldest day of the year the whole house is going to feel just the right warmth because they're able the the envelope is is insulated in such a way it doesn't fluctuate hot and cold hot and cold when the furnace kicks on it doesn't flood to hot and when the air conditioning kicks on doesn't flood the cold and when it's hot outside it doesn't migrate through the house to overheat it's this just right beautiful temperature control so it's a really neat experience that we're not used to so we might not value initially but after you've been in one you'll understand especially if you get to live in it and additionally with the insulation it's quieter you have thermal panes or triple pane glass that the road noise outside the the the buzz of a city is all muted which makes for a calmer environment all the air is filtered so it's a cleaner environment less allergens less pollutants less dust it's a beautiful thing and jumping back to the hygiene criteria when you understand where the thermal bridges are and where condensation can occur in a wall and you've you've used their one of their principles of thermal Bridge free construction so you you can actually say there's not going to be mold in our house like you can you can calculate the mold out of your house by how you build your wall assembly so for those that are concerned about interior air quality this is super super important now a big piece for us the passive house modeling software it's the phpp passive house oh I'm blanking here on video okay it's the phpp modeling software I'm also a certified enter can energy advisor here in Canada and they give us a software called Hawk 2000 and there are other softwares out there and none of them compared to the modeling software that passive house provides it is thorough and comprehensive and it actually represents the finished product of the house which is one of the major deals if you're going to go into this whole process of building a net zero home or a super high performance energy conscious home and you do all the work of modeling which you have to do to get a building permit if you're here in Kelowna or British Columbia of the energy step code you need to go through the process the pain and the expense of energy modeling your home and most software won't produce an accurate reflection of what it will look like in the end and to be fair a lot of people know how to cheat the system in the hot 2000 software so is that you can make the spreadsheet look like the house will perform a certain way but upon completion building an occupancy the house will perform nothing like what they said it would at the beginning now if you're the type of person that just wants to get through the permitting process and get through the energy audit or the energy modeling just so that you can build your home that's not going to bother you but if you actually care about understanding what your home is going to do once you live in it and you are putting the time and energy expense into building one of these I think the accurate reflection piece is super critical because a lot of people make decisions based on poor modeling software that says hey double pane windows will be fine in a reality they're not triple pane windows is where you need to be and triple pane fiberglass foam filled frames is where you need to really be if you really want to have beautiful Windows lots of light and high performance assemblies so one of the lists on the five passive house core principles is amazing windows and there's stickers out there you go to a hardware store and you'll see these energy star stickers and their double pane High Performance Glass and it's garbage they're able to cheat the system based on how they measure the thermal conductivity of the window and they often measure right in the center but most of the windows poor performance is on the edges and anyways so people are cheating the system all the time and that can come in an expense to you but passive house doesn't allow that to happen and because of the way they they very thematically look at a building which is brilliant so you get clarity and accuracy and we'll jump down here where it says they also have done the work to pre-qualify a bunch of building materials the essential Parts the um the heaters the air conditioners the heat pumps the windows the doors so that when you go looking for what do I need for my home passive house is independently audited the performance of these windows according to their passive house criteria which is super high which means that instead of those are 2.4 Windows you might get at the hardware store you're getting windows from the R value of 10 like it's way better it's not even in the same category but um and they're confirming that it's not cheating or manipulating it's it's true to what it is so that when you install it it'll be what they promised and all the areas particular on Windows where you can cheat these things and it's just there's a lot of confidence as a consumer when you follow this pathway now along with the modeling software a neat part about building a passive house as this thing from just going to a high performance home that you're gonna you're gonna do the work of the high performance home is that municipalities actually acknowledge a passive house as a credential and what that means is in Vancouver in particular Vancouver Canada the municipality actually gives you some allowance because when you take a lot especially if you're going to infill a lot there's existing buildings on both sides and they have what's called setbacks you know so that you can't touch your neighbor's house there's got to be space between it and there'll be differences in terms of what municipalities want between homes but they've actually made exceptions to lower this that backs and and offer more variance in terms of height and width to passive why because the walls require more insulation and so the city says hey we're not going to put you in a box and then make you get energy efficient and squeeze you on the inside will acknowledge that you're actually trying to do something really special that's going to help our environment so we'll give you the same room on the inside and we'll give you some extra Tolerance on the outside which all works to your advantage you're not shrinking your square footage as a penalty to Energy Efficiency you're actually getting a boost same thing see more attic insulation think R40 walls r60 ceiling that's kind of a ballpark or where you want to be and there needs to be foundational or insulation of your foundation as well so the pre-qualified building materials is just a really neat resource they have a database for you you can search by country you can search whether you're looking for