For a tiny, little-publicized, relatively new ultra energy efficient building movement, passive houses have quite a reach. Buildings built and in various stages of planning and construction can be found coast to coast in the U.S. and Canada.
As of this spring, there were over 50 educational, single family and multi-family buildings in the planning, pre-certified and certified stage in 23 states from Maine to California and Canada, according to the Passive House Institute in Urbana, Illinois.
A passive house in Maine with solar panels
To be sure, it’s not a groundswell. Indeed, compared to Germany, where the movement first was launched in 1996, and Austria it’s a barren landscape. Germany has over 15,000 passive houses and 17% of single-family housing starts in Austria are Passive Houses.
Still, it’s a start. The first Passive House was built in the U.S. in 2002 and 2003 by Katrin Klingenberg, a University of Illinois architecture professor, and her late husband Nick Smith. She lives in it today and is responsible for the design of the other three passive houses built in Illinois, half the national total of homes.
Though the numbers are few, they count for a lot. Passive houses are performance based and start proving their worth from the beginning. Through the development of simple shapes and using super insulation and few windows passive houses are able to achieve remarkable energy savings of some 90%.
Whether they can catch on the way they have in Germany and Austria is another matter. In practical terms, the design of the homes has little curb appeal. They’re little more than boxes with broad expanses of windows on the south side to catch the sun and a few small, generally fixed windows on the other three sides.
The first passive house built in the U.S.
The eight single-family home built so far were all custom built and it’s hard to imagine a developer stepping in to lay out a line-up of cubes on spec. The emphasis, at least in the much more successful European model, is to keep size down to well under 2,000 square feet, something Americans don’t particularly warm-up to either.
In fact, of the 8 homes built so far, the ones in Utah, Louisiana, Massachusetts and the one private home Klingerberg designed in Urbana are all bigger than average. Klingenberg’s home and the one in Maine are closer to the ideal. (The two other Illinois houses were special low-income constructions.)
Probably the big promise Passive Houses have in influencing home development is in showing the way on super insulation. They all have zero energy levels of averaging around 15 inches thick or over R-50. Triple pane windows, a staple of passive houses, may also gain widespread popularlity.
Neither the insulation or the triple pane windows are exciting to look at. Homebuilders will be adding something that costs more money too. Still, they wouldn’t make a house any uglier no matter how it’s designed, but they would reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions dramatically.
Paying more money for future savings is not what many homebuyers and builders want to hear now in this incredible housing slump, but the passive homes are reminder that it can be done for when the good times return.
