Thanks for all your detailed answers! Very interesting. I'll go by them one by one.


I'm sorry I wasn't more precise, but it's hard for me to translate all this stuff because I don't know the technical name of items.
What I meant was: is the supporting structure of your house built with layers of bricks, usually with another layer in front for the look (in your case, you used shingles), of was wood used like they do a lot in the US. Wood insulates better, but bricks are obviously more sturdy. Because you said beams and blocks were used, I'm pretty sure now the supporting structure of the walls was done with masonry.


The wood used will help a lot. That's one of the main difference in my house. A wall of my house consists of (when seen from the outside) bricks, an air layer of 20mm, 100mm of polyurethan, then the insulated supportive bricks of 140mm and then a layer of plaster. Like is shown here on the first photo. Sometimes this way of building passive or low energy is called 'massive passive' since no wood is used. It gives me a good k value for the walls, but in hindsight I wished I has used Ytong stones or lime-sandsones instead of regular insulated bricks. Maybe even ICF building blocks. Ytong stones because of their much better lambda value (but they are lighter) or lime-sand stones which actually have a worse lambda value than bricks but because of their higher mass block exterior sound a lot better and have a very high accumulative potential. ICF is just an interesting concept: the strengh and airtightness of concrete + fully insulated on both sides with no chance of cold zones.


Awesome! Triple layered glass is really great. It also insulates outside noise a lot better (in case you should need that where your house is built).


So if I understand correctly, the floor plan was pre-defined and you couldn't change that? Then I understand the choice you made. Because indeed, you want to use as much space as possible.


A very understandable compromise which I would have made too in this case.


A value of 0.9 is indeed very good. Congratulations!
The airtightness of our house was the biggest disappointment I had to take during the entire building process. I believe it was more than 4g. In hindsight it seemed that the guy who insulated the room had not attached the roof insulation to the insulation in the walls, creating an enormous gap. If I wanted to have this fixed, I would need to remove all the ceder wood from my overhangs, and that's not a price I'm willing to pay.

Our architect was a classical architect, and was not used to all these special building techniques necessary for passiv. Passiv house architects are really rare here - this started getting better in the last few years, but when we needed one, about 4 years ago, no-one did that kind of stuff around here. All the techniques that got implemented was because I told the builders what to do exactly, or because I did it myself. Only for the roof insulation I wasn't present at the time because I couldn't leave work for it at that moment, and by the time I checked in the evening, it was dark (it was winter). By the next day the carpenter had closed up the overhangs and so I never knew, up to the day of the blowerdoor test.
Conclusion: you have to do or check everything yourself.

It's for these kind of things I would really like to build another house one day in the future. I plan on using my current house as the plan of reference, and then change all the things I don't like about it now. That's not all that much really, only small niggles AND a few building things that went wrong, like the roof insulation in the overhangs... That way I should end up with the perfect house that's perfectly built (for my needs anyway).


It's a PAUL unit, it has an electrical frost protection circuit but just takes in fresh air through the wall, the engineer did originally spec a ground loop but changed his mind, can't remember why.
Paul is the Rolss Royce of ventilation units. They've only got one downside: the filters are hard to reach so every time you need to change or clean those you need to take the unit apart. It's for this reason I've chosen Storkair, which also uses Paul motors but has a simpler filter changing system.

It's a shame your engineer left out the ground loop in the end. This is excellent for cooling your house in the summer. A very nice feature.


I see your specific gas boiler only starts at 12 kW. That's certainly not a passive house value (that should be 2kW or something). Our heat pump is also 12 kW , but that was because the installer left some headroom because we want to install a swimming pool somewhere in the future. Normally 8 kW should be fine for our house. 2-6 kW would have been ideal, but we had to insulate a lot more for that.

Thanks a lot for your answers!