passivhaus / Green Building & Sustainable Home Renovation Information & Advice

...PassivHaus program that started in Germany and eventually became the global  Passive House movement. Here is a presentation Harold recently gave on the Saskatchewan Conservation House, which he has graciously allowed us to republish. His contributions to the building industry are immeasurable. The Saskatchewan Conserva...

First, the background to this Passivhaus My partner and I are geeks. Our idea of a romantic dream was to build a house so well insulated you could heat it with a hairdryer. For added fun, we wanted to do this on a tight budget while raising a young child. The hairdryer part wasn’t a pipe dream – it’s a common way of de...

...Passivhaus): the global specialists in comfort & low energy combined Its philosophy: Passive House has a primary, measurable goal - to create a highly-efficient building envelope that requires very little energy for heating and cooling. It is a rigorous performance standard, not a simple checklist. A home either me...

The Rainbow Duplex in Whistler is the first Passive House in BC The passive solar design and orientation of homes is anything but new. Solar heat collection is a technique that has been used in home construction for thousands of years. What is relatively new is the rating system developed to certify them. The Passive H...

WA paves the way for tiny home eco-villages: Tiny houses, also colloquially referred to as tiny homes, are both an increasingly attractive and affordable housing option as well as a trending alternative lifestyle choice across North America and Canada as people realize that “quality of life” doesn’t depend on surroundi...

...Passivhaus Planning Package (or PHPP), and did not have permission to change the software often stated as converting it from metric to English measurement units (although again, opinions vary). Feist also stated that PHIUS had begun a “competing professional certification scheme” while not following their official Pass...

Building a Passive House that's also LEED certified This is an owner blog Ecohome posted following the personal experience of Sarah Cobb and William Murray of Rocket Construction Inc. as they built a home in Abercorn, Montérégie, Quebec. Setting the bar about as high as you can, they targeted both LEED certification an...

Passive House construction on Vancouver Island Building the first certified Passive House on Vancouver Island, a duplex shared with our son Mark’s family, convinced us that the market in Victoria was ready for Passive House market condominiums. To follow through, we built the North Park Passive house, a six-unit urban ...

A resilient home for sustainability Northern Quebec isn’t a place where one might expect to look for a model of resilience. It’s bone-chilling cold in the winter with 10,450 heating degree days per year (Fahrenheit degree-days, base 65°F); there isn’t all that much sunlight in the winter, and Quebec—let alone northern ...

Along with its unprecedented achievements, the Kenogami House continues to act as a laboratory for resilient, cold climate building practices. Through software energy modeling it was determined that the Kenogami House would likely require 14.6 kWh of heat per square metre per year, but its actual performance seems to b...

The most resilient house in North America The first house designed under our Passive Solar Index (PSI) program won "Most Resilient House" in the 2013 Green Builder® Home of the Year Awards. The Kenogami House is a living laboratory of high performance design and technology, called "The Most Resilient House in North Ame...