Case Study: Passive House Construction in Kansas City

The most effective way to reduce world energy consumption on our planet is to reduce the annual heating and cooling demands of our buildings. The combination of a super insulated, thermal bridge free, airtight enveloped design, integrated with high performance glazing, can reduce annual heating and cooling demands by over 90% and reductions of 60-­‐70% in overall energy consumption compared to traditional design methods. Our firm is designing and building a single detached Passive House in the Kansas City urban core that will achieve such reductions in energy consumption without the use of solar panels or geothermal. This is a spec home, and is set for groundbreaking in the first quarter of 2015. The interior will be conditioned with an air-to-air heat pump and annual heating is modeled to be 4.75 kBTU/ft2⋅yr and the annual cooling demand to be 3.25kBTU/ft2⋅yr. A typical home in Kansas City would have an annual heating demand of 42.75 kBTU/ft2-year. This will be one of the lowest energy consuming homes in the Midwestern region of the United States.

(This entry contains a conference paper and presentation in PDF. For optimal viewing, open in Adobe Acrobat Reader.)