Advocates of passive house design promise a lot of benefits, but the past few weeks of cold weather and combined with power failures have tested the mettle of high performance buildings of all kinds. JLC (the Journal of Light Construction) has a look at a few of them and finds that with or without electricity, during the worst of the Polar Vortex, the people living in these houses were snug as a bug in a rug.
In Chris Pike’s Passive House in Vermont, they don’t use the heat pump at all, just the occasional fire in the wood stove.
The article also looks at a co-housing project in Maine where the power went out for five days, but the temperature never dropped below the mid-fifties.More in JLC: Cold Snap Tests High-Performance Homes
© Baukraft Engineering
JLC points to a post by Cramer Silkworth of Baukraft, who shares the data on a Passive House renovation in Brooklyn that is heated by a little mini split heat pump that wasn’t even turned on through most of the cold snap. He writes:
Perhaps they should be called Resilient Houses, not Passive Houses
Two years ago, Alex Wilson of BuildingGreen made the case for resilient design, noting:
With respect to insulation, he wrote:
At the time of this writing, Hundreds of thousands of people are without power right now in Pennsylvania. The whole Northeast has been going through cold like we haven’t felt for years. If anyone ever needed a lesson in why we should stop building glass towers and why we should be building to far higher standards of insulation, this has been it. The people who are living in Passive Houses are sitting pretty while everyone might freeze in the dark.
