This is not a passive house, this was confirmed by a builder on Youtube who contacted the architect.<p>The features called out that contributed were
- Stucco siding
- Metal roof with no overhangs
- ~4' tall concrete wall
- 1 hour fire rated exterior wall assembly
For folks in the east bay area, the Berkeley fire department gave a great talk on fire risk reduction:
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MUh16czYGk&t=239" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MUh16czYGk&t=239</a><p>In the past year, I’ve added gutter guards, removed trees in zone zero (especially fire-prone cypress), and hardscaped zone zero.
I need to look into whether we can do more sealing like this passive house- bit tricky with 1950s construction.
Reminds me of my home here in Germany. I guess it’s not as sophisticated as the architects where more concerned with energy savings then fresh air. Means in the early years we had to vent the house manually a lot. I friend of mine renovated his house and installed on top an automated air refresh system. I wish my house had the same.<p>What I mean specifically is that around 2010ish the energy footprint started to be become more and more important. Currently the building codes here are so crazy that building a new house demands quite the upfront costs.
I'd love to know more about the windows. The architect's thread on Twitter mentioned that the windows are made of tempered glass, but I don't know if that's significant because they withstood impact damage better, or rejected heat better, or for some other reason.<p>Often there are flammable interior furnishings close to windows in a home (e.g. fairly flimsy cloth curtains). I wonder if the radiant heat of a nearby structure or vehicle fire is sufficient to ignite them through a typical residential single-paned window. In other words, is there a fire danger even when the window pane doesn't break and embers or hot gases stay on the outside?
> Though still a fairly new trend on the market<p>Passive Houses are a thing since the seventies or so and fairly common since the nineties. Does that still count as a "new trend" in real estate?
I've head that fire resistance and earthquake resistance work against each other. That the things that make a house fire resistant - stucco/metal roofs - are bad for earthquakes and the things that make earthquake resistance - flexibility - are bad for fire resistance.<p>Reading just a bit it seems like the question is how you get that flexibility; the easy way would seem to be building with wood which is tricky with fires.<p>Any truth to this?
Reminds me of this story about this hurricane-resistant house left standing in Mexico Beach, FL after Hurricane Michael:<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/14/us/hurricane-michael-florida-mexico-beach-house.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/14/us/hurricane-michael-flor...</a>
How does an airtight house work day-to-day? If I don't open a window, how quickly am I poisoning myself?<p>Not knocking the idea, I've heard of them before and experienced the joy of triple pane glass (both in insulation and noise protection)
"other construction material more fire resistant than plywood box held together by spit and prayer"<p>How interesting.<p>In all seriousness you could make a home from almost anything else and it would end up being more fire resistant. The flammability of your average US suburb has to rank somewhere near 1944 Tokyo.
One thing I'm curious about is how the CO2 levels in these "passive houses" look. If there's limited indoor to outdoor air exchange, wouldn't they build up? Is there a scrubbing mechanism?
Of course, if you build a house with a tight envelope and reduce air circulation, you can easily have poor indoor air quality. You still need a strategy for this, and in my opinion, it’s very overlooked.<p><a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273588438_Building_tight_-_Ventilating_right_How_are_new_air_tightness_standards_affecting_indoor_air_quality_in_dwellings" rel="nofollow">https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273588438_Building_...</a>