7 Health Benefits of a Passivhaus Home
With 90% of our time spent indoors, our homes shape our health more than we realise. Find out how a Passivhaus improves air quality, boosts productivity and enhances your wellbeing. [2 Min Read Time]
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Passivhaus: How To Insulate Your Home Against Soaring Heating Bills
Read Time: 5 minutes
Author. Clare Booth
Director
Author. Clare Booth
Director
Read Time: 5 minutes
•
Heating oil prices have more than doubled in the past month, and Scotland's off-grid homeowners are feeling the pressure. Here's how the Passivhaus building standard offers a long-term solution.
Scottish homeowners are bearing the brunt of the current energy crisis. 42% of homes in Aberdeenshire, 31% in Moray and 62% in the Highlands aren't connected to the national gas grid. That means homes rely on alternative fuels like heating oil, and since the outbreak of the US-Israeli war with Iran, that oil has more than doubled in price.
Government financial support helps, but it doesn't address the wider issue. Because it's not only the price of energy that matters. The way our homes are designed and built has a huge impact on how much energy they need in the first place.
Source: BoilerJuice
The Homes That Don’t Feel the Energy Crisis
For some households, record heating bills are a problem they've never had. These are the people living in Passivhaus homes.
Passivhaus is a building standard that keeps homes comfortable all year round while using as little energy as possible.
Compared to homes built to current Scottish Building Regulations, a Passivhaus cuts heating demand by 79%. This achieved through considered design and careful construction that captures heat from passive sources: sunlight, the body heat of the people inside, and even the warmth generated by everyday appliances like a boiling kettle or a running TV.
In a typical home, most of that heat escapes. A Passivhaus keeps it in.
There are now more than 2,250 certified Passivhaus homes in the UK, and interest has never been higher. Google searches for "Passivhaus" have risen 86% over the last three months, and Channel 4's Guy Martin's House Without Bills has brought it firmly into the mainstream. The February episode followed a Manchester home being upgraded to Passivhaus retrofit standard.
And that public interest is being recognised at a national level. The Scottish Government has set out its ambition for homes to be built to a "Scottish equivalent" of the Passivhaus Standard in the coming years.
Source: Google
How Does a Passivhaus Work?
Every Passivhaus, whether built or retrofitted, takes a 'fabric first' approach. This means the home's materials and components [the building fabric] do the hard work to reduce the amount of heating required to keep it comfy. It does this by using 5 complementary building principles:
1. Continuous amounts of high-performance insulation:
Generous amounts of insulation is firmly packed in– far exceeding the insulation quantities found in average new builds. Similar to a giant woolly jumper, it curbs heat loss and keeps your home cool in summer. The thick insulation also acts as a barrier against external noise, ensuring your home remains calm and quiet.
2. Airtight construction:
A continuous, high-performance airtight layer is formed around your home. Then any gaps around doors, windows, electrical outlets, pipes and lights are taped and sealed. This stops heat escaping, cuts down on energy use and keeps your home comfortable with no draughts. Two airtightness tests are performed both during and after construction to make sure your home hits the strict Passivhaus airtightness target.
3. Triple-glazed windows:
These provide optimum comfort and efficiency in summer and winter. Triple glazing doesn't feel cold to touch and also helps reduce outdoor noise, keeping your home quiet.
4. Mechanical ventilation with heat recovery [MVHR]:
The lungs of your home, quietly delivering fresh, filtered air 24/7 while recovering heat from outgoing air. Continuous air circulation means your bathroom doesn't steam up, cooking smells vanish and laundry dries faster. If you've got allergies or asthma, the MVHR's filters remove dust, pollen and pollutants, keeping your home healthy.
5. Eliminate thermal bridges:
These are weak spots in a building envelope. They often occur around corners, junctions and where materials meet [i.e. a steel beam passing through insultation]. The problem is, these areas become cold spots, which can lead to condensation, damp, mould or structural decay. The Passivhaus Standard requires that any junctions, corners, connections and penetrations are carefully planned in the design phase to avoid thermal bridging. This is cheaper and easier to address early, rather than on the building site.
Certified Passivhaus designers and tradespeople will ensure these 5 building principles are integrated into your home. However, these alone don't reliably deliver Passivhaus performance. The following three approach principles are also essential:
3 Passivhaus Principles of Approach
1. Strict Performance and Comfort Criteria:
Your home must meet strict targets for space‑heating/peak heating load, overall energy demand, summer temperatures, airtightness, ventilation and acoustic performance.
2. Passivhaus Planning Package Modelling:
The Passivhaus Planning Package [PHPP] is powerful, physics-based design software. A certified Passivhaus designer uses it to calculate, model and optimise your home's year‑round energy use and comfort. It’s been proven to be reliable in giving accurate predictions of actual energy use in a finished home.
PHPP is used early in the design process, before key decisions are fixed, such as how many storeys your home has, its siting, orientation, building form and window layout. These factors have a direct impact on your home’s energy efficiency. PHPP instantly tests and compares design options, clarifies the impact of each decision and flags risks such as poor performance, occupant discomfort [i.e. too hot, too cold] and high bills. It helps you get the best value for money by highlighting when design ideas work against energy efficiency and by identifying opportunities for optimisation.
3. Quality Assurance/Passivhaus Certification:
Passivhaus Certification is an independent, third-party quality-assurance process that protects your interests. A qualified Passivhaus Certifier reviews the technical drawings and the PHPP energy model, checks detailed construction evidence at key stages of the build and verifies test results [i.e. airtightness]. When all criteria are met, your home is certified and it receives the official Passivhaus plaque. Certification gives you confidence that you’re living in a genuinely low-energy, high-comfort home. The quality assurance process also ensures the design and build teams are trained in the Passivhaus Standard.
It's the combination of all these principles [building AND approach] that delivers the Passivhaus Standard. Skip one and overall performance can be compromised.
Interested in a Passivhaus home?
We've taken everything that makes the Passivhaus Standard so effective and applied it to our range of pre-designed homes, which are Passivhaus certified and ready to build. It's the fastest, most straightforward route to a home that's warm, quiet and costs a fraction of the average heating bill to run.
Author.
Clare Booth
• Director
A trained communicator, Clare co-founded Coldwells Build with the aim of improving consumer experience within the construction process. Working previously as a television director and journalist, she understands more than most, about the power of detail, organisation and timing.
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