This article in the NYT about “passive houses”
DARMSTADT, Germany — From the outside, there is nothing unusual about the stylish new gray and orange row houses in the Kranichstein District, with wreaths on the doors and Christmas lights twinkling through a freezing drizzle. But these houses are part of a revolution in building design: There are no drafts, no cold tile floors, no snuggling under blankets until the furnace kicks in. There is, in fact, no furnace.
In Berthold Kaufmann’s home, there is, to be fair, one radiator for emergency backup in the living room — but it is not in use. Even on the coldest nights in central Germany, Mr. Kaufmann’s new “passive house†and others of this design get all the heat and hot water they need from the amount of energy that would be needed to run a hair dryer.
“You don’t think about temperature — the house just adjusts,†said Mr. Kaufmann, watching his 2-year-old daughter, dressed in a T-shirt, tuck into her sausage in the spacious living room, whose glass doors open to a patio. His new home uses about one-twentieth the heating energy of his parents’ home of roughly the same size, he said.
reminds me of a common theme around here: it’s easy to make comparisons between Europe (in this case Germany) and the United States as long as you don’t know anything about either one.
Darmstadt, like much of Germany, has a typical low temperature in the winter of around 20°F and a high temperature in the summer around 80°F. The nearest big town to where I lived in Germany, Cologne (Köln), is about the same. Europe, generally, is very temperate by American standards.
By comparison here in Chicago every winter we have temperatures that get to -10°F for at least one week and every summer it goes over 100°F for at least a week.
Building a passive house in temperate Germany is very, very expensive. Building one that would work in intemperate Chicago would be ridiculously expensive.
And then there’s the space issue. A passive house usually calls for about 500 sq. ft. per person. That would be intolerably small for many Americans. I don’t know what the size of an average house is in Germany. My experience was that houses were typically significantly smaller than we’re accustomed to so that 500 sq. ft. per person wouldn’t be too far off the mark.
Kevin Drum comments on the same article:
More passive houses, please.
In Germany, definitely. In the U. S. maybe not so much.
My point is not that we shouldn’t use resources efficiently. We should. But one size doesn’t fit all. Culture and conditions matter.
If people wanted such houses, they would get built. The simple fact is that most Americans prioritize other values in deciding on a house besides energy efficiency.
I come from a family of builders and was, for a short time, a general contractor myself. The vast majority of Americans in our experience want cheaper costs up front. They do not want to pay beyond what is minimally required by code.
Although building codes have improved and required greater energy efficiency in recent years, there is very little support for requiring the kind of efficiencies in construction that went into that house in Germany. Potential home buyers do not want to make the requisite sacrifices in other areas and builders believe such requirements will result in fewer homes built and less business for them.
I think it’s also important to note that home heating costs in Europe are much more expensive that the US.
I liked that NYT article, because it illustrates how the “Passivhaus” concept might be adopted for US needs. True, German houses ARE too expensive, made for 100 years at least… In Sweden they live in a colder climate, but are often perfectly happy with lighter and cheaper wooden houses. Why shouldn’t it be possible to develop modified concepts which cost roughly the same as the average US house?
What makes such a house especially comfortable is that you don’t have to care about temperature and humidity of the air. In a standard house, it is always either too warm or too cold. And few people are aware how much air humidity influences their daily form, sleep and general health.
Heating prices are a factor: this winter my heating prices rised by 25 percent – sure, in absolute terms US citizens are still better off. But after watching the oil prices in 2008, energy independence now earns a lot more attention. When it comes to building or renting a house, you have to consider not only what happens next year – what will be in 2020?
For years, Passive Houses still have been expensive, the kind of extra feature that you afford only for your own use and not for houses offered for rent, but the situation is changing. For example, on the following webite
http://www.immobilienscout24.de/44735906?ftc=5020&_s_cclid=1230424680
there is a half “double house” offered to rent. For 630 Euro (884 US-$) per month + heating costs (an incredible 8 Euro per month!) you get 1100 squ.ft. (4 rooms + bathroom + kitchen) to live on, + additional 400 squ.ft. (maybe extra space in the basement or in the attic, or both?). Not enough space for an US couple, really? (In average German flats a couple lives on 800-900 squ.ft.)
Other offers on the same site (recently only 13 flats/houses to rent) are more expensive. Nevertheless I find the development encouraging. It all started with one Passivhaus in 1981. Now we are already at 15,000 (not too bad when you take into account that most of the 1980’s went by for only sporadic experiments of this kind, and that to get more houses built, the architects had to be trained at first), and it may soon be possible to rent more Passiv Houses all over Germany (a new trend is to bring old houses to passive house standard). Paying 640 Euro per month for such a house sounds like a great deal, as compared to 520 Euro for 1100 squft. plus 120 Euro for heating – and rising!
