Floreat Passive House Sustainability Tour. Architecture by Ben Caine, Leanhaus

foreign [Music] I'm the founder and architect of greenhouse and this is my house tour so the idea behind this house is to come up with a really compact cost-effective family home and I wanted to build it as efficiently as possible using as less material as possible so we've got this rectangular shaped house with a simple single pitch roof and that roof line allows us to have nice high ceilings through the whole house house is unique because we've really designed it for flexibility and this front portion of the house here is actually a self-contained apartment and we're renting it out at the moment but it could easily be used as a home office or a space for family or even just an extra bedroom and an extra living space um yeah and as you can see they've got their own entrance and they've got their own garden but it's still under the main roof of the house but this house is built to pass a car standards assist not certified but we've used a really Big Timber stud 170 mil Timber start to pack as much insulation as possible and we've got this really nice thick sturdy walls use a really limited palette of materials in this home we've used Color Bond on the eastern and western facades where it needs to be really robust but in the more protected areas we've used this beautiful iron Ash Timber and the good thing about where we've used it is that it's kind of protected from the Sun and from the weather so it should last a really long time without me needing to be recoated it's really important for a passive house to use upvc windows and doors with double glazing but we always try to make sure we get really great cross ventilation in the house so what we've done here is we've put a side Light Window next to the front door and that opens to let the amazing like breezes through and and flush out the house and inside the windows we have these blinds so that if you want privacy from the front door you can have it but during the day sometimes we just leave it down so you can see the views out with the skillion roofs we're really able to push the ceiling up high and get this sense of space and flow but the problem with high ceilings is it quite often acoustically it sounds really bad from Echo so we've actually installed these um acoustic plasterboard ceilings throughout the main living areas of the house and that really helps to deaden the sound and make the place more comfortable you so wherever we have east or west facing windows in the house we've got external roller shutters they do a fantastic job of cutting down the heat gain on the glass in the mornings or the afternoons and the other benefit is the kids can well the bedrooms can be pitch black at night and also great security main living space it's north facing directly out onto our garden we've been able to push the ceilings up high under that single story roof and as you can see we've got the acoustic ceilings ceiling fans are really important and it's nice big 2.7 meter high double glazed lift and slide doors with plastic house it's really important that you don't have gas appliances so this house is full Electric so we've got electric carbon and induction cooktop and we've got a recirculating downdraft extraction built into the crop top it's really handy it's really quiet and it does the job really well so here you can see we've got the vents for the air conditioning system this is actually a bulkhead split system and it's just the only place with air conditioning supplied in the house and above it this is a exhaust vent for the heat recovery ventilation unit so we have exhaust in all the wet areas like bathroom laundry kitchen and we Supply fresh air to all the Living Spaces like bedrooms living room activity rooms stuff like that through the kitchen we've got the fridge appliances pantry and then through into the laundry is where we keep the heat recovery ventilation system and that air conditioning controls the house does have air conditioning we've got one small six kilowatt split system and it helps really well to just take the edge off the really hot days but generally we're only setting the temperature to 25 or 26 degrees and with the constant humidity of the passive house it's super comfortable in a tight house it's got to be ventilated right this house has a heat recovery ventilation system by Zender that's bringing in fresh air from outside which is then filtered and tempered by the outgoing stale air so it helps to maintain a constant level of humidity in a constant temperature inside it's got filters that are easily cleaned or replaced if we need to and it's also got different speeds generally we don't need to touch it but if you're having a shower or if you're cooking something you can boost the fan space and it will extract more air faster very very energy efficient it uses about 80 watts of power which is about the same as the super small like LED TV so for this house it was really important to me that we used as little material as possible and we've been able to completely eliminate steel structure from the build even with these really big wide openings we've worked closely with the Builder and the engineer to do it 100 in Timber and I think it's a really great result and dogs need doors and an airtight home and the problem is like what is the right solution for allowing a dog to come and go but still keep that open airtight so we've actually sourced these doors from the United States and they're really clever they're rated for Passive house in terms of fair thermal efficiency but they also seal their tight from both directions so the dog can come and go as they need to probably the most energy hungry part of the whole house would be the swimming pool and it's a bit of an Indulgence to have it heated as well by a heat pump so the house has got 10 kilowatts of solar installed and that's more than enough energy to heat the pool run the hot water and run everything in the house and we actually have Surplus energy being put back into the grid all the equipment is tucked around tucked away down the side of the house so you can see we've got our stable ltron heat pump hot water system I've got the heat pump for the pool the pool equipment and just behind there is the small six kilowatt air conditioning system part of the idea with this project to keep the house quite compact was to protect the potential of subdividing the block you know later in life and so we've done that by keeping a nice four meter wide driveway down the side of the house to the rear and there's enough space here that could easily be turned into another home or even an ancillary dwelling for the moment though we've installed a shed and that's where we keep all our toys and the kids play area helped us decide what plants to use we've got this waterways Garden these are all natives they're planted from like tube stop and we've got Jiff irrigation which comes directly off the ball it's really water wise driving they've only been in his life three or four months for joining me on the tour of my lead house I would love to hear any questions or comments that you've got so visit the website leanhouse.com or visit us on Instagram and leave a comment there

Channel: The Lean Architect

Views: 47,854

Keywords: Passive House, Passivhaus, newhome, sustainabledesign, pertharchitect, architecture, timber, perth, australia

Id: jy9Mg-58_gM

Length: 7min 53sec (473 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 22 2023