hrvs or ervs which is the lungs of a building that flow air in and out and they the hot air passes off to the cold air and they they they blend the the temperatures so you're not wasting energy by pulling cold air into your house in the winter and then having to reheat it again because you've already heated air so they exchange that heat it's beautiful but perhaps one of my favorite Parts about a passive house and why especially if you're in the used market like you're going to go buy a home that's built is the Deep consideration that has gone into the home in order for it to become a passive house I'm gonna go so far like I'm a licensed Builder you know so I'm going to go so far as you cannot become a passive house as an afterthought in building construction you can't you can't give me your set of plans that you had drawn up last month and you're like okay Brandon I love my hey can we make this a passive house we can't do that there needs to be deep consideration from the planning stage with your designer they have certified passive house designer Consultants that's what why we went through the process is you need to be integral in the way that the house is built with the type of wall assemblies where the windows are the overhangs things like this to make it actually hit the standard then throughout the building process you need to be actively engaged in maintaining the standard that you've outlined in your modeling software so that people aren't poking holes in your wall assemblies and therefore compromising the air tightness criteria that's super important to this and I know a builder and he's he's an extraordinary Builder we're talking on the scale of like 10 000 square foot homes that are passive house caliber um and his his whole Philosophy for Tradesmen on site is no utility knives scissors only because how many times and you know you're going you're cutting something on paper and you just slide over here and this becomes a casualty of what you were trying to cut here and when you have airtight membranes in the house you have really fancy tapes you've gone through the work you don't want anybody accidentally compromising something that just can't be patched up because you're looking for seamless continuity of barriers so anyways scissors only on his job site and I respect him for that because he's maintaining the standards of high performance throughout the build because it's all audited at the end too you know audited in the design the certain because you have a third party auditor then it's audited in construction you have to have uh trades training as well and then it's audited upon completion to a higher degree than any other standard is audited you have to do a blower door test in both directions because what most people don't realize is that when it's hot outside and cold inside I think summer the temperature gradient pushes into the house so it's kind of a suck on the on assembly so if there's air leaks that flap open when it's drawing in air can exchange it leaks in but what happens in the winter when we heat the inside that's cold on the outside well then it actually pushes out of the house that way and if there's a flap that's open on that pressure gradient it'll leak out that way now so if you have it this way in the summer it might feel like it's sealed but in the winter it opens and it does that it's just that's why they pressure test in both directions to make sure the seal works all year round so you don't have differential performance anyway so all that to say at the end of the day you get clarity you get accuracy and you get a super high performing home guaranteed it can't be passive house if it doesn't meet the standard standard plus one percent no cheating doesn't doesn't mean it so that's the why you should but why shouldn't you let's take a look I think the first barrier most people will bump into is the cost there is the cost of High Performance Construction you know can that add 15 20 to your home yes absolutely it can materials are more expensive triple pane glass is more expensive than double paint no two ways about it but if you're in the category of I want to build a great home and you're thinking hey do I want to go passive house or not a couple extra costs are you're paying a designer consultant in the planning process but you're also paying an auditing fee and these aren't cheap I mean is this twenty twenty five thousand dollars depending on the size of your home yeah and that's just an extra cost and if somebody's maintaining the standard and they're auditing the standard and you've had sloppy trades or a builder on site that's not considerate they call them air barrier Champions you know and and you know you specify the house you paid the planner you paid the auditor and your Tradesmen are sloppy and they poke a bunch of different holes and you go to the end of your project you do a blow door test and it doesn't achieve the 0.6 air changes per hour that passive host requires it doesn't pass so you can pay for all this process but if it so so there's cost of cost of I'm going to say continual auditing from qualified trades and you're building through the process with just more time and attention which is that consideration value but that does add expense because time's not free when you're dealing with quality trades and on the trades part some trades especially the non-current ones if you say passive house hey would you help me do my drywall on a passive house like ah I don't want to be involved in that because they might perceive it like we did honestly going back in time several years back it was like it was it felt like an onerous burden to like jump over these extra high hoops and there's a psychology that's that's that's a carry forward from a long time ago that's Energy Efficiency is a pain in the button it doesn't make sense and it's not worth it anyways and they might actually be afraid of having to to perform to a standard as as high and clear as passive house they they might not want to be as tight as um as is required so if you're in a place that is hard time finding qualified Tradesmen this will just add complexity to that Journey for you because the number of Trades might shrink but that being said the most current trades the ones you actually want on your site they're gonna be pumped to join a passive house because these are like portfolio worthy projects if you are passive house capable as a Tradesman you're top tier you're a plus you know it's just it so there is this Nuance you're gonna find people that are yes absolutely I'll prefer you but I think generally still the um the the feeling in the Market at least from where I'm seeing it is there's still some reluctance to do anything even high performance it's