What It's Like Living in a Passive House

casey gray here from the conscious builder and today i'm here to tell you what it's like to live in a passive house simply put it's awesome but i know you want more details than that so our specialty lies in building healthy comfortable and efficient homes and that is really hard basically impossible to put into a pretty picture on instagram or to convey through an award that we won for a design or something like that so this is really something that you need to experience and obviously it's hard to experience it without having to do it yourself so i'm here to share my experiences after living after building and then living in a certified passive home for four years the most notable thing that i noticed by far was how fresh the house always was and this really hit me a couple years after we lived in the house we actually left for an extended period of time we went to florida in the winter so the house was left vacant and closed up for weeks and i would come back and when i when i came back i would walk into the home and all i could smell was fresh wood so all the wood that we had throughout the home you know we had reclaimed wood floors all of our baseboard and trim work was was wood that we that came from my mom's property and the backsplash there's just wood everywhere in the house and that's what i smelt and it was so refreshing after coming from florida where the homes are filled with mold and mildew because of all the humidity to come back into that was such a good feeling to know that that that is what we had been living in uh for the two years prior to that we continued to live in after that obviously and it was far from what i expected or what anybody would expect after leaving a home closed up and sealed for an extended period of time another thing we loved about the house was how thick the window sills were how wide the windowsills were because of how thick the walls were and you could really use those window sills for anything we had plants herbs we were growing all sorts of stuff but you could put books up there we used it for all sorts of different things you could have even put a cushion up there and turn it into a reading nook and all the bedrooms if you wanted to we didn't end up doing that but it's something that could be done and that that thickness or that that width of the windowsill would really depend on where the window would sit in that assembly we decided to put it towards the outside so that we could take advantage of that and we designed our windows so that the windows weren't opening in and sweeping off of the windowsills so that's a huge benefit to having a nice thick wall assembly is you can use that for extra storage but also an extra design feature it's just a nice to have and if you're using these window sills as a bench or if you have any furniture close to these window sills another benefit is there's no drafts right most windows aren't drafty but they feel like there's a draft if they're not designed or if they're not built properly and that's what the convection current would create that cold from the glass it's the warm air and then it creates a current we didn't have that at any of the windows and these windows which you can get for really any house the certified pacifist windows will be to the to the next level but putting a lot of attention and detail into windows is a huge benefit for comfort and once again for air tightness you want to make sure those those windows are sealed tight because a lot of sound could come through those windows as well and of course the utility costs were extremely low uh yes we had solar panels on it you don't need that for a certified passive house that was able to offset the already low bills that we had we did have the electric car and that was charging but the utility cost the heating and cooling demand was already reduced significantly by doing this and one of the things that really adds to that is those windows that i mentioned and the air tightness because the comfort and the efficiency isn't just measured by the temperature on your thermostat it's how you feel if you're by a drafty window in a house that has all sorts of leaky points air cold air coming into it you're going to turn that thermostat out but if the home with the envelope is done properly and you're comfortable everywhere you can actually turn that temperature down on the thermostat which actually saves you more energy just because the home is built better so a huge advantage to being in a certified pacifist and of course all of these things are great and these are the reasons why we will be building another certified passive house however i do want to point out a couple things that in theory were supposed to work well but in reality they in my opinion they didn't work very well and the biggest thing was using the sun to heat the house so i want to point out that there's a difference between a certified passive house and just a passive solar house the certified pastors we actually got the certification it was modeled and we took advantage of the sun but it's not necessarily a requirement we were able to on the site so that means we positioned the house we had overhangs to block the sun in the in the winter or sorry block the sun in the summer and then in the winter the sun would be lower in the sky and would let the sun in what we realized in theory is that it it worked well on paper but after living in it what we realized is that it wasn't very comfortable the house would actually overheat in the winter and yes we could have put shades up and we could have put blinds or done something to block it on those hot days but that kind of defeated the purpose we wanted the sunlight we wanted that natural daylight to come in we didn't want to necessarily block it but i would be less concerned about orientation in the future so the sun although it helped great if you're if your house gets too hot you're going to be opening up windows so what's the point of having all that all that heat come into your house if you're not going to keep it because it gets too hot so i'm definitely a fan of using the sun to produce energy and then using that energy to control everything within your home because we'll be able to offset the energy costs with the solar panels and that was a big thing for myself it wasn't a make or break deal we weren't upset about it or anything but it is something that i like to inform people when they're concerned about the perfect site and getting the best building site and orienting it and getting all those windows south facing don't be too concerned about it if we build the envelope well we make it airtight it's actually more comfortable if we can mechanically control the temperature inside because then we can maintain a temperature throughout the home as opposed to relying on the sun to heat it because when the sun's on it's on you're not going to be able to turn it off when when all of a sudden your temperature in your house gets up to this set point the second thing i like to point out and i feel like i need to point out is that when you add all that extra air tightness details and all of that extra insulation is that when you're keeping the sound out you're also keeping the sound in so understand that any sound that's within that house is going to travel if you don't find a way to block it so we could hear people from one end of the house to the other without a problem we were able to close off and insulate our mechanical room which is great but that's another reason why we went with two ervs because we wanted to keep the cfm low so that that air traveling through the ductwork lower so we wouldn't hear it echoing throughout the house 24 7 because they would run 24 7. as i mentioned we will be building another certified passive house and this one will be better than the last because obviously we've learned a lot and our design has changed too either way the best thing about living in a passive house is how we felt about that house it felt good to live in that house it felt good to share that house we slept better at night knowing that we were doing something good for the environment for the industry and that's something that we are missing and we were looking forward to getting back to so like a heated steering wheel if you've never had a heated steering wheel you should try that too but just like a heated steering wheel a car when it's really cold you don't really understand what you're missing until you don't have it and a passive house is exactly just like that thanks for watching another episode of the conscious builder show i know passivhaus can be the extreme but we are building a lot of other really cool exciting projects including the three-day cottage which is our first official youtube series which will be released this coming spring so stay tuned if you haven't already subscribe and you'll get all the updates

Channel: The Conscious Builder Inc.

Views: 16,055

Rating: 4.8886309 out of 5

Keywords: custom home builder, efficient home, comfortable home, sustainable, green energy, energy efficient, construction, general contractor, healthy home, whats it like living in a passive house, living in a passive house, passive house, what its like living in a passive house, sustainable home, how to build a passive house, what is a passive house, net zero home, family, casey grey, design, passive house experience, certified passive home, fresh air, air tightness, fresh wood, wood

Id: Y4vi7SB-7tg

Length: 8min 12sec (492 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 04 2021