Passivhaus

Our award winning social housing retrofit, carried out with Southern Housing under the Technology Strategy Board's Retrofit for the Future project, used passivhaus 'fabric-first' measures, together with a very efficient heat recovery ventilation unit. Monitoring of the house shows that it has been transformed from a cold house running with condensation and blighted by mould growth and asthmatic indoor conditions, to a house that has absolutely optimal indoor comfort and health conditions in winter and summer.

We received two awards last night at the inaugural Greenbuild Awards in the Leisure Buildings category for our certified passivhaus retrofit of Mayville Community Centre and in the Domestic Retrofit category for one of our Retrofit for the Future projects, Passfield Drive.

If you are looking for a passive house architect to design you a sustainable building, eco house or passive home, you may wonder what is the difference in meaning between architecture that is ‘Passivhaus’ and ‘Passive House’?

In a unique extension of the indepth, remote energy monitoring of the low cost, passivhaus Larch and Lime Houses in Ebbw Vale, the keys to the houses were handed over to the two lucky families who have won a competition to live in the houses rent free for 12 months whilst participating in the live monitoring process.

On Sunday, some of the UK's leading building performance experts joined Dr Wolfgang Feist and Witta Ebel of the Passivhaus Institute, visiting some of our latest domestic and non-domestic Passivhaus projects in London. The purpose of the visits was to review the last 12 months of data analysis and inspect the live data that is being produced, in order to check if Passivhaus is working in the UK climate.

A lot of heat is lost from buildings in winter through simple bathroom mechanical extract fans. Furthermore, people all over the UK suffer from cold drafts and heat loss caused by primitive ventilation grilles in the outside walls of their house. This thermal image of a house next to our Passfield Drive retrofit, illustrates the terrible heat loss that occurs in such houses before renovation, even though it seems that everyone in the street has tried to board and tape over the ventilation grilles! (see picture below).

Download the attached PDF (2 pages)

Jaya Skandamoorthy (BRE director of Enterprise and Innovation) attended a meeting at bere:architects today with Virginia Cinquemani (BRE Innovation Park) in order to establish the building and training and disemination programme around our competition-winning Chestnut House low cost passivhaus prototypes at the Watford Innovation Park.

The semi-detached pair of houses, designed in collaboration with the Prince of Wales' Foundation for Building Communities, will be completed in time for a ministerial opening in September 2012.