A Passive Approach to Reducing Your Power Bill
The best way to heat your home is with your body.
That’s the belief of the passive house school of eco-friendly architecture. Its buildings avoid the energy-wasting constraints of conventional heating and cooling designs, in favor of technologies (triple-pane glazing, for example) that circulate and regulate temperature without drawing on more than minimal electricity. Minimal electricity can be met by solar power – and suddenly, you’ve got something excitingly near a closed loop. If you want more details, have a look at the Passive House Institute’s primer.
It’s the kind of environment you’d want your kids to grow up in. For Viking House and their German partners, this is more than a hopeful sentiment. They’re working hard to introduce Passive Schools across Frankfurt, Germany – a city that in 2007 decided that all schools and official buildings should be built and renovated to the passivhaus standard.
But it’s not just for new architecture: it’s a methodology for home improvement. Here and here are a few suggestions on how you can turn your home into the most economical in the neighborhood.
Image: Erik Charlton
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2 Comments
August 13th, 2008 at 3:49 pm
I love the passive house concept! Great post, Mike.
April 24th, 2009 at 9:32 am
Very soon, the solar cells on the outside of a house will generate more storable solar energy in form of H2 and O2 gases, than Photo voltaic cells provide in energy stored in batteries, due to a recent MIT discovery and the pursuant refinement thereof. We will be able to power light carbon fiber, fuel cell cars with these storeable gases, cook, heat our homes with them and make electricity via fuel cells for the home as well! If one is lucky enough to own land that can accommodate such cells, one will be able to live, in a more efficient fashion than “The American Dream” of the advertisements albeit, a very comfortable lifestyle free from grid hook-ups entirely! Stick in a veggie garden, aquaculture for protein and veggies too, composting, water preservation systems, and bio-gas and free fertilizer from a local humanure collection system, and you will have what most sunny third world countries only dream about! Free living, with time left over to contribute to the lives of others through re-education, outside the parameters of the current “You pay Now, Yankee Doodle!, no free ride, “work hard for “the Man” , die poor” nonsense the American people face under this new fascist vulture capitalistic, Nazism of the Bush regime. We can build better images of our nation than can be found in the now crumbling Detroit City, a monument to years of unfair exploitation and misdirection of American people, and comparable to Third World Johannesburg today! Obama be strong! The uber-rich Republican Vulture capitalists mansions and strongholds are falling with GM and Chrysler, and soon to be replaced by Chinese ventures, a bargain for all Americans and a new post great republican depression meritocracy, not based on Capitalistic materialism, but a more realistic Post-Materialists society, where quality, re-usability, and longevity in products in the market place return. Henry Ford you will be vindicated, and we will run cars on solar and bio-fuels, and electricity, and build them from other, and lighter than steel!
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