Katrin, I’m sure we’ll meet sometime soon, I LOVE what Passive House is doing to raise the bar for new builds. I used 0.6 ACH50 for a recent retrofit project goal and failed miserably, I did get it from 109 ACH50 (?!) to 2.4 though.

I hope as an industry we start to try and crack the existing home nut, it’s tough but big. Focusing on measured results is a big part of that path, and since Passive House focuses on it, I’m a big fan.

Cameron and I started to hammer out a Decent House “standard”. I ended up really disliking putting requirements on. The requirements should be related to solving client problems, in my mind. We can’t prescribe requirements. But we can measure blower door and energy results – both are predictable and both are good proxies for solved problems.

We’ll be noodling this for a while… I look forward to getting my case studies out this fall, it will be the beginning of figuring it out.

The questions that you are outlining here were the guiding questions that we set out to answer with the new climate specific passive building standards. The annual demand criteria were developed to identify the economic sweet spot in a particular climate between generation and conservation, identifying the point of diminishing returns of envelope upgrades. After you reach that sweet spot it is more cost effective to invest in PV. That sweet spot is climate dependent. The new standards guide you there. They also require to meet a certain peak load. That assures comfort and resilience. Also climate specific. It’s pretty cool – check it out here: http://www.phius.org/phius-2015-new-passive-building-standard-summary!

Allison, there are 78 million existing homes in the US, I’d estimate that 99% of them suck at comfort. Comfort is by far the exception, not the rule.

I LOVE Cameron’s idea for a decent house. Especially since I’m working on a JLC article about the Habitat for Humanity house today. Their motto is safe, decent homes.

Pretty Good House is too tough for existing homes. Passive House is absolutely insane. Decent is better. Maybe EUIs under 45? I’d love to see Energy Use Intensity rule. Get there with envelope or PV, your choice… may the best man/woman win.

I have heard about the “Pretty Good House” concept but need to read up further. I think I’m approaching “pretty good house” status with my own house serving as self-directed building science guinea pig, having logged performance data on my house HVAC and finding it only needed one ton of cooling over one hour of the hottest part of one day for 1860 square feet earlier this week. Installed system is two stage three tons; second stage hardly engages now, and in first stage runs around two tons, so it’s grossly oversized.

I still remember Robert Bean’s talk from Summer Camp last year about “exergy” and your article on the matter “Must the Three Little Pigs Die?” I’ve condensed that to “combustion must die” since we are still largely a combustion culture. It’s a multi-prong approach to reach this goal, which would include Passive House construction along with Decent House/site generation and other efforts contributing to demand destruction, coupled with a shift in transport to non petroleum based fuels (electric vehicles and etc.) Since our focus here is on housing, I really would like to see Decent House scale up for the huge existing housing stock inventory yet to be touched by this approach, along with Passive House lessons applied to new construction, where the basic concept is to shift the burden of maintaining a comfortable, healthy living space toward the envelope, while reducing the intensity of HVAC required. Both “Pretty Good House” or “Decent House” along with Passive House have this basic premise as a foundation.

If you spend $400 a sf building an “efficient home” and it’s uncomfortable, how is that analogous to the 1995 spec built raised ranch that is also uncomfortable when the sun is just so?

Seriously, my point is that passive house may be great at pushing the edges of what’s possible, but if we make it the example we encourage, good luck with scale.

#solvingrichpeoplesproblems
#someofwhichareselfesteemproblems

But let me ask you this? How many non-passive houses have you heard of that are “hard to control and uncomfortable”? I’m pretty sure you’ve not only heard of them but have been in quite a few.

http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy15osti/64278.pdf

It sounds like you don’t know about the “Pretty Good House” folks. I’ve written about it a few times. Here’s one:

http://www.energyvanguard.com/blog-building-science-hers-bpi/10-essential-steps-to-building-a-pretty-good-house

What?! You’re not going to Summer Camp? I can’t believe it. Well, I hope to see you back there next year.

Let’s make houses really good – pursue the “decent house” standard rather than the “passive house” standard. Healthy, comfortable, controllable, and spend the difference on generation.

Nate Adams is finishing up a Habitat for Humanity “decent house” – which shows making houses really good is possible for the rest of us who can’t afford science projects that pursue perfection. https://cleantechnica.com/2016/07/29/habitat-humanity-deep-energy-retrofit-part-4-planning-hvac-system/

Let’s do lots and lots of THAT!