Where to start?
Over the past year, green building has become a regular topic of conversation between Greg and the Hasler Homes team. How do we do it? Where do we start? Are we ready? Will clients want to build green?
Well, I think we finally came to the conclusion that we needed to start somewhere if we want to begin to answer those questions. Enter PassiveHouse Canada, a national non-profit professional association advocating for the Passive House high-performance building standard. So what is that standard? Well, here is a brief explanation from the originator, Passivhaus in Europe. “‘Passivhaus’ or ‘Passive House’ is the fastest growing energy performance standard in the world with 30,000 buildings realised to date with the majority of those since the turn of the century. The Passivhaus standards strengths lie in the simplicity of its approach; build a house that has an excellent thermal performance, exceptional airtight-ness with mechanical ventilation!”. See the diagram below for a more visual explanation:
Training
In June, Greg and some of the team will be beginning their first round of PassiveHouse training here in Vancouver. Following that, Greg will be doing extra training and going through the certification process which involves an intense exam.
Our expectations with being trained on PassiveHouse building is that we will be left with inspiration and tools to use to improve our approach to building. Through training, we have found that our current standard is closer to Passive House than we thought. One of the main things we learned from the training was about the materials we are using. Being able to take the time to work with products like SIGA wrap and tape, ables us to better explain to clients why they are worth spending the extra money on. The road to ‘building green’ has just begun but we are excited to be stepping in the right direction and we can’t wait to share what we learn with you and our future clients along the way.
Why build a Passive House?
Their are definitely benefits for the earth that come from building green, but an added benefit is the long term money you will save. Building a Passive House IS cost efficient. The costs of initially implementing a Passive House system are quickly offset by the lower budget HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning) system and the energy bill. The energy bill for a Passive House can be as much as ten times lower then a conventional house. We will get into more of that later though! We hope you join us on our journey to building green(er) homes and please comment with any questions or thoughts that you have below.
