Bag End: A Passive House. Huh?

Thanks for stopping by. Just a few short comments this week.

If you read the bar title “From Hobbit  Shed to Hobbit House” you would have come across a sentence or two mentioning that a Hobbit House would be considered an earth sheltered passive house.  An earth sheltered home is obviously a home with some form of soil as its cover. There are a wide range of what some would call an earth sheltered home. There are also quite a few products that architects use to call the roofs on their structures “Green”. So I think we can all agree that  Bag End would be an earth sheltered home.

Calling a home a passive house is another thing altogther. The passive house standard is, in my opinion, the state of the art in building technology. It is a construction standard that was developed by a German physicist named Wolfgang Feist in the 1990’s and is just catching on in the US today. In order to claim that your house is a passive house the home must meet certain requirements. If it meets these requirements then it can be passive house certified by the Passive House Institute. I will be trying to meet these requirements as I build Hobbit Hollow.

I’m not going to get into the nuts and bolts of the requirements but basically a passive house has these attributes: 1.Low air infiltration. 2. Super insulation 3. Triple glazed high performance windows and exterior doors. 4. Energy recovery ventilation. 5.Elimination of thermal bridges.

These items when combined together properly will result in a home that uses 90 percent less energy than a new typical home built today. That is probably hard to believe but it is true.  This is what we are going for with this project. I am very excited about getting started.

As we go along on this project I will delve into each of these attributes from time to time.

This past week I had the opportunity to attend a conference sponsored by the Journal of Light Construction. It was called JLC Live and was held in Providence, Rhode Island. The session I went to was about building to the Passive House Standard and was given by a guy named Chris Corson. He built a passive house in Maine and is currently working on a few others. The Maine house was featured in The Journal of Light  Construction last year in the May and June issues. It was very helpful for me to hear a guy like Chris speak about the nuts and bolts of passive house construction. Without getting too technical I have always felt that this Hobbit  House we will be building will be an excellent fit for a passive house. We will see!

Just a quick update. My building permit was approved this past week and the electric utilitycompany connected my meter. I hope to lay out the footings next weekend! Of course I picked up the DVD of “The Hobbit”  Friday at Best Buy.  Whoever designed Bag End is a genius. I mean, who wouldn’t want to live in a house like that?

To the free folk of Middle Earth enjoy your week!

Jim