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Going Green with The Passive House
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Posted On :
May-11-2010
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Article Word Count :
552
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Interested in the "Passive House" movement? Many different options exist on today's market for making life a little more environmentally friendly, but little that is out there right now can do it quite as effectively as a well built passive home.
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Interested in the "Passive House" movement? Many different options exist on today's market for making life a little more environmentally friendly, but little that is out there right now can do it quite as effectively as a well built passive home. Read on for more about how passive homes got started, what makes a home "passive," and how the passive house building standard is helping to create greener living options.
What Is A Passive House?
Every time something in your home consumes energy, a little bit of heat is released. With a passive home, everything is designed to collect that radiant heat and re-purpose it for keeping the home warm. These homes use a nearly airtight environment, air filtration that is designed to collect heat while it vents and recycles air, and smart placement of selectively shaded windows to create an environment inside the home that is always comfortable without using more than a tiny fraction of the usual electricity. As a side benefit, passive homes have some of the best air quality available in housing today.
Passive housing was invented in Europe about 10 years ago and is currently being used to make many European buildings more energy efficient. There are strict standards in place for allowing something to be considered a passive home, with one monitoring and qualification agency currently available in Germany and many EU countries starting to adopt their own monitoring of passive house quality. To qualify as a passive house according to the Passive House Standard adopted in Germany, a home needs to have an airtight shell and maintain a very strict set of standards about how much energy is being used for the home's normal operation.
How Do Passive Homes Help The Environment?
The goal of a passive house is to bring the energy requirement for keeping the home comfortable and in use to as close to zero as possible. Because of how efficiently this type of home recycles heat energy, the carbon footprint generated by passive housing is almost zero. Depending on the climate the home is used in, a house that meets the standards for being "passive" can get away with handling the majority of heating and cooling situations that may arise within a year without resorting to any outside energy at all. The high quality air filtering and dedication to using the home's emissions allow a home that is considered "passive" to produce some of the best indoor air quality out there without sending the filtered waste out into the rest of the environment.
What Does It Take To Make A Passive Home?
There are several factors that go into making a home energy efficient enough to qualify as "passive." First, the home must have an airtight shell in order to make sure that any heating or cooling happening inside the home stays there. This is followed by an extremely high quality insulation layer designed to aid in keeping energy and heat inside the home. The passive house then employs a vent system that is designed to filter out and collect any heat emissions that the home's electronics may be giving off. Finally, the home's windows and orientation should be set up to take full advantage of passive solar heating to finish heating the home naturally.
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Article Source :
http://www.articleseen.com/Article_Going Green with The Passive House_18471.aspx
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Author Resource :
Joe Cline writes articles for Austin real estate. Other articles written by the author related to Austin real estate blog and Austin Texas REALTOR can be found on the net.
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Keywords :
Austin real estate, Austin real estate blog, Austin Texas REALTOR,
Category :
Home and Family
:
Home Security
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