Living In A Passive House: Theory vs. Reality

Casey alright so I figured coming to this presentation the bunch of Engineers I might as well talk about theory versus reality after living in a passive home so before I get into all that and I'll ask if everybody knows with passive homes essentially this is me in a nutshell the reason I do what I do is because of the people you see in that I am obviously an adventure seeker as well the van is what slows me down it's not electric maybe one day it'll be electric I do race the Volt though I have done that now has been fun so I can attest all of that well my journey around the sustainability really started with the little guy there and when he came into this world that's when my whole mindset changed so that's why I think it's important to show this slide because now I'm thinking about the future does anybody here is everybody familiar with Passivhaus or should I say there's anybody not heard of Passivhaus before so essentially most of you have heard of it pacifies it's actually a certification so if you go through the certification process it's modeled it's one of the only it's one of the most rigorous building standards in the world so if you want to go through it they don't really care about the products that you use they care about how your house performs and this is the basics to it so if you can orient your house properly you can gain from the solar you have all of your living spaces on the Sun side you have you want to make it as airtight as possible you have super insulated walls high-performing windows and then you mechanically ventilate your whole house so yeah when you make it really airtight you need to make sure that you're bringing fresh air into that system so that's basically how in theory a passive house would work I'll get into what worked and what didn't work when we built our house but this is the five most important factors so I've reordered this since I've done presentations over the last few years because I think it's most important to when you're designing building a house these things in this order so if you can start with the envelope the envelope being your walls your roof your windows doors that sort of stuff here wall assembly is going to be our value and your airtightness your windows is going to be where you how well they perform where you place them in the house are they on the north side the South Side east west that sort of thing right because you can only block the Sun on the south side and you can't really block it on the east and west unless you're getting into shades that are moving and so forth and then you never have to worry about sun on the north side fresh air system it becomes extremely important when you build a house and the overhangs if you can an orientation if you can and I'll get into some of those areas because once again if we can all do it perfectly we've all explained what I think but everybody wants something different you want to make it look good just like electric cars if it doesn't look good people aren't gonna buy it this is so we've done now five passive houses around the city for different architects and we started the first one that I had done was for ourselves so we tested it on our own house and we wanted to do something that wasn't reinventing the wheel so we weren't reframing a whole house in a completely different way one of the concepts behind building a super insulated wall is you have to really understand building science and a lot of the people that you'll talk to says they say to put the load-bearing portions towards the inside which makes sense because if you ever have any moisture issues you won't really know if it's on the outside there's the possibility of it happening is going to be higher on the outside I decided to put it on the outside because of the constructability and we actually started building this house in November and I remember when we built this house we're building in our 2000 home at the same time we basic got the foundation and put the insulation down on the slab and it snowed and it never stopped so we wanted to get it closed in as quickly as possible and that's just a reality of building in our climate right if it was if everything was perfect we'd be starting construction in the spring and all of our houses would be closed up by the time it snowed and we'd be doing all the interior work and be perfect right but unfortunately it doesn't work like that in construction or anything really mr. setpoint so here's what our wall assembly ended up being like I ended up with about our seventy three and a half so to give you an idea of what that is if you're not a hundred percent sure that is if you were to buy an older home for example like 2x4 construction if it has insulation you might have our twelve in their houses nowadays minimum building code there's different building packages but typically the the building code now is our 24 and what they're doing is they're requiring you to either go within our 24 baht which is more expensive or usually you do in our 22 bat you put one inch of exterior insulation and you get rid of the thermal bridges so things are changing so the way the building code is going they're saying that all houses need to be Net Zero by 2030 we'll see if that actually happens once again it's the economies of scale how do we make it cheaper I think the bigger problem is how do you train people to build better because there's there's a whole lot of people that need to put these houses together and we need to make sure that they're putting it together properly and then what do you do with all the houses that I already built that's not going anywhere and that's where the majority of our housing is right now so the way we got our our seventy three and a half is we did two inches of insulation on the outside and then a typical 2x6 wall within our 22 back so that was our structure and then once we got everything air sealed on the inside of that we have a half-inch accel extreme sheeting which is our air barrier and then