In the post above, the temperature difference between Chicago and German towns (there are Passiv Houses almost everywhere in Germany, from North to South) is greatly exaggerated. For Berlin, the range of temperatures (20-86 degrees F) isn’t so much different from Chicago as suggested, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Chicago
http://www.wordtravels.com/Travelguide/Countries/Germany/Climate/
Stefan:
I’ve lived both in northwest Germany and in Chicago. Believe me, there’s no comparison between the two. Chicago is extremely harsh. There’s no place in Germany that routinely gets as cold as Chicago does in the winter and there’s no place in Germany that routinely gets as hot as Chicago does in the summer.
It makes a difference. Passive houses aren’t appropriate for the kind of heat we get here in the summer and an ambient temperature as cold as Chicago’s in the winter requires a lot more insulation than would be necessary in Germany.
In Germany I visited any number of private homes that had no furnace, no central heating. That would be insane in Chicago.
Is Kevin Drum willing to live in 500 square feet per person? I’ll bet that as a member of the “intellectual elite” he uses a lot more than that for his collection of books and magazines.
Dave,
OK Chicago may be too harsh for the PH technology of today. These congress reports say, basically, that you need much thicker insulation for a PH in Warsaw than for one in Rome. Sounds fine, but on the other side the PH experts admit that there are unsolved problems for extreme climates, and Chicago may be such a case.
Wikipedia says: “Evaluations have indicated that while it is technically possible, the costs of meeting the Passivhaus standard increase significantly when building in Northern Europe above 60° latitude [14] [15]. European cities at approximately 60° include Helsinki in Finland and Bergen in Norway. London is at 51°; Moscow is at 55°.”
The NYT article had mentioned other restrictions, so in many cases a low-energy house may well be a better solution than a Passive House.
However, where they are possible, PH are an attractive alternative. Thanks to their superinsulation, they are also well insulated against noise – relevant for places with lots of trafic (but still a free view to the South!). The clean, filtered air is nice for people with pollen allergies (ok I know that after closing the windows in a house, the pollen quickly settles to the ground anyway – so perhaps it only “feels” better).
@ pst314: My own collection of 4000 books and bound magazines – I am a journalist working from home – occupies a full room. Some are from the early 1800’s, and I can assure you that for a book collection there is nothing better than a room with constant temperature and moisture. Ask a librarian. You can easily damage a valuable old book, if you place it on a shelf leaning on a cold, outside wall. When you visit a library, you’ll see that most of the books are placed on “free-arm” shelves. The NYT article said that “people who wanted thousands of square feet per person should look for another design.” Well, I don’t need “thousands”, to have 1100 squ.ft. for me and my books would be just perfect. The missing heat (from the second person) perhaps can be submitted from solar panels, or from my three PCs which are running almost the whole day ;-).
My last message perhaps was too enthusiastic. Many people who work from 9 to 5 may not profit enough from renting a flat in a PH, which is hardly available even here in Germany, and still costs 650-750 euro per month, 100 euro more than other nice apartments in a leaky old house.
But developing alternatives is never wrong. Companies building Passive Houses are successful here in Germany, a modified concept might work in the USA, too. If the first US houses of that kind are still expensive and only attractive for VIPs, this might change – remember the hybrid cars?
I agree with most of what you wrote above, Stefan. I think that developing alternatives is good but that the alternatives that are held out and, particularly, those that receive government subsidies, should be appropriate to the preferences of people in the specific countries and suitable to the conditions in those countries.
BTW Chicago’s climate is much closer to that of Moscow than it is to that of, say, Frankfurt. There are also striking similarities to St. Petersburg. Both were built on swamps and St. Petersburg has a notoriously lousy climate.
For most of the United States net zero houses would be better than passive ones. Unfortunately, the present state of solar energy is such that the cost will never make financial sense. That doesn’t mean that we should give up on solar energy but that it isn’t ready for prime time.
I think what much of the US could really use is an effective furnace substitute that runs on electricity instead of natural gas (or in the Northeast, heating oil).
I didn’t realize it got THAT cold in Chicago, Dave, since while you guys are farther north than we are (I live in Salt Lake City, UT), you’re at a lower elevation and next to a large body of water. It usually averages 21 degrees Fahrenheit here during the coldest month (January), and the lowest it has ever gotten on record was 2 degrees back in 1990.
There already exists a Passive House in Moscow. But a report on PHs in Norway says that building a PH row house in Oslo is “quite ambitious, but … possible … with available technology. However, it is well above the PH standard for row houses in central Europe. The extra costs […] will also be quite high, and will probably hinder the market penetration of Passive Houses in Norway.” Which only confirms what you wrote.
Whether in moderate climates a passive house or a net zero house is the better choice also depends from local subsidies. Solar energy in Germany profited from subsidies of 1 billion euros in 2008 alone. It still contributes less than 1 percent of the national electricity. But one day…
5 years in Chicago. 3 in Minneapolis. Chicago’s bad. Really bad. But Minneapolis is a place where losing a button off your overcoat can kill you.
There are a pack of Passivehouses already built in Urbana, IL at an extremely affordable cost. Not Chicago, but not far off: http://www.passivehouse.us/passiveHouse/PHIUSProjects.html
There is a Passivehouse in Bemidji, MI, which is way colder than Chicago: http://greenlineblog.com/waldsee-biohaus-certified-passive-house/