What's Happening

People often ask us what is a passive house. Normally people confuse a passive house with a passive solar house. Well we finally have some pictures that really bring home the difference between a passive house and regular home or a passive solar home. Before I get into the specifics I just wanted to give my view of what a passive house is. There are three main concepts behind a passive house:

1. Super insulation
2. Reduced air exchanges (how much air leaks from your house)
3. Reduced thermal bridges (the ways that heat can leave or enter the home)

When you combine these three concepts you can radically (up to 90%) reduce the energy demands on heating and cooling. In other words you don’t have to heat and cool the air around your house just the inside of the home. The pictures we’ve recently uploaded demonstrate this. For example, you want to seal everything so that no air will leak. In the sealing picture you can see that the outside shielding is sealed to the outside framing providing for an air tight enclosure. The exterrior framing is futher air proofed by adding a rubber gasket that sits between the exterrior framing and the basement walls. Additionally, thermal bridges are reduced because a  gap between the framing exists so that the framing doesn’t reach from the inside of the home to the exterrior. The gap in this shot will be filled with insulation.

It is pretty exciting to see the home start to come together and some of the passive house concepts be put into practice.

In addition to flower picking, this week, the second floor framing began and you can really start to see the shape of the home as well as the home’s relation to the neighbor’s home. In terms of design work we picked out cabinet colors and started the countertop discussion. We’ve also picked out the final layout and cabient design for the master bathroom. And the final cabinet design for the kitchen. We tried to match the size of our desired cabinets with those that are sold at Ikea and we were unsucessful at finding a couple.

So this week Rebecca and I took off from work to help define some of the landscaping and other items that we have been neglecting. We started this week by taking a look at some plants. We started by going to a couple of the local nurseries but eventually wound up at the Jordan Water Conservatory. We saw a bunch of cool ideas, and have uploaded them to the design section of see our house. Check out the Jordan Water Conservatory web site there are many more images there.