Part 2: What is a Passive House?

Passive House Heating Load In our last blog post, we talked a little bit about Passive House as a building standard. We also discussed the first primary benchmark for Passive House certification, which is reducing air leakage to less than 0.6 Air Changes per Hour (ACH) at 50pa pressure. The second benchmark for certification deals with total heating and cooling load. This distinguishes Passive House from the well-known "net-zero" standard, which simply requires the house to produce as much energy as it consumes. Passive House caps heating load at 15kwh per square meter annually, regardless of energy source. This means…