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What are the actual benefits of a 'passive house'?

Lisa Miles
On my lunchtime walk around town I pass by a construction site on a local residential street where an old house has been demolished and a couple of ‘passive houses’ are being built on the patch of land. 


I don’t know an awful lot about passive houses but I’m wondering if they are really worth the £699,995 price tag that’s being asked for them? 


They’re basically a three bedroom bungalow with two bedrooms in the roof space (dormers and skylight as windows) and one bedroom downstairs with an open plan kitchen/diner/lounge. A standard three bedroom house in the town goes for anywhere around £300 to £400k.


Can you really justify the extra £300k+ price tag for a passive house’? 

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  • 0
    This is the first time I've contributed to these discussions, so I hope I'm not going to get anything wrong.  

    But this is one topic I feel I can contribute to - I live in an certified Passivhaus.  And we had it built for us (and did some of the work ourselves).  It cost just over £1,000/m2 which I'm told is competitive in 2012 and this included both solar PV (expensive in those days) and solar thermal with associated thermal store (both of which, strictly, are nothing to do with Passivhaus..  Yes, it very much sounds like Lisa's suspicions that it's a rip-off are right.  It need not cost much, if any, more than a conventional house.

    The key points are very good insulation and very good airtightness.  The latter forces the use of a MVHR.  In my case the solar thermal generates all the DHW and space heating for about 3/4 of the year.  There's quite a lot of south-facing glazing.  All the glazing bar one skylight is triple glazed - it's a very quiet house!.
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  • 0
    This is the first time I've contributed to these discussions, so I hope I'm not going to get anything wrong.  

    But this is one topic I feel I can contribute to - I live in an certified Passivhaus.  And we had it built for us (and did some of the work ourselves).  It cost just over £1,000/m2 which I'm told is competitive in 2012 and this included both solar PV (expensive in those days) and solar thermal with associated thermal store (both of which, strictly, are nothing to do with Passivhaus..  Yes, it very much sounds like Lisa's suspicions that it's a rip-off are right.  It need not cost much, if any, more than a conventional house.

    The key points are very good insulation and very good airtightness.  The latter forces the use of a MVHR.  In my case the solar thermal generates all the DHW and space heating for about 3/4 of the year.  There's quite a lot of south-facing glazing.  All the glazing bar one skylight is triple glazed - it's a very quiet house!.
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