What Is Passive House?

Better Buildings By Design

Sometimes called Passiv Haus, Passive House is an international recognised energy performance standard developed in Germany in the 1990's. The standard is heavily focused on reducing the requirement for space heating and cooling, whilst providing excellent indoor comfort levels.

Passive House is a building standard that is truly the world's most robust energy efficient, comfortable and affordable solution for delivering homes, offices, schools, industrial and public buildings.

To do this Passive House focuses on adopting a fabric first approach using high levels of insulation for the building envelope and exceptional levels of airtightness coupled with whole house mechanical ventilation.

Passive House uses the following principles to achieve excellent thermal comforts for either Residential, Commercial, Industrial or Public buildings and can reduce space heating requirements by 90% compared to standard practices:-

High levels of insulation
Minimal thermal bridging
Airtightness
Excellent indoor air quality through Mechanical Ventilation with Heat Recovery (MVHR)
Optimising passive solar gains
Minimising overheating by detailed solar designing
Simple design for minimising external surfaces compared to the internal floor area
Using thermal mass to help balance temperature changes throught the day

What's Involved?

Firstly any building must be modelled and assessed using the Passive House Planning Package. Our designers are able to create 3d models of your proposed building in it's built environment to allow for very detailed energy modelling and solar analysis.

The 3d models help us a designers develop the most accurate energy models to enable an evaluation of the buildings performance. From hear be can advise on improvements to the buildings design and performance against the Passive Standards.

What's Are The Standards?

For new buildings there are three classes of achievement. These are Classic, Plus or Premium.

The heating demand of a Passive House may not exceed 15 kWh/(m²yr). Tthe case of the Passive House Classic category, this value will be 60 kWh/(m²a) at the most. A building built to Passive House Plus is more efficient as it may not consume more than 45 kWh/(m²a) of renewable primary energy. It must also generate at least 60 kWh/(m²a) of energy in relation to the area covered by the building. In the case of Passive House Premium, the energy demand is limited to just 30 kWh/(m²a), with at least 120 kWh/(m²a) of energy being generated by the building.

When should I get my SAP?

Quite simply, the earlier we are involved, the more influence we can have on easily incorporating small changes with minimal cost which can make big impacts and huge savings in build cost and carbon.
How long does it take to get a SAP calculation?

Generally a SAP calculation takes about 2-3 days to produce, we suggest however you allow 1 week from appointment to allow for busy periods.
What do you need to produce a SAP?

We require drawings including plans, sections, elevations and site plan together with a proposed specification for the materials and insulation together with the heating and hot water appliances.
What happens if my design fails?

Even if your proposed design and specification fails we will provide you solutions and recommendations to successfully achieve a PASS free of charge!
How to get a quote?

Just send us your project drawings via email to info@beatsolutions.co.uk or use our quote request form and we'll send you an electronic quote by return.

Frequently Asked Questions