Passive Housing

Located in Oldtown, a hard to find country town in County Dublin, is a stunning new one-off house that not only manages to bring open-plan living to rural life, but also meets the onerous passive house standards using low impact materials. Jason Walsh visited the site as the house neared completion to find out more, an opportunity that Construct Ireland couldn’t pass up

Sustainable architect Simon McGuinness describes a project in Dublin which is set to surpass the onerous standard using structural insulated panels.

In the hands of the right architect, meeting the passive house standard needn’t involve compromising on design. Construct Ireland visited a recently certified passive house which shows that a seamless low energy architecture is possible

A striking new house in County Cork proves that meeting the passive house standard needn’t mean sacrificing good design

A new development at Grange Lough, Rosslare, reveals that passive houses can be made Irish – both in terms of what they’re built with, and how they look.

While the principles of low energy building apply equally for new build and upgrades, the reality is that htting passive levels becomes much trickier when retrofitting. The Passive House Institute have taken this on board and created a retrofit standard that is ambitious but achievable.

As interest in sustainable building continues to escalate, Construct Ireland is increasingly unearthing buildings that betray an ambition to break new ground under a plethora of green criteria. John Hearne visited one such house in County Louth, and found a project driven by passive house and BER scale-topping ambitions combined with on-site energy and water supply strategies and a commitment to the use of green materials

Passive houses have long been considered the ultimate in low energy buildings. So when it comes to BERs, why don’t they always get a straight A? Lenny Antonelli investigates.

For a building to truly be considered a passive house a vast range of criteria need to be met, as Niels Bjergstrom, founder of Zero-Carbon Solutions Ltd reveals.

It could be a reflex response to the shockingly poor construction standards that came to define Ireland’s boom years, but the world’s leading low energy building standard is starting to thrive in Ireland. As the several case studies following this article reveal, a groundswell of Irish clients, designers, contractors and manufacturers are starting to recognise the opportunities available in becoming early adopters of a standard destined for exponential global growth.