The HIP modular Passive House is now completed, with all systems installed. HIP held a grand opening in late November, attended by Patricia Waiters, Mayor of Fairmount Heights, and officials from the Prince George’s County Department of Housing and Community Development and the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development. The Prince George’s County […]
Modular Home
Modular Passive House is now completed
Second modular Passive House blower door test results!
Chris Conway and crew were able to get back at the site on September 3rd for a second test, after taping of the various leaks we’d uncovered on August 26th. The big culprits, we believe, were the gaps at each of the straps between the top and bottom modules. The results: .40 ACH50Pa. Our tightest […]
First modular Passive House blower door test results
Chris Conway and Caleb Fritsch of Conway Energy performed the long-awaited blower door test for our first modular passive house today. We couldn’t have picked a more beautiful — and simultaneously more inopportune — day to have scheduled it. Good forensic testing requires a greater than ten degree difference between inside and outside temperatures so […]
Our modular Passive House is on its foundation
Architects rarely see sudden transformations. Our work is composed of small incremental steps, generally forward, from fuzzy concept to finished building. The pace usually seems glacial and there is never, ever, a big WOW moment when what we do suddenly becomes a building. So it was a unique experience today watching our first modular house […]
Preparing the site for our modular Passive House
Sitework began in mid-July. Everything is now ready for the arrival of the modules on August 11. One of the ways we controlled costs on the project was to eliminate the conditioned crawl space, which on a passive house can be a very large expense, with the insulation of walls and footings just as is […]
The building envelope of our modular Passive House
One of the biggest challenges in all Passive Houses is meeting the air sealing requirement of .6 ACH @ 50Pa. It is particularly challenging on this project for two reasons: First, the relatively small size of the house means there is more surface area relative to enclosed volume than on a larger house. Since air […]
Our modular Passive House is under construction
This week Beracah Homes in Greenwood, Delaware began construction of our — and their — first modular Passive House. The house is sponsored by the Housing Initiative Partnership(HIP), a Maryland non-profit organization committed to providing affordable housing. HIP had seen the Habitat Passive House at the last DC Solar Decathalon and had toured our Bethesda […]