SDSU Passive home

SDSU’s student designed home is South Dakota’s first official passive home.  Construction and planning of the home took a bit over 3 years for completion.  A Passive House is designed to meet a performance standard certified by the U.S. Passive House Institute (PHIUS). They were first developed in Germany and Scandinavia in the 1990s, and have been adopted and modified for the wider range of U.S. climate zones. The basic principles of these high performing buildings include high insulation levels without thermal bridges, air-tight construction, heat-recovery ventilation, high performance windows and doors, and solar heat-gain management.

According to the Passive House Institute U.S., a passive building is designed and built in accordance with these five building-science principles:

• Employs continuous insulation throughout its entire envelope without any thermal bridging

• Prevents infiltration of outside air and loss of conditioned air through an extremely airtight building envelope

• Employs high-performance windows (typically triple-paned) and doors

• Uses some form of balanced heat- and moisture-recovery ventilation and a minimal space conditioning system

• Maximizes solar gain to exploit the sun’s energy for heating purposes in the heating season and to minimize overheating during the cooling season

GenPro Energy donated time and labor to install the solar panels on the roof of the passive home.