Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Welcome to our new (but not yet built) home.

Thanks for your interest in Our Connecticut Passive House.  We are the Honig Family and we are embarking on the domestic adventure of our lifetime.  We are building a Passive House (or Passivhaus) in Harwinton, CT, a lovely town in the Litchfield Hills. For those who are not familiar with the term, oversimply, Passive House is a German developed standard of building/design creating an ultra-insulated, ultra-energy efficient building.  Our home will have a sealed envelope (no air leakage) and a heat exchange fresh air ventilation system to retain most of the internal temperature.  And here is the kicker, No Furnace.  That is the part most people react to when I describe PH, especially in New England.  More later on how we arrived at the decision to build a PH.  For now I would like to explain where we are in our process and why I'm blogging about it.
We have purchased a lovely 2 acre piece of land that we affectionatley call "our patch of dirt".  We have hired a wonderful PH certified architect, Jamie Wolf (http://homesthatfit.com) and are deep in the design process with him and his staff. We have weekly design meetings and the preliminary design drawings look great.  At tomorrow's meeting Jamie will show us the energy model of our house design acording to the PH standard.

While we were exploring the possibility of a PH, I did a lot of web research.  One of the more helpful resources was other folks' blogs about the process of building and finally living in their Passive Houses.  It helped me to feel that we too could create this type of domocilic lifestyle of environmental responsibility and comfort.  I would like this blog to surve that same purpose,  to inform and inspire others.  Sharing information and experiences.  How can we effect change in the world with our own little patch of dirt?

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