PH 2.0 – The development of optimised practice-oriented planning and performance documents for passive houses of the 2nd generation

In the last years a lot of innovative technologies and building services systems were applied in new passive house projects. The projects showed that energy related solutions were as manifold as the involved planners behind them. The only common bases of these projects mostly were the planning criteria of the Passive House Planning Package (PHPP) developed by the Passive House Institute in Germany. The monitoring of passive house projects in Austria had shown that the calculated values from PHPP are suitable for characterising the energy use for heating, but in reality the buildings often failed to have planned final and primary energy demands or summer comfort. The origin and reasons of these differences were figured out.

First of all there were unexpected high energy losses within the building services (heating and hot water generation) and the mechanical ventilation systems although technologically high developed single components had been applied. The aim of the project was to optimise the whole system “building” instead of only single components. This has been done by analyses of the energy losses, power consumption and user’s behaviour. Specific definitions of quality criteria for the user’s comfort in order to adapt the building services system have been made. The ides was: Not the users should change their behaviour, but the technics should correspond with required quality criteria.

Reprocessing a lot of available monitoring results from previous studies showed deviations in practice, they could be found in the final report of the project. The optimization of the planning (by PHPP) and of construction, building services and ventilation components leaded to innovative solutions for the overall system. These optimizations are part of the project results summarized in a planning handbook titled “passive house 2.0 – guidelines for the passive house of the 2nd generation” which is available at the project partner’s websites.