Passive Standard House Castleconnell, Co. Limerick

Passive Design, Self Build, Timber Frame

Project Highlights – Passive Standard House
House Type: Two Storey
Contract Type: Full Build – Turnkey Finish
Build Time: 8 months
Air Tightness: 0.27 ACH @ 50 Pa
House Size: 215 m2
BER/PHPP: Passive Certified Standard
Est. Annual heating costs € 250 – €300 per year
Note: Running costs are for Space & Hot water heating and Running costs are subjective to variations in individual use.

Foundation: 300mm
Supergr0und Foundation – U Value 0.10 W/m2degK

External Walls: Factory fitted Insulated & Air tight
Panels with service cavity – to U Value – 0.15 W/m2degK

Flat Roofs: 220mm Factory fitted Insulated & Air tight Roof Panels with service cavity to U Value – 0.12 W/m2degK
Flat of ceiling: 400mm of High Performance Quilt Insulation to U Value – 0.11 W/m2degK
Sloped ceiling: 220mm Factory fitted Insulated & Air tight Roof Panels with service cavity to U Value – 0.12 W/m2degK

Windows & Doors: Grady Joinery Passive Standard PVC.

Heating: 7.5Kw Air to water Heat Pump with underfloor heating on the ground floor with towel Radiators to the 1st floor
HRV: Lo Carbon Sentinel Kinetic – 92 % efficient Heat Recovery & Ventilation
Vent Axia Unit.

Passive House Kilmurray

Passive Design, Self Build, Timber Frame

Emmanuelle and Aodh were keen on mber frame building, and the Green Build Centre (GBC) built the house’s closed-panel mber frames in their Cork factory.

“It’s factory fied, the panels come out pre-insulated and airght,” says GBC’s Kevin Murphy, a veteran of timber frame for two decades in the US and Ireland. He said that while GBC have built six or seven homes to a similar spec, this was the first that included a specific brief to hit the passive house standard — including a space heang demand of 15kWh/m2/yr, maximum heat load of 10 W/m2, airghtness of 0.6 air changes per hour and
maximum U-value of 0.15 for walls, roof and floor. Kevin found the requirement to hit the standard focused the mind: “It made sure everything was up to the mark. It was both challenging and interesng,” he says.

“And you’re working with MosArt who are one of the most preeminent on the island for passive house. It was challenging at the beginning, and it was quite rewarding at the end of the day.”

GBC did more than just assemble the mber frame though — they did everything down to fing the windows and the landscaping too. They insulated the roof secons and block-clad timber frame walls with mineral wool and insulation, while the sloped roof and walls are also beefed up with an extra 50mm of rigid PIR insulation. The windows are triple-glazed Vrogum-Svarre units made with Scandanavian pine, and Siga airghtness tapes and membranes were used throughout the build too.

The house’s final airghtness result was 0.4 air changes per hour at 50 pascals — well inside the passive house standard. Art recommends that as many of the building team as possible – […]

Passive House Cork

Passive Design, Self Build, Timber Frame

Contractor the Green Build Centre had worked on passive house projects before, but this was  upgrade
ph+ 67 their first Enerphit renovation. “We were very lucky to be honest,” says project manager Mark Higgins, “because basically the house was stripped
back bare. In that respect we had a blank canvas to work with. We stripped out the whole building, ceilings – the lot.”

Retaining the external look of the house meant ruling out one approach that tends to feature prominently in Enerphit projects: external insulation.
But because it was such a big, boxy house, there was sufficient room to accommodate additional insulation internally.

The team then turned its attention to eliminating cold bridges and achieving airtightness. Andrew Shorten points out that external insulation, in
addition to affecting the house’s character, can add a further challenge in a retrofit situation. “With external insulation, there’s now a huge gap between that insulation and the insulation under the floor.”

Shorten argues that insulating internally put him in a better position when it came to designing away cold bridges. Cutting away all floors and ceilings allowed the contractor to completely dryline internal walls. Installing new insulation beneath the floors and in the roof then allowed the team to effectively create a continuous, almost unbroken layer of insulation inside the house.

“If you draw a section through the house,” Shorten explains, “floor meets wall perfectly, wall goes through first floor perfectly, bar timber joists bridging, which isn’t a major deal. Then it goes up and meets the 450mm of attic insulation. “All of the internal walls meet the external walls, creating a break in the insulation but we pumped the cavity with 100mm of bead, so that thermal bridge was nullified by the fact that there […]