Place heavy materials (concrete, stone, brick, earth) where the winter sun falls on them inside the insulated envelope, so that they absorb heat by day and give it back at night.
Rules · Walls · Materials · Theory
The passive house: insulate, seal, recover
Make the envelope so well insulated and airtight, and recover so much heat from the exhaust air, that the building needs almost no active heating.
heating ≤ 15 kWh/m²·a · airtightness n₅₀ ≤ 0.6 h⁻¹ · heat recovery ≥ 75%
The Passivhaus standard is defined by performance rather than form. The first passive houses, a terrace of four at Darmstadt-Kranichstein (1990–91), used about a tenth of the heating energy of a typical German house of the time. Their recipe (very thick insulation without thermal bridges, triple glazing, an airtight envelope, mechanical ventilation with heat recovery and a sensible use of solar gain) has since been applied to schools, offices and blocks of flats.
Related rules
Face the homes south behind glazed sunspaces; put workspaces on the north side, in the shadow of the row in front, where even light suits them; cover the roofs with sedum and gardens; and ventilate through wind-driven cowls with heat recovery.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The passive house: insulate, seal, recover”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/passivhaus-standard. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.