not I want to build a net zero house you might get the same kind of freak out um I'm using that as a general term just to say reluctance apprehension um yeah because there's a um not a lot of understanding here and that's why we've gone through this process and why we're making these videos the education's super critical so that we can actually change the minds of people to embrace what is a beautiful opportunity for us and something we can totally do but interesting irony here it's harder for small homes to become passive house than big buildings so if you have a 10 unit Condo building if you have a Walmart sized building it's actually easier than if you want to build a carriage house in your backyard which is ironic and that has to do with how the square footage is calculated or square footage and volume and the energy density required like if you build a home that's 100 square feet or 3 000 square feet you need one furnace and one furnace uses a certain amount of energy your hot water uses a certain energy so it's kind of like this uh there's a minimum thing and your windows and doors are less efficient less thermally efficient than your walls because you don't get an R40 door but you might get an R40 wall well a small house in a big house has a front door and a back door and it's like so you're dealing with these inefficient zones in a much smaller square footage which actually penalizes your energy utilization and that that's just real it's unfortunate because you're thinking I'll shrink it and make it more is it more efficient yes is your overall energy consumption a small home better than on a giant home absolutely you're you're but the density is higher and passive host standard is oriented towards density and we'll get to this all right we'll get to this it's and this because there's here's their limitation based on your meters squared like your square footage thing if you're if you're in the states that's okay meter squared is like yards squared and so which means there's some limitations in terms of the shapes you know the sizes the features the sizes of Windows and the type of features that go into a certified passive house if you love lots of Windows and an open fireplace that might just be the thing that makes it so you can't quite hit this performance standard of passive house and so you get to weigh out it's like what do I really care about doesn't mean you can't have a really really really efficient home and I I wrote a Blog where I'm like so if this is the standard you can't use more than 15 kilowatt hours per meter squared per year okay and you end up using 16. you don't get the standard do you have an amazing home at 16 kilowatt hours per meter squared per year yes are you well below industry yes but doesn't mean passive house standard no so you're not going to get certification even if you have an amazing home that is also very reasonable to offset Net Zero with solar just just saying um and while we're on this and this is this is real for me you know and I'm sitting here license Builder been doing this for 15 years like I I understand buildings and building science and I care a lot about homes that last a long time they're beautiful all this and I look at this and and and I'm confused you know I just 40 48 and a half inches makes sense to me 15 kilowatt hours per meter squared per year huh like I just it's not tangible which I think is one of the barriers to this whole thing about energy efficient homes and some of the measurements we're using about and like why is the K lowercase when the watts is uppercase and the hours lowercase the meters squared it's daunting and I think this is one of the reasons why people won't build homes is the just it's intangible sometimes when you're trying to hit this target I actually don't know what this means in real life I'm being honest with you right now like what is 15 kilowatt hours per year my lived experience when I walk into a home versus 16 versus 20 I couldn't tell you intuitively I'd have to go to the calculations and see the energy utilizations or if in your home the home you live in right now you you need to look at your utility bill and see how many kilowatt hours per year you use based on last year's utilization and then divide that by your square footage or your square meters and that's how you and I would get the answer but I don't there's no intuitive here and I see that as a genuine barrier barrier to trades barrier to homeowners barrier in the planning department because um yeah just saying I can look at a wall and go there's enough insulation in this wall this is what we need to see this is too small this is totally like I can see that intuitively just by walk but there's a tangibility to going not good enough close definitely good enough that this doesn't offer unfortunately so moving into flexibility you know this rigid performance standard is based here and it's here all the way around the globe and there's no flexibility based on geography which means that people in California or Seattle Washington are going to have a much easier standard with this okay because how often are you turning your furnace on full blast in Seattle now there's the inverse of this is air conditioning so if you're in Arizona you're going to have some challenges hitting your cooling demand because it's a heating and cooling standard okay so there's there's inverses here but all in all the heating heating demanded climates which is like all of Canada it poses some challenges so if you're in Bismarck North Dakota which is right under Winnipeg where I grew up it's like it's cold and it's cold for a long time so if you're going to hit the standard in Seattle your wall assemblies can be this thick if you're going to do it in Bismarck you're out here which is like 8 to 12 inch thick walls of insulation which is a lot now imagine if you had to go from eight to twelve okay so that's 50 increase in insulation cost what are you going to have to do to your windows you're not going to be able to get away with uh I'm going to say a low performing triple bass playing triple pane glass you're gonna have to go to a high performing triple pane glass now all triple panes High performing for the most part especially if you're in I say the fiberglass foam filled insulation because there are people making low quality triple pane glass windows selling them is super high performance and you're a homeowner going oh I got triple pain you've got crap because it's wrapped in vinyl or something like that so it ends up not performing because all the energy is leaking through the spacers and the around the perimeter of the frame and all that stuff so so anyways if you go to here's just this is just a hack if you're getting a triple pane glass