Do you live in a "passive house" (not to be confused with a passive-aggressive house)? Each year when we make our winter visit to mom's big, old, drafty house she makes a big deal about turning on the heat just for us (especially now that a young baby is a house guest). What if you didn't worry about the heating bills or the furnace breaking? What if you didn't even have a furnace?
A few weeks ago we read a fascinating article about "passive heat" and "passive houses" being pioneered in Germany. There are now about 15,000 of them mostly in Germany and Scandinavia. The basic idea is to recycle heat through a central ventilation system: "The warm air going out passes side by side with clean, cold air coming in, exchanging heat with 90 percent efficiency."
Where does the heat come from in the first place? The sun, body heat and appliances for starters. One homeowner estimates he uses about 1/20th of the heating energy his parents used in a same-sized house. Surprisingly, passive houses only cost about 6% more to build than a traditionally heated home.
Intrigued? Check out the full article in The New York Times.
(photo by Rolf Oeser for The New York Times)
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Interesting. My dad built my parents' current house (almost 20 years ago) as "passive solar". Low-E glass windows, terracotta tile floors (soak up sun in winter, stay cool in summer), high ceilings with fans to move the hot air down, super insulated, etc. They don't have a furnace, but do use a woodstove for extra heat in the winter (this is in Ohio).
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I'm a little surprised that this concept doesn't appear to well known.
We installed a 95% efficient (nominal) heat-recovery system into our previous two-story unit. Living in Central Auckland it also filtered the fresh (dry) incoming air. Particularly nice in winter...
With very little insulation in a 90-year old brick building with lots of glass, we managed to heat to house with two 1kw heaters. Admittedly, Auckland doesn't reach below zero temperatures, but under normal circumstances, we would have needed about 4 times that for the same comfort level.
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We have a 1956-built passive solar home, which works well here in the upper midwest in fall and spring, but as it is yet to get above freezing (32 C) this month and the sun has been hiding this week, we have turned the boiler on to warm the floors. It's amazing how a warm floor makes you feel warm all over.
When the temps go below zero at night, we put the kids to bed with long underwear under their pjs and rubber hot water bottles tucked in their blankets. We use an electric mattress pad to pre-warm our bed. And flannel sheets all around, of course!
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