What could be more luxurious than living in a Colorado passive home? Your air is always fresh and filtered. The temperature is never too hot or too cold. Everything about the space feels healthy, peaceful, and in harmony with nature.
Passive homes ease your stress as you embrace eco-friendly living. When your home is designed to be passive, you don’t have to rely on traditional methods of maintaining its comfort.
What is a Passive Home?
Passive homes are part of a home-building trend incorporating sustainability and environmental consciousness in heating, cooling, water, air, insulation, and power sources. A passive home provides resilience and long-term utility while making it easy to stay comfortable in your day-to-day life.
The 5 Elements of a Passive House
Airtight construction
Maintaining an airtight home envelope means there are no leaks where temperature-controlled air can escape.
High-quality continuous insulation
Continuous insulation installed across all of the home’s structural supports and features acts as a comprehensive seal against temperature loss.
Performance glazing/windows
High-performance windows may have features like two or more panes of glass, sealed argon or krypton, polarization, and nonconductive materials.
Thermal bridge-free design
Thermal bridges are gaps that allow heat and cooling fluctuations, thus interfering with the stability of the home’s atmosphere.
Ventilation for maximum heat recovery
Passive home HVAC systems recover residual temperatures and pre-heat or pre-cool fresh air before it enters a room to significantly increase efficiency.
Common Features in Passive Homes
Each passive home uses a custom blend of eco-conscious features. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to these structures. Each is a unique and custom building project. Consider adding these features to your passive home.
Aerothermal ventilation
In an aerothermal ventilation system, heat pumps extract energy from the air and use it to move perfect-temperature air indoors or vent it outdoors as necessary.
High-quality continuous insulation
Continuous insulation installed across all of the home’s structural supports and features acts as a comprehensive seal against temperature loss.
Performance glazing/windows
High-performance windows may have features like two or more panes of glass, sealed argon or krypton, polarization, and nonconductive materials.
Thermal bridge-free design
Thermal bridges are gaps that allow heat and cooling fluctuations, thus interfering with the stability of the home’s atmosphere.
Ventilation for maximum heat recovery
Passive home HVAC systems recover residual temperatures and pre-heat or pre-cool fresh air before it enters a room to significantly increase efficiency.
Why You Should Build a Passive Home
Building a passive home is always a worthwhile endeavor because it’s unparalleled comfort and sustainability. The initial investment in a passive home can be about 5% to 30% higher than a traditional home, but it delivers dividends for decades to come. Over the lifetime of a passive house, it will pay for itself through energy and resource savings.
A study by the North American Passive House Network (NAPHN) found passive homes deliver more value than traditional homes for several reasons. First, consider that any high-quality home will cost at least 1% to 8% more than a basic home, so it makes sense that a passive home would be slightly more, too.
Meeting essential LEED certifications raises a home’s cost by 2% to 8%, but LEED-certified homes save money immediately by using 20% to 60% less energy. It’s important to keep in mind that passive features allow homes to be bigger without sacrificing energy efficiency, unlike traditional homes.
How to Blend Luxury With Sustainability
From a design standpoint, it’s a myth that an eco-friendly home can’t be beautiful or luxurious. Nearly any home style, design, or layout can blend seamlessly with passive energy features.
Imagine a lush green indoor-outdoor living space where warm beams of sunlight pour through the glass sunroom walls and nourish your houseplants. Inside, you relax comfortably as your home absorbs solar power and maintains the perfect temperature.
The secret to bringing this vision to life lies behind the walls, deep inside the structure of your home. Passive features are built into every hidden space, from thick insulation to highly efficient energy-preservation HVAC systems.
As the homeowner, you simply experience perfect everything: soothing temperatures, fresh water, crisp air, a peaceful ambiance, and the luxurious lifestyle you’ve always envisioned.
Don’t worry. You don’t have to be an expert on passive home design. When you work with the right home designer-builder, their expertise makes it easy.
At Truth Design Build, we have a strong team of Denver’s most experienced designers/builders for eco-friendly designs. You can rely on us to create an environmentally conscious Colorado home that blends luxurious living with the natural environment.
To learn more about eco-friendly passive home designs, please see our portfolios to see the high quality of our new builds and home remodels.
