It is worrying that the passive house method is no longer used in Swedish teaching and research than it does today, says Ingrid Westman , civil engineer, CEO and founder of Friendly Building . Research and development should be based on already known information and then further developed in the ongoing process. Already in the 1990s, a method was developed to research our buildings through energy efficiency.

With the passive house method *, heating in buildings could be reduced to 15 kWh / m ² and year, to compare with the average heating of houses which at that time was about 200 kWh / m ^{2 <}

The Passive House was born in the early 1990s through a collaboration between Professor Bo Adamsson at Lund University of Technology and Dr. Wolfgang Feist at the University of Dramstadt, Germany. Dr. Feist took the concept to his faculty, Building Physics, and he was able to quickly demonstrate that it was possible to build houses that only took 15 kWh / m ² and years.

Dr. Feist proved this by building his own townhouse, which he still lives in today and measures every minute. Today, Boverket's building rules, BBR, require that the house heating must not exceed about 60 kWh / m ² and year. Something that usually never holds other than the calculations, in fact, the heating often becomes significantly more.

Today, environmental considerations permeate everything in our society and also teaching and research at our colleges and universities. At the same time, energy efficiency is a very important area in the construction sector. Passive houses are today the most effective method in the construction industry to reduce its climate impact. Why then is this ignorance in Sweden for passive houses, a way of reducing the energy demand by about 80 percent?

The method has also sprung from our Swedish construction method and then only refined in Germany. Passive houses today do not have to be more expensive than Conventional Houses, the comfort is better, the operation is simpler, the maintenance cheaper and the energy requirements Significantly lower.

When KTH built its experimental house KTH live-in-lab in the fall of 2018 research on, among other things, energy efficiency, the experimental house was not built as a passive house. Why were you not Already using proven methods and research based on them? Nothing else asked about that project, Which is exactly what we need in the industry.

Building norms in many European countries

Energy efficiency is a Very Important Part of the Achieving the Climate Goals and there is a technology samples.Why has it not Become our Swedish building standards, as it has've become in many other countries in Europe ThatsToday have passive houses as Their building legislation? Because the method is misunderstood, just like the ugly duckling.

Misunderstandings based on ignorance and a possible lack of interest in studying a method developed Further abroad, as there is still an imagination That Sweden is at the forefront of Energy Efficient Construction. Or you think it is a profit-making company That developed the method, Which is wrong.

Passive house is not an experimental house, something How Can Be an experiment When The method is used? over 28 years for over 100,000 projects.Many passive houses are being built in the Alps and Canada where the climate is the same as Sweden's, so We Can Also Apply this myth. The Myth That passive houses need thick walls does not hold true either.

I have had Several ex-employees with me who are curious about the passive house concept and not regret it learning in school. What you learn, on the other hand, is exactly the same building physics That is applied in the Passive House method, so the step to learn the systematic structure of the passive house is not far and it is easy to retrieve it afterwards. I appeal to our Swedish higher education institutions to include the Passive House in teaching and research to continue from here.We must not forget That we have a climate to think about and we must act now.