we would do that so that would be here so I'm talking from the outside here so this is the two two inches of rock cell here this is our 22 there's a space after we put our inside wall so this is all load-bearing stuff we were able to build the whole house and then after we had the roof on and after the air seal and everything was done then we could do all the stuff on the inside after the fact we also went with rocks all in this case which is now rebranded to rock wall I believe because there's no fire retardants it's rock it's naturally going to prevent any fires or sorry not catch on fire because of the rock the if it gets wet it doesn't lose its our value it can dry and it's totally fine if fiberglass gets wet for example it's garbage image we'll throw it out molds gonna grow under it loses our value so we wanted to if moisture or say when moisture gets in there because it probably will at some point I'm out she was a Holt or something who knows what's gonna happen so we went with rocks all so the vapor barrier I'm actually gonna talk about the demoscene an air barrier and a vapor barrier as well in this case our vapor barrier ended up being on the inside but our air barriers taken care of here with this half act half-inch accel extreme sheeting which is a fiber board and then we have our weather barrier here on the outside so we instead of doing our air barrier and our vapor barrier which you typically see in construction now on the poly and then that gets taped we we separated them so it's on the inside yes so this would be after we frame the exterior 2x6 wall so this wall here and after we she'd the underside of the trusses and we seized it and we taped all the joints because we wanted to build the chaise below that because we had to run ductwork for all of our ventilation system we had to run electrical and pot lights and all sorts of things we wanted to make sure that we were penetrating our air barrier so our air barrier on the roof side is actually the OSB which is also our vapor barrier so to go with 5/8 well some actually half inch OSB or 7/16 so SB can be vapor barrier as well so and then we taped all the joints this is the excel extreme sheathing you see here which is typically used on the exterior buildings we used it here because it's permeable and then we taped everything from there if you count the masonry we're about two feet without the masonry about 19 and a half inches which ends up with really nice window wells on the inside if you keep your windows towards yourself which is part of it well everything we didn't drive all returns right these are all construction things to consider once you start going through it and this is part of the how do you train people to build houses like this because it's not cookie cutter type stuff so there is definitely even now like we do custom so we're used to it and the guys are always say well this wasn't on the plan just like if you guys are used to this we deal with it on on the site right because there's things are gonna be missed and we just need to deal with it when they come across it so this worked really well though so pre drywall Stefan was supposed to be here anybody Caesar ended in energy modeler island today I don't see him but we got 0.56 ACH air changes per hour pre drywall with this pacifies needs it to be 0.6 or less this same wall assembly goddess 0.44 on the house after it and actually when we did a pre drywall test on this this house which we didn't have our yep we had 23 foot wide windows we didn't have those in so we just had like poly and i think on the bottom of the basement we had like six guys sitting across the bottom of the tarp anyways thats construction windows didn't show up on time so here's the difference between air air barrier and vapor air this is really important when you get into building signs is that if people don't understand the difference between a vapor barrier and an air barrier there could be some issues there so the building code actually requires your air barrier to be continuous which in theory it isn't and it's never been done ever because if it was you'd have an ACH of zero and to my knowledge nobody has ever done that anywhere in the world so the air barrier needs to be just iced tight as possible but if you take care of that air barrier somewhere else in your wall assembly your vapor barrier does not need to be continuous so we did not have to tape our so this was our air barrier which ended up getting taped you can't really see the tape there because it's white as well the vapor barrier just went on and then we did actually a strip of what's called certainty membrane spelled em EMB Rai n and it's a it's a vapor permeable so it allows of a per would bigger pressure builds up on one side of the other it can actually travel through it so if there was any moisture in the wall it could dry towards the inside or the outside so windows this was the concept of our house before we actually got to it I'll show you pictures of it done but when you're thinking of windows with spacers are extremely important the spacers are what holds a glass apart so if you're ever shopping for windows if you're living in an older home and getting your windows replaced be sure your you ask for super spacers instead of aluminum spacers so they don't get that thermal bridge coming through that one of the things that we obviously knew about this going into it but these back windows you can't tell here I'll show you on another picture but they're about the walkout basement there's a 23 foot four and we had to carry masonry across that opening and the reason we had to do masonry is because the area that we built the house and had accommodates for brick stone or stucco on the exterior and I am NOT a fan of stucco so we went with brick so we had to do big steel beams and lentils and all sorts of other complicated things and we actually ended up having frost on the outside of our windows there at one point and that was new to me and I'm like oh what's going on called window guy needs a door