North Plains home, built by Hammer & Hand and designed by Scott Edwards Architecture, honored by distinction.
The Pumpkin Ridge Passive House, built by Hammer & Hand and designed by Scott Edwards Architecture, has been selected by Northwest ENERGY STAR® as one of six demonstration “super-efficient homes” across the Pacific Northwest. Over the course of construction, we’ll publish a project journal to the ENERGY STAR website, sharing our progress, challenges, solutions, and successes at Pumpkin Ridge.
Pumpkin Ridge Passive House, rendering courtesy of Scott Edwards Architecture.
The new “Super-Efficient Homes” section of Northwest ENERGY STAR’s website offers a nice introduction to high performance homes, including a primer on efficient technologies (framing, insulation, windows, air sealing, HVAC, indoor air quality, water heating, lighting) as well as this infographic of the “home performance scale”:
The scale shows that super-efficient homes like Passive House perform well beyond their Energy Star-Certified and DOE Builders Challenge brethren. It also underscores what the Passive House community has known for some time; super-efficient homes are the best route to net zero energy homes. Once you’ve driven energy demand down to Passive House levels through smart design and high performance building envelope, it takes just a modest addition of alternative energy (a few solar panels, for instance) to reach net zero.
Please check out the Northwest Energy Star site, and take a look at the other cool demonstration projects featured there (in Coeur d’Alene, Ennis, Ashland, Seattle and Olympia).
– Zack
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