Passive house is one pathway to solving the carbon riddle

Passive Tom is devoted to a way of living that is comfortable, healthy, aesthetically pleasing and doesn’t burn up the planet.  It’s called passive house.  It’s a proved way to live by consuming far less energy and emitting a fraction of the carbon we do now. 
 
There is no magic; this is all science.  We can arrange our built environment in a way that uses some 90% less energy than the way we build now.  Europe has led this field for a simple market-driven reason: it has always been expensive to waste energy there.  In North America, energy has been cheaper, and with cheap comes profligacy. 

Many North American builders will say passive-style construction is too expensive. Yes, the up-front cost is higher.  The life-cycle cost of a passive house is not, however.  We need long-term thinking to tackle long-term problems.  As these principles are adopted, the costs will fall for many of the components we need and bring passive house closer and closer to the economics of conventional buildings. Sound far fetched? Consider the price of installed solar energy has dropped some 80% in two decades and is now cheaper than coal.  With scale, the same can happen with passive house. 
 
Let’s get going.

Here are our two projects on Vancouver Island

You can follow our blog to be informed about Passive House in the world, Canada, British Colombia and Vancouver Island.