that's actually a good sign that means that your windows are performing right because we don't have the heat loss so frost can build up on the outside of your window that means you don't have that heat loss coming from the inside just like frost builds up on your car or anything else that's outside so we actually had that happen quite a few times and now when you have your ACH it's so low you want to go with something that this is essentially like it says I can't really read to here but it says the lungs of your home so when you make your home tight you need to make sure that the fresh air can actually come into it and this makes for a comfortable home I'm also a fan does everybody heard of HR B's anybody not heard of a Chinese what about er B's so he actually stands for enthalpy usually people call them energy but people don't know what enthalpy means so they started calling them energy but what these are actually RVs and they allow Trent they allow the transfer of humidity through the core and HRV has a luminol core and I'm actually not sure what the material is in these cores but it'll actually allow vapor to travel through and these can run 24/7 whereas H RVs technically shouldn't be ran in the summer because that hot humid air from outside is being pulled into your house now in theory you don't really want to run that in the winter either because then you have that dry air coming into your house if you need moisture in your house so actually a good ERV which all the typical manufacturers doing of any like breath they're all doing good er vs now that don't freeze in our climate the issue with the air bees at the beginning is that the cores were freezing and our core is actually froze at the beginning they weren't supposed to and then that's why they they weren't working for our climate so there's and then you can go high and I won't get into all the different manufacturers but I definitely recommend er bees and run them 24/7 the this kind of gives you an idea of I had said that we were doing a chase below our roof trusses this is all the duct work that we had so our whole house to give you an idea our house as I say was because we actually sold the house last April so our house was 4,000 square feet with a big great room 17 foot ceilings in the middle of the house the whole house only needed 18,000 BTUs in theory to heat house typical house that size would need over about 90 I believe built a minimum building code so we heated the whole house with air source heat pumps we were phosphoryl free as well we got on the microf it we had solar panels on the roof I'll show you some numbers for that but one of the things we did to keep the house airtight is that we eliminated all of our fans so no bathroom fans no range hoods are in our dryer didn't vent outside so no range hood people have done that not a big deal you put it in charcoal filter you can do a lot of greasy fill cooking maybe you don't want to do that convincing people not to put bathroom fans in that's usually where I get some pushback however all of the bathrooms have exhaust fan have exhaust ducts and they all have booster switches so the idea is when you turn a fan on for example say you weren't running the through your ventilation system if you turn your kitchen range hood on or your bathroom fan that's sucking air out of your house and that air has to come into your house somewhere and that's going to come in just through leaks and holes and anywhere that a can in your house so by eliminating those you actually precondition the air that comes into your house so if it's minus 25 outside 20 degrees or 22 degrees inside and you turn on your booster switch it's actually going to go through the core and if your core through your fresh air system if it's 90 two percent efficient you're actually preheating the air with the air they sleep in the house as it's coming in as opposed to bringing in minus twenty five degree air outside so to give you an idea I'll go through all the math on this but I can obviously share this with everybody I think you get a copy of it on the website but they give you an idea say did put a big people love when we redo kitchens they love the big kitchen range hoods if you put a thousand CFM fan in and you run that you could lose based on being minus 25 degrees outside and 22 inside you can lose almost 9,000 BTUs by running that fan so that's energy that you have to then use to reheat your house so however you're heating your house that's just adding more energy whether you want to call the money you're adding to the energy grid however you're heating your house it's definite not a good thing so another the next thing would be overhangs if you can do overhangs you can design it great the issue is trying to get rid of thermal bridges is important and when you're adding exterior insulation I've mentioned we put two inches of insulation on the outside you have to attach structural members to that somehow so if you end up with details like this where you have like a 2 by 6 and you attach the roof - these are all the little details that you need to have everybody working together which makes it a lot more difficult to do these feels like this when you're building houses by the hundreds every year easy to do on the smaller scale harder to do on a bigger scale obviously if you can get good orientation great I'll explain what why I put this in this order later we were lucky enough we bought our lot knowing that we could face the house directly south so we angle it to get that full southern exposure and one of the things that let me tell you actually had six feet of peat moss on this lot so I basically blew my budget before I even had a foundation but that's beside the point it did work out really well in the end but yeah we had so much peat moss on our lot that we actually had a high hoe get stuck we had to get a bigger high hoe to come and pull the smaller high ho out of the mud I don't think my excavator let that one down for a while but this is the finished product so you can see this is