Open Source Content Management

In the summer of 2015, Cheryl Hitchcock and Dudley Thompson moved from an energy-hogging Victorian home into a new timber frame passive house in Cumbria’s Eden Valley. Below, they give a frank account of what their first year and a half in their new home has been like — and reveal how shockingly low their energy bills are.

The default answer when you want to do pretty much anything to a listed building is ‘no’. The default assumption if you want to achieve the Enerphit standard for retrofit is ‘tackle everything’. So how on earth do you retrofit a listed building to within a whisker of the Enerphit standard — with the blessing of the conservation officer?

A brand new passive-certified nursery at the University of Aberdeen provides the children of staff and students with a bright, warm and healthy space for learning and playing.

Mixing modern standards of super-insulation with vernacular farmhouse architecture led to the creation of a very special home for proprietors Jeanette and Jon Fenwick — one that picked up a coveted UK Passivhaus Award in 2016.

Lenny Antonelli speaks to architect Fran Bradshaw of Anne Thorne Architects, who designed and built a straw-bale home for herself in Hickling, Norfolk two years ago — and aimed to meet the passive house standard while doing so, with only a single infrared electric panel as the building’s sole active heat source.

Self-building with no construction experience, Eamon Fleming didn’t set out to build a passive house, but he managed to meet the standard while doing almost all of the work in conjunction with his father, while exceeding the targets of Ireland’s nearly zero energy building definition.