I mean windows are what: the eyes to
the world and the pains in our asses. So um but i mean they're letting you know
the goal is on a site like this you buy, these clients bought, this lot for the views and
one of the first things you learned through the Passive House trainings is you don't sacrifice
the lot and the views just so you can have a well-insulated wall. If you've got views
of mountains then you go for the views of the mountains and you build the rest of the house
around that so the windows here were giving us the views primarily and also day lighting. We're
not getting too much of the daylight now because our lights being absorbed by the concrete and
the plywood that we still have exposed but once we have our finishes in there the lights going to
bounce off our floors and bounce off our plastered walls and our our tile centerpiece there. It
will really feel that effect of the daylighting. Often times windows seem to just be
thought of as needing to be operational and an operational window is going to have
a lower performance than a big huge fixed piece of glass so we have nine window units in
this house and we only have one two three four operating five units so we have a lot of fixed
glass in this house that's giving them the views and the daylight that's really important to them
and we have just a few operating units to give them the ventilation they need. We also have a
15-foot-wide nine-foot-tall folding accordion door that's going to give them plenty of ventilation.
So okay so as we were just talking about the differences between fixed and operational
units and why we've used a lot of fixed windows in this house and not very many operational
units but we've also used combos so this is a really important spot for us to
have glass. They're going to have a really beautiful garden right outside this window,
but this is also a good spot for us to have ventilation. It's on the north side of the
house and it's also their laundry room. So this larger unit here is a fixed pane of glass
and then we just have a small operational unit and if you tilt it in so it can be open
for ventilation and then you can close it and the whole thing can be opened fully
over the top of the laundry room countertop. The difference between these windows and
say a conventional or a code minimum window and why we use them. What we've found just
through the energy modeling that we do- even if you weren't building to a passive house
standard and you were just building to a code standard the the three kind of pillars that would
make the biggest difference would be air sealing, exterior insulation and then also better windows.
So right now california code minimum u-value u-factor is .30 and we're at .17 on these windows
so we're about twice as good. So that's about an r5/r6 for our windows just by using better
windows. It makes a gigantic difference in the total performance of the
house. These are Zola windows. They're made in Poland. There are American
companies making triple pane windows that are really good windows and we will probably use
some of those companies on our next projects. I really like these windows a lot, but
i'm not beholden to any one manufacturer. Passive House really does come down to the details
we talk about it in the big picture scheme of things a lot and the the big effects that it
could have on the planet, on people's comfort, on your inhabitants health, the occupants of
the home. That's all great big macro stuff and big picture stuff but it really does come down
to the little details of the hands that put it into the opening and then and tape it off.
The details are really important. The manufacturing you know on-site manufacturing of
taped corners so that they fit just right into all four corners and then putting your three-inch
tape. Wrapping it behind the aluminum rain screen and tucking it in and then sealing it to our
liquid air barrier which is also acting as a primer for the tape. All of those little details
make the big difference in how they get installed, how they operate, how they work, how they function
,how they perform. so that's our air sealing envelope and then the actual operating windows
themselves fortunately they come out pretty square straight out of these factories but if you're
trying to do this with a typical American window the chances of your window sealing on all four
sides perfectly (it's that sound that kind of like like you can hear that like instantly with these
windows) there's a lot of finagling that you'd have to do to get that right in a typical
American window. Often will you might get 90 percent of it but that last 10 percent that's
not working means your window's ineffective. The little details of how we installed this one
or all of these windows that's that kind of makes the big difference. It creates our air sail,
gives us that little room to a backing to pack our insulation in there, and stop that thermal
bridge in between the window and the frame.