back of the house these are the 22-foot windows I was mentioning this here actually from here to here is all open on the inside we have pictures on our website if you want to see interior shots but we pretty well designed this house exactly the way that picture was at the beginning when I showed you so the all the bedrooms we had four bedrooms so each window here is a bedroom this is another bedroom down which is actually my office but turn it into an ending suite all the living spaces have glass that's facing south and then we have the garage you can't see it but these windows here actually going to graduates a side entrance and then you can see the front smaller windows overhangs everywhere tried that we basically took a box cuz that's the most efficient shape and we try to make it look good and we put all the overhangs on and they were sized accordingly to block the Sun depending on the time of the year I on the east west and north sides nothing it just looks good it was nice to have a wraparound on the on the south side it actually blocks the Sun in the summer months but then when the Sun drops in the colder months then it allows it in so you can see this overhang up here although it doesn't look like much because these windows are three feet off the ground it actually does do something this overhang here is I think ended up being like six foot six I believe it was eight feet originally and then we pulled it back once we modelled it the top one I believe was 18 inches so but that all gets calculated too right so this could be less if it was closer to the top of the window and then the other thing too is that we had our windows towards the outside if you set your windows more towards the inside that gives you like the Sun comes in less as well right so it all depends on and these are all things that need to be modeled and put into the software I don't do any of the modeling stuff we get somebody else to do that we just work on the building side it depends on the modeling we wanted the big windowsills that's why we did it usually when you get into passive house certification and pacify certified windows most of them are European Tilt interns so they swing in so if they swing in then it's hard to you make use of that windowsill if you have wherever it's an operating window right so we ended up going with casement dumper on purpose and then this another example run at a time so I won't go through everything but this gives you a good idea of how we built it once again you can kind of see that it's exactly like the first picture that I showed you this would be the south side here all the windows and then smaller windows on the north side and then we basically had almost no windows on the east and west side because you can't block the Sun on those sides at all we did I won't get into it but we did do like a Swedish version of Swedish platform framing so typical construction is you Frank you have your foundation you sit your floor on your foundation you sit your wall on top of that floor your next floor sits on top of that the issue is that becomes an issue with the air barrier so this red line that you see going all the way around is our air barrier and the trick is how do you make that continuous we we ended up hanging our floor joists after the fact so once again another detail that we can do but training somebody else can be difficult so this is where we get in a little bit theory this is the new enter guide rating system has anybody seen the new one you might have seen the old one which is a scale from 0 to 100 and you have no idea what the number means but anyways the new system that's now out is the lower the number the better so this was actually my house it's supposed to be zero so in theory I was living in a Net Zero home in reality I was not and it was a big house but there's only three of us we had Airbnb had the office we do some work there and the house was never really full so we're always working on the house so there's tools running but this is before I got the electric car so I make don't worry about the dollar I was making money just because I was part of the micro fit but we were almost net zero and that's and that we didn't have any natural gas so that's hot water that's air conditioning heating that's everything so it was pretty close now we weren't net zero if you were to do it month by month in the winter months we were obviously we were not net zero and the summer months we were producing way more right but we were on the grid because we were selling it back through the micro fit now when we added an electric car to the mix we were basically double so our cost didn't really go up that much but we were using a lot more electricity so that's one of those things where theory versus reality is important to know right and testing these things because as soon as you throw humans into the mix it throws everything off because you don't really know you can't predict any of us right so or how we live and everybody's different and there's been studies done where they try to model the same house but then one house ends up being the laundromat for the whole neighborhood and that throws everything off right so there's all sorts of things yeah no they're all bebe and then we had an air-source heat pump hot water tank no I talked to my plumber about that and I didn't one of the things I didn't want to turn it into a science project didn't scare people away knowing that I would probably be selling it so by putting less I wanted to use technology that was readily available and easy for people to fix and the solar hot water what didn't really make sense cost wise for me with the solar panels producing the energy and using the air source heat pump hot water tank that he heats his house with or heats his water with oh yeah we doesn't have radiant so we're heating with air source heat pumps so the only thing we would have been doing is heating our hot water tank with it yeah I just didn't go through the paperwork and the cost of doing that I would probably be I