Passive House certification criteria
Passive House is the world‘s leading standard in energy efficient construction.
The Passive House Standard stands for quality, comfort and energy efficiency. Passive Houses require very little energy to achieve a comfortable temperature year round, making conventional heating and air conditioning systems obsolete. While delivering superior levels of comfort, the Passive House Standard also protects the building structure.
The use of high quality building components (see Certified Passive House Component Database) is key, but simply using Passive House suitable components does not make a building a Passive House. Careful planning of the interactions between these components is of critical importance to meeting the Passive House Standard. The Passive House Planning Package (PHPP) can help designers determine whether certain building plans, if carefully followed, will produce a structure that will adhere to the Passive House Standard certification criteria.
The definitive criteria for the certification of Passive House components and Passive Houses are set by the Passive House Institute under the direction of Dr. Wolfgang Feist.
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See Passive House and EnerPHit retrofit building criteria
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See Passive House Component certification criteria
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See breakdown of "soft" criteria for Passive House buildings
Certification
The Passive House Institute issues a checklist intended to make it easier for your building to achieve the Passive House Standard and potentially “Certified Passive House” status by outlining the most important steps in the process. It draws particular attention to the quality control that accompanies the construction of a Passive House. A work in progress, this list is not necessarily complete. The current version can be viewed here under the Passive House checklist section of the Passive House Institute website.
Advantages of certification
While a Passive House building does not need to be certified to be considered a Passive House, certification provides an important and visible form of quality assurance.
