What is a Passive House?

Passive House is perhaps the highest of all international building standards and ensures that your home is energy efficient, comfortable, affordable and ecological. This energy-based standard consumes up to 90% less heating and cooling electricity than a conventional New Zealand home.

In New Zealand we are accustomed to hot summers where we have to open all the windows and doors to get a cool breeze, or the cold winters where it is 5 degrees outside and we crowd around the heat pump in the living room. Would you be surprised if I told you this is not what they do in Europe, even when their winters get down to -10 degrees. In fact, most of them can walk around in a t-shirt and shorts during some of the coldest days of the year. This is the climate in which Passive House was developed in 1991.

The Passive House standard has been developed in Germany by Professor Wolfgang Feist, as a world leading approach to minimise running cost of a building. Passive House has since become a world-renowned approach to creating a sustainable, healthy building.

The core principle of Passive House is to provide the healthiest indoor environment for the occupants. It achieves this by reducing the heating and cooling requirements of your home while providing fresh filtered air to the entire home. This reduces the overall energy consumption and heating costs, making a Passive House an incredibly energy efficient home to live in.