don't I don't think I'd be LEED Platinum because I'm not close to bus stops the thing is I'm not i like lead and it focuses on materials but you get points like being a carpenter by trade you know the the LEED Platinum building for the trades at Algonquin is great but you have a wood shop that's full of glass and no parking for any of the trades people right so there are some things that just didn't make sense I'd probably be LEED Gold or something but I didn't actually talk to Stephanie about yes yes Mitsubishi she's units now he'd to - stay efficient - - 27 the I'm not sure the percentages I'm not sure if Stefan was here I'd be asking him for that but I know I can tell you that I'm not sure what the reason I don't know the specs on the refrigerants or anything so the ours were working - - at the time they were they said to - 25 so the new ones say - 27 those oh we never had so the thing is when it's really cold it's typically sunny out so we would get all the heat from the Sun because of all our south-facing windows now one of the big lessons I learned though in having all those windows is that I couldn't regulate temperature so I can / it is possible to over glaze so it's great I had all this heat coming from the Sun but it was minus 25 outside now I was like 28 degrees inside I was boiling and I couldn't sleep on it it was so that's a thing right so there's a theory in theory yes I'm producing a lot of heat and it's great but it's not comfortable right the only reason we do anything as humans is - really it's for a feeling is ultimately what we're going after right and if we're not comfortable in our house what's the what's the point so one of the things I've realized is that it is possible over glaze and yes it's great if you can get that heat from the Sun but understand that you can't turn the Sun off right Suns on or off ya know because re RVs at tui RVs in that system in that house that runs 24/7 eric.kolly she's wonder if I had any problems with air quality sir I didn't see who ever asked that we could we did it because we didn't have any rear neighbors so that is one thing but ultimately what you want to do is have blinds on the outside because if you have them on the inside it's already in your house so once again it's kind of counterintuitive there are windows out there now that actually have a fourth pane of glass that have blinds built into them and you can get all sorts of like solar sensors but it's adding cost right so what cost and where does it where does it make sense cuz i got i got pricing for windows for that house the this was five years six years ago my quotes range from 70 to 120 thousand dollars just for windows so that's you know that's a non-starter for most people right yeah but everybody likes simple right nobody wants to have to close the shutter yeah we avoid it whenever we can where we use it as in renovate renovations so if we can design to avoid spray foam that's what we'll do for multiple reason one of the biggest reason is that's the most expensive way to insulate and it has its places and we think that's really in renovations if we can design a house to avoid spray foam and actually do a better detail like what we did by hanging our floor joists that's what we would recommend you have a hundred year old house and we're trying to make it better spray foam makes sense the hallways are tight yeah probably one of the reasons we sold it so on that note the 4,000 square feet though that includes the basement so it was actually a 2800 square foot home with the 1200 square foot basement so the 4,000 square feet was absolutely everything so it was a four bedroom home with way too many bathrooms I don't know because I ended up doing a lot of the work myself it's not really legitimate but I can tell you like so I get this question a lot so I wrote a blog post about this building custom homes is expensive it doesn't matter if we build an energy efficient or not it's gonna cost more and I always get the question around well how much extra does it cost to build a passive home or our 2,000 nets or whatever it may be and I answer it like a politician I say well it really depends because I can build you that house same size same features same energy efficiency but I can instead of putting masonry on the outside reclaimed hardwood floors concrete countertops custom kitchen five and a half bathrooms cork flooring link instead of doing all those features I can do vinyl siding I can do carpet I can do an IKEA kitchen I can do all those things and it drastically reduces the price which means that the percentage that it went up to get to passive goes up as you know numbers being engineers right so it varies but I can tell you that where you spend your money when you build a morning do you fish at home it's gonna be your envelope so your insulation air ceiling details windows and doors and then in theory you can save money on your HVAC equipment but you usually end up spending more because you put in a better fresh air system and then you might go to like an air source heat pump for heating in the house which is about three times the cost of the furnace natural gas furnace yes most of our work is still renovations so I know I'll be on the panel that was the biggest don't rely on the Sun for comfort because too hot is not comfortable I'm sure now you can talk to Nicky's over there we do have the one thing one point out we do have a podcast and YouTube channel so check it out there we do answer a lot of questions we do all sorts of stuff there if you have any questions we're happy to throw them on there you have it somebody else

Channel: The Conscious Builder Inc.

Views: 88,904

Keywords: passive house, reality of living in a passive house, what is a passive house, sustainable building, ottawa passive house, ottawa custom homes, ottawa custom home builder, living in a passive house, custom home, the conscious builder, what does passive house mean

Id: 7WabCsWRRyY

Length: 31min 32sec (1892 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 28 2018