Abstract
The Passivhaus (or Passive House) Standard is one of the world’s most widely known voluntary energy performance standards. For a dwelling to achieve the Standard and be granted Certification, the building fabric requires careful design and detailing, high levels of thermal insulation, building airtightness, close site supervision and careful workmanship. However, achieving Passivhaus Certification is not a guarantee that the thermal performance of the building fabric as designed will actually be achieved in situ. This paper presents the results obtained from measuring the in situ whole building heat loss coefficient (HLC) of a small number of Certified Passivhaus case study dwellings. They are located on different sites and constructed using different technologies in the UK. Despite the small and non-random nature of the dwelling sample, the results obtained from the in situ measurements revealed that the thermal performance of the building fabric, for all of the dwellings, performed very close to the design predictions. This suggests that in terms of the thermal performance of the building fabric, Passivhaus does exactly what it says on the tin.
Highlights
The ambition of the Passivhaus concept is to provide appropriate indoor air quality (IAQ) and thermal comfort with minimum energy demand
The in situ thermal performance of the building fabric of seven Passivhaus Certified case study dwellings has been quantified by undertaking an electric coheating test
It is only possible to make a number of qualitative comments, due to the small and non-random nature of the case study dwellings tested, the results indicate that in all but one of the dwellings, the measured whole-house in situ heat loss was greater than the predicted steady-state heat loss
Summary
The ambition of the Passivhaus concept is to provide appropriate indoor air quality (IAQ) and thermal comfort with minimum energy demand. The basic premise is to address thermal comfort requirements and to create an environment whereby the performance of the building fabric will be such that it permits space heating using the minimum fresh air supply required in order to maintain hygiene [1]. When the building fabric is so well insulated, the proportional impact of thermal bridging becomes more pronounced. The Passivhaus Standard calculates heat loss through the use of external dimensions (unlike the England and Wales where internal dimensions are used). This means there is a tendency to overestimate heat loss providing that a visual inspection confirms the insulation is suitably continuous. Visual inspection cannot be used to predict heat loss when using internal dimensions
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