Passive House

The other day I attended a site tour with insulation peers. The house is aiming for Passive House certification, and as expected the insulation was at a high level.

I believe the destination of the ultra-high-insulation housing we're aiming for is the Passive House standard, and this particular house achieved that level fairly inexpensively using high-performance 16K-grade glass wool.

Once insulation is raised to that level, eliminating heating in winter isn't that difficult. The harder question — and the key — is how to suppress summer heat gain. That was apparently the hot topic at the Passive House Japan association over the past year or so.

Personally I had already mostly reached conclusions on two points: handling summer heat load, and ventilation system. At the after-tour social, exchanging information confirmed that everyone is still figuring out the same two points by trial and error. Very valuable exchange.

I also learned that there are essentially no design firms in our region pushing ultra-high-insulation housing forward. I felt anew that we need to communicate our work on ultra-high-insulation to the wider world.

I had been starting to feel that just our firm alone importing high-performance materials wasn't going to amount to much — so this was a great chance to find peers to push forward with.