Passive shell

Viking House is now offering homebuilders a solution to get their build off to the best possible start. We will supply and install a passive house standard foundation system and a fully enclosed closed panel timber frame kit for a price guaranteed not to exceed 50% of your turnkey budget.

First, how do we do this

Viking house has an unrivalled track record in delivering commercial and residential passive house buildings at prices comparable with conventional build. We are constantly using innovation, developing Irish skills and materials to deliver comfortable easy to heat homes at prices to suit the current market. Our Patented cold bridge free foundation systems has been accredited by the Passivhaus Institute. We have developed a cost effective ‘twinwall closed panel solution’ which reduces the wall cