Pat Murphy of CommunitySolutions has written an excellent summary of the talks at the third annual North American Passive House Conference.
Organizations such as Net-Zero Energy Home Coalition in Canada should take advantage of Passive House and run with it. The standards, methodology and technology have already been worked out, and Germany is several years ahead of us at that.
Of course the EQulibrium(TM) Housing initiative from CMHC is useful. It is out of demonstration programs like EQulibrium and its predecessors that we get innovation. But it’s a long process. Results are slow to trickle down. The only hard technical information on existing EQulibrium houses comes from the few projects that have established web sites and are willing to share the information.
It’s time to stop building a dozen demonstration houses every decade and adopt a proven system to actually build and certify these homes. There’s already over 12,000 in Europe.
UPDATE Nov 6 2009: I have started www.passivebuilding.ca as a meeting place for everyone interested in bringing Passive House to Canada.
One Response
Gary McCallum
24|Sep|2009 1Probably the most dissapointing thing about our reluctance to build passive houses is the fact that so much of the innovation originated in Canada. The air to air heat exchanger, webed truss joists that are utilizd in wall systems and the basic concept of an air tight house first demonstrated in the R 2000 home. I have previously built several High Thermal Mass passive solar homes in Kelowna and am presently chomping at the bit to do my forst European style passive house. Germanay isn’t several years ahead of us they are a decade ahead of us with no government direction towards mandating energy efficient houses in the near future.It is truly sad that we are so good at innovating but not very good at implementing.
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