Highland Passive

I was contacted this week by someone asking if I could investigate where their house was losing heat - they were paying a fortune in heating bills for a house (relatively new) that was still uncomfortably cold. This is a familiar and depressing story; exactly the same thing happened a few weeks before on a brand new build.
Looking at the websites of the architects and builders behind these houses they talk a good talk regarding energy efficiency, insulation, sustainability an...d environmental credentials, but they have clearly failed to deliver in these cases.
Employing a team to build you an energy efficient/sustainable/eco-friendly house with no objective definition of what that means and no third party quality control is roulette with very bad odds. Most new build homes perform much worse than they were designed to; on average requiring 60% more heating than predicted at the design stage, but it can be much more than this.
Passivhaus certification combines robust design standards with stringent third party quality assurance, meaning that this 'performance gap' is eliminated. Passivhaus buildings perform as they are designed to meaning you get a house that is supremely comfortable year-round, provides a healthy environment for you and your family and costs almost nothing to heat. Find out more at http://www.highlandpassive.com
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Just came across this article. Good simple myth busting regarding Passivhaus buildings: https://blog.passivehouse-international.o rg/eight-passive-…/

Our boiler stopped working at the end of last week, leaving us shivering through the weekend before it could be fixed (our house is a 70s build that has had no thermal upgrades besides better windows). This put me in mind of a couple of stories I'd heard about Passivhaus buildings in similar circumstances:
At a Passivhaus school in Wolverhampton the boiler stopped working for several days, in winter, before anybody noticed.
Someone had their thermostat set to 0 for five year...s without noticing.
Occupants in Passivhaus in Austria complained to the architect that their house was cold. Upon investigation it turned out the boiler had stopped working 4 days earlier. It was the middle of winter.
Passivhaus works, guaranteeing excellent comfort all year round, and even passable comfort should the heating system fail!
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Did you know that the check to see whether a new building meets building regulations for energy performance is based on average weather for the whole UK? That means whether a building is being built in Southampton or Skye it can be designed the same way. Look out the window today and ask yourself how much like Southampton our weather feels...
Certified Passivhaus buildings are designed for the specific climate where they are going to be built, meaning they work in that climate.

Reading this should give you a good idea of one of the main reasons Passivhaus buildings perform as well as they are designed to do; excellent quality assurance. This quality assurance is almost completely lacking in most new homes in the UK, and it is not uncommon for them to require several times more heating energy than they were designed to need, costing you more to heat and leaving your building less comfortable.

Passivhaus provides exemplary comfort. I'm aiming to rebuild the self-catering cabin my wife and I let through Airbnb to #Passivhaus standard so that more people can experience it for themselves.

Good bit of building physics geeky trivia for you.

While the recent spell of cold weather will have had many of us cranking up the heating, putting on an extra wooly jumper and cradling hot cups of tea, those lucky enough to live in a Passivhaus haven't even put their heating on yet! Check out the following tweets.
Juraj Mikurcik's award winning Passivhaus self-build in Hereford. Frosty outside, no heating on, still cosy, comfortable and healthy inside. https://twitter.com/JurajMikurcik/status/ 1056071778815168512 (this buildi...ng recently won an award from the Passivhaus trust, see here http://www.passivhaustrust.org.uk/project s/detail/…)
Ostro Passivhaus in Kippen (near Stirling). Freezing outside, toasty warm inside, no heating on. https://twitter.com/paperigloovo…/statu s/1056509590433681408
Preston Springs Passivhaus near Leyburn, North Yorkshire. 1°C outside, 20°C inside, no heating on. https://twitter.com/MarkSiddallR…/statu s/1056099691346231296
Andrew Michler's Passivhaus in Colorado. 0°C for 36h and a snowstorm, 21°C inside, no heating on. https://twitter.com/EsTresidder/status/10 57694631679442945
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Drying your laundry indoors? This is the water remaining in one full load of towels after being spun at 1600rpm. I dried these in a tumble drier (the tumble drier water tray is what I'm emptying here). If I'd air-dried these towels this water would have ended up in the air in my house.
In winter people often close windows, block draughts and close trickle vents since we’re more sensitive to cold than we are to air quality. So where does all this water go? Read on below.
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/…

Today's IPCC report makes daunting reading. It also acknowledges the role that individuals can play in making and enabling the dramatic changes needed if we are to keep warming below 1.5 or 2°C. Among those changes are dramatic improvements to our buildings so they use less energy. In building science there is a happy coincidence that if you design buildings to use very little energy (and you do it well) then you also end up with buildings that are more comfortable, healthier... and quieter. Win win win. So if you're wondering what you can do, here's a list of the building related things:
If you're planning to build a new house, do it to Passivhaus standard. You'll end up with a building that is warmer in winter, cooler in summer and healthy; a joy to be in year-round.
If you live in an old house, make a plan for how you are going to radically reduce the energy needed to heat and light it (and cool it, if you live somewhere hot). Take care not to lock in mediocre performance by adding just a little insulation or putting in quite good windows. Doing it right may need more planning and money, but can be achieved as a step-by-step process if you can't do it all in one go.
Both of these steps will result in a massive improvement in your quality of life, at the same time as radically reducing your carbon emissions.
Get in touch for a chat about your projects.
There's a lot we can do, let's focus on that and make these changes as fast as we can.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-enviro nment-45775309…
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Nice view, shame about the condensation...
Inadequate ventilation (leading to high humidity) plus poor quality glazing (meaning cold surfaces) results in surface condensation. This spoils the view & leads to mould, with its associated health and maintenance costs.
All too common as we come in to the colder months.
... #Passivhaus is guaranteed condensation free.
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Last week I had two conversations, on consecutive days, that left me reflecting on the value of the quality assurance inherent in Passivhaus certification.
The first was with a client who had been considering building their new house to the Passivhaus Institute’s ’Low Energy’ standard. This standard is slightly easier to meet than the classic Passivhaus standard, and is for buildings where achieving the classic standard is not feasible (in this case due to aesthetic and budge...t constraints). Although the targets are slightly less ambitious it has the same level of quality assurance as the classic standard. My client voiced a common question about certification along the lines of “why would I pay extra for a piece of paper telling me that my building performs the way it’s been designed to perform?”. I answered that what gets built in the UK rarely matches what was designed in terms of performance. This is true and this ‘performance gap’ is often very large (like 2 or 3 times the anticipated heating demand!) but without a solid example to back it up my client went away, I fear, unconvinced.
The next day I was contacted by a friend who had moved in to their dream self-build house 10 months ago. Over the winter they’d found one whole floor, plus some rooms on another floor, to be uncomfortably cold and their heating bills to be much larger than anticipated. On paper their house looks great, not a million miles off Passivhaus in terms of energy performance and scoring a high B on the Energy Performance Certificate. In reality, because there is precious little quality assurance, the insulation and air-tightness work has been executed extremely poorly, leaving the occupants chilly in the winter and their bank balances suffering.
Passivhaus standard gets a lot of attention for the ambition within it’s numbers. Even on paper it is an impressive step up from typical design details, but it’s the quality assurance that really seals the deal. Passivhaus buildings perform as they are designed to do because, as part of the certification process, the designer must provide evidence that insulation, airtightness and ventilation strategies are well planned and have been correctly implemented.
Now if only I could have got my client and my friend to share a conference call…
Some more information about Passivhaus quality assurance below (from the Passivhaus Trust's excellent guide "Why Choose Passivhaus", available here: https://issuu.com/passivhaus_tr…/…/wh y_passivhaus_2013_final
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This was me setting the record on the Cuillin ridge in 2007. Finlay Wild, who broke my record in 2014, is also in the GB team for tomorrow. Best way to track race seems to be on twitter. Follow https://twitter.com/ROSskyrace

It's been a busy few summer months at Highland Passive but I've now got an exciting selection of Passivhaus projects on the go and a few more 'maybes'.
Nice to be working on a diverse range of projects - three social housing "Passivhoos" developments for John Gilbert Architects (http://www.johngilbert.co.uk/?page_id=16 166) through to an ambitious self-build in Portree on Skye (https://portreepassivhaus.uk/).

It's looking hot and sunny again this week. Excellent weather for getting out and enjoying the wonderful hills, glens and beaches of the Highlands. But how will our buildings perform?
It goes without saying that a well-designed modern building should perform much better in winter. With careful design, the same can also be true in summer. But designed badly, buildings with modern levels of insulation can become uncomfortably, or even dangerously, hot during heat waves.
While... we may not associate our cloudy and cool corner of the world with heatwaves they are likely to get more severe and more frequent in the coming decades, as the global climate warms. Buildings built now should be designed to perform not just in the heat waves of today, but in the heat waves that the future will likely bring. Most new houses built today pay little or no attention to overheating risk, leaving occupants uncomfortable and putting those already in poor health at risk.
Passivhaus standard buildings are required to meet minimum standards for summer comfort and designers that go further than this minimum can produce with buildings that perform exceptionally well in summer. Check out this post from Passivhaus designer Juraj Mikurcik, who has designed and built an elegantly simple Passivhaus in Herefordshire. Not only is the winter comfort superb, but the comfort during a heatwave is pretty impressive too.
This blog post is from a period of hot weather last summer. If you're interested it's worth keeping an eye on Juraj's twitter feed over the next few days (https://twitter.com/JurajMikurcik) to see how the building performs in the forecast very hot weather this week down in England.
https://oldholloway.wordpress.com/2017/06 /19/summer-comfort/
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After many weeks of warm, dry, sunny weather this week has brought cold, cloudy and windy weather. Many people will have found there houses getting too hot in recent weeks and are now having to put their heating back on to stay comfortable. Are you one of them?