Passive House Today – GreenBuildingAdvisor

By Joshua Salinger | November 18, 2024

More and more frequently while speaking with building professionals, reading industry literature, and viewing product marketing materials, I am struck by how passive houses are held up as the pinnacle of residential construction—something for other homes to aspire to.

This is great to see, yet there tends to be a “but” following that statement. This hesitation comes from the perception of a passive house as necessarily containing superthick walls, a complicated origami of control layers, small windows, high-carbon materials, and—as a result—additional and unnecessary costs. And all of this is for the purpose of saving the last possible few Btus of operational energy.

At my firm, Birdsmouth Design-Build in Portland, Ore., we have been building certified passive houses for almost 10 years. This type of building strikes our team as the best science-based approach to delivering high-quality and environmentally responsible buildings that our industry has come up with to date. I have seen firsthand how the passive house approach has evolved over time, and in my opinion, today there is little daylight between any high-quality home and a passive house.

When I hear the aforementioned hesitation, it occurs to me that a lot of folks are stuck in an outdated understanding of a passive house. In North America, we’re now on what I’m calling “version 3.0” of the passive house building methodology. It’s time for our industry to shake the old image and move toward this latest version.