Free Floor Plan: 10 Ways Passive House Design is Different Than Normal Home Design

If you want to download the floor plan, please scroll to the bottom of the article.

This is a guest post by Mike Duclos. Mike is founder of The DEAP Energy Group, a firm providing a wide variety of deep energy retrofit, zero net energy, and Passive House related consulting services. Mike has real-world experience with the […]

Free 26 Minute Lesson on Performing Heat Loss Calculations for Net Zero Energy Homes

Calculating heat loss, and designing for minimal heat loss, is absolutely critical to designing and building net zero energy home or to passive house standards.

Watch this 26 minute video lesson, from Marc Rosenbaum’s Zero Net Energy Homes course to learn about how to design buildings with minimal heat loss. If you need to learn how […]

September 30th, 2013|Categories: Building Science, Free Courses, Zero Net Energy Buildings|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |

Full Case Study of 8 Net Zero Energy Homes

The following post is a case study of 8 Net Zero Energy Homes that were designed by South Mountain Company (SMC). SMC’s Marc Rosenbaum is teaching a class on Net Zero Energy Design that will give you all of the information and tools (Marc’s own custom made tools) to design Net Zero energy homes. The […]

September 30th, 2013|Categories: Building Science, Zero Net Energy Buildings|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |

[Photos] How to Frame a Super Insulated Home

There has been a lot of hoop-la and craziness around passive homes, net zero energy homes, and super energy efficient homes. I’ve been amazed at how easy it can actually be. My friend is building a house that will burn less then a cord of wood per winter. His building cost? Around $100 to $110 per square foot. Yes, he did do a lot of the work himself. However, if a contractor would do it, the price would still be on par with normal construction.

If you need to learn more about designing a zero net energy home, high performance building and HVAC technologies and principles, we’ve created an amazing free class for you. Our Free Course: High Performance Building and HVAC is the most in-depth, best free course on high performance buildings and HVAC systems available on the internet. You’ll learn from all of the smartest industry experts. The class has 20+ of video lesson, plenty of reading assignments and a number of free tools. It will drastically decrease your learning curve on these subjects. Topics include, residential building enclosures and ventilation, zero net energy homes, passive house design principles, biomass heating, ground source heat pumps and solar thermal. Click here to sign up for High Performance Building and HVAC. 

Before we talk about building a super insulated home, first you need to understand how to design a super efficient shell. The below 26 minute free video lesson is from Marc Rosenbaum’s 10 week, “Zero Net Energy Design” class, where students learn how to design a zero net energy home in 10 weeks.

Here’s how he did it.

1 – Keep the house small. Less resources, cheaper, and less energy use. At 1600 square feet the house will use about a half of cord of wood be winter. We’re burning mainly maple which is 20 million BTUs per cord. Thus, he’ll burn 10 million BTUs per winter. This averages around 55,000 BTUs per day. Don’t believe me, this house will use the tiniest wood stove he could find.

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