How thick are the walls in your home? No seriously, how thick are they? The majority of home owners have walls that simply don’t maintain the inside temperature. This loss in efficiency means excess heating in the winter and excess air conditioning in the summer. What about your roof line, does it even help to heat and cool your house? Unfortunately, the answer is likely not.
It is an uphill battle constantly trying to keep your home properly heated while the walls and windows themselves leak costly heated air. A Passive House has outer walls that are much better insulated compared to almost all other house designs. This usually translates to thicker walls overall. Passive Houses are also much more heavily sealed to prevent the leaking of heated or cooled air to the outside. Looking at the windows we see they follow the same path as the outer walls. Because they are designed to have a much higher efficiency rating, they tend to be thicker. As you can see from the two images, the windows on the left is a regular window thickness, whereas the right example is one suitable for a passive house. When your home is better insulated and sealed the less electricity is needed to maintain your preferred temperature.
Windows Suitable for A Passive House Provide Superior Insulation
In a passive house additional heating and cooling is almost not needed in the Lower Mainland. Ceilings are higher and angled or with an overhang to let summer heat rise out of your home and provide shade coverage. In the winter, this roof overhang is situated favouring the lower winter sun angle heating the house. An air recirculation system is used to makes sure the air temperature is evenly distributed throughout the home.
Sun’s Rays at Different Times a Year Shining on a Passive House
Imagine for a moment what it would mean for your day to day budget if you were spending as much as 90% less on energy every month? Imagine the potential for your liquid asset availability in the short term. Long term, imagine the appreciated value of your home as demand for Passive Houses keeps rising. VictorEric has a distinguished build pedigree with an award-winning design team and we specialize in building Passive Houses. We are best suited to making sure your investment targets the growing green market demands of today for and years to come.