with foam filled fiberglass no manufacturer is going to go through the effort of manufacturing that that assembly without doing the diligence of making it good so it's a way of kind of setting a minimum for yourself you don't have to go on to the passive House website to get pre-qualified building materials if you don't want to but if your local manufacturer distributor is selling a fiberglass foam-filled triple pane glass assembly odds are it's a high performing assembly maybe you're getting R8 might not be R9 or r10 but you're getting at least R8 so as a just a rule of thumb I'm not looking at your data sheets on your window assemblies but that's part of like that intuitive guide to know if it's the right fit for you in the field because you got to make a lot of decisions on this stuff so no flexibility based on geography if you want to go to Alaska if you want to go to the Yukon understandably more insulation more complexity bigger walls means more lumber it means more insulation more complexity like how do you hang 12 inches of insulation off the outside of a building and then put cladding on the outside these are real construction challenges that are geography based which are required in order to hit this performance standard with this maximum so there it is now there's hope there's some there's some space here you know fias you know passive house Institute of the United States does offer some Regional flexibility and and just I'm going to wave my hand and say I am a big fan of this because there's already enough obstacles to getting the idea of Net Zero high performance homes to mass Market and if you just make it feel like it's punitive to people you know it's just harder for some people it feels unfair I think that's going to add another barrier there's already have to pay for the cost and complexity so let's make it realistic so that you know the guy that builds a 16 kilowatt hour per meter squared home is rewarded for that for saying well done you're rocking it we need more people like you tell your friends and family your whole neighborhood let's do this we need we need to get because he's in Bismarck and he needs a little more time on his furnace you know it's like let's reward people for taking these steps um and fias does that there's some flexibility and I'm a fias certified or anything like that I just I'm a big fan of what they're doing because it feels more realistic um sometimes these these standards can feel punitive and I just I don't like that we don't need that sense in the market um net zero this is a big one if you're in business this is like if you're a developer um or you're in trades or your contractor I want you to understand that Net Zero is the language of the industry and because I started with passive house because it was the gold standard and then got into it and realized that passive house is akin to like Tesla 10 years ago it's like oh yeah they're doing it over there you know and it's like it's awesome but it's not mainstream yet it's very it's an elite standard and and then it is it's the gold standard okay so that's awesome but Net Zero is what the governments are using what municipalities are using it's what people starting are starting to I want I want a net zero home or at the very least I understand what it means it doesn't Net Zero doesn't require you want to understand this it just means that if it's 15 you make 15 and you spend 15 at zero if this number is 87 you make 87 you spend 87. Net Zero you know so there's there's a sense of intuitive understanding present here that and that's why the language around that zero is just just where it is is where it's going doesn't mean municipalities don't honor passive house because municipalities perhaps understand more inclusively what it is um but this is where the orientation is currently so just be aware of that and a big overarching thing here is like technically you don't need certification to have an incredible home I think it's one of the biggest drawbacks to to building a a passive house and going through the extra expense is like you're going through extra expense and at the end of it you get the consideration throughout but then you you get a plaque it's a little plaque is a certified passive house home you need to put that by your front door and you get to be proud of it but you don't need that plaque to have an you could have a passive house that's not certified and it's still all the benefits of the passive house and did you save the certification cost yes note that if you save the certification and auditing expense you also save that auditing which means that you didn't get audited because you're gonna have to pay for that auditing if you so there's there's a chance that in the design phase some of the thermal bridging would be missed which is just one of those really important parts of building high performance home is a thermal Bridge free construction you're balanced heating and air conditioning with through heated HRV and Erv which is a heat recovery ventilator energy recovery ventilator those might just get missed or not as thoroughly calculated which kind of puts you back into that you know phpp modeling software it's the gold tier and auditing helps guarantee that so just know it know that going into it and decide if that's the right if you're comfortable with the compromise or the ambiguity but regardless of what you do Net Zero or not um I I'm sold and this is what we do this is where we are is that passive house is a great guiding Foundation if I had a client says I don't want to get certified in passive house I want to build a net zero home perfect we're still building with this in mind we're still using phpp to model it because the software is a standalone it might not pay for the auditor to do it but we're going to use this Foundation because it offers Clarity and accuracy they can guide you to materials and they're going to set the Benchmark that you can weigh others against and see where the gaps are that you're willing to accept so I I have high honor for these folks they don't get paid selling products they're not hustling you and I that gets paid to sell training because they're passionate about it and they've dedicated their lives to this so um lots of lots of honor to do for these folks but Hey listen I hope that helps I did it in two pages this has been a years of Journey and study and practical field application and whatnot I'm like hey let's make this clear this is why you should hands down and hey this is why you shouldn't all the best have a great day

Channel: Level Up Strategies

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Id: VXGli1G2YMM

Length: 31min 18sec (1878 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 27 2022