Our house for instance looks like it will not meet passive house standards, but isn’t far off. When we were looking into what it would take to be a passive house we realized that the easiest solution was not to increase insulation or eliminate thermal bridges, but to extrude our house ten feet to the north and keep our window area the same. We would have increased our heat loss a little, but would have nearly doubled our floor area.

The thing that would have made that the most viable option for us is that we are building with a construction loan. The size of that loan is based on an appraisal that is very heavily dependent on the square footage of our house. So by increasing the size of our house, we would not only improve our efficiency in terms of energy use per square foot, but would have also improved our ability to get funding for it. But at the same time we would be increasing our consumption in a variety of ways and reducing our very limited yard space. And like our value judgment where we are going to be sacrificing LEED points for a design option that we felt was more responsible, we are choosing not to pursue Passive House for similar reasons.

It is great to see more and more homes being built to such low levels of energy consumption.

I am surprised, however, to see an unwarranted criticism of Passive House standards. While I understand your perspective on the discussion of measuring energy on a square footage basis, I think that you will find that building larger to somehow decrease energy usage / sq. ft. presents its’ own challenges and is counter-intuitive to the goals of consumers building to the standard in the first place.

While the pursuit of points in the LEED system may lead to compromised choices that do not maximise energy conservation, Passive House makes no such provisions. Points for points’ sake just to qualify for a different plaque is not only irrational, it is irresponsible when looking to minimise energy usage. It is money and resources diverted from better use in the energy saving model. By setting a target of 15 kWh/ m2a, the PH standard simply mandates maximum conservation. Short-sighted trade-offs that allow for higher energy consumption means that today’s (relatively) cheap dollars are spent and tomorrow’s potentially vastly more expensive dollars will be required for incremental energy costs.

The larger you build, the more complexity is added to the home and the more money is required to reach the target. I think that you will find most PH advocates also design and think smaller, relative to today’s standard home because a smaller, simpler footprint mitigates both additional expense and complexity. If clients want bigger, they will simply have to pay for it, but a total home consumption target would exclude larger homes and buildings (schools, offices, etc.) from the concept all together and would do nothing to direct a designers’s efforts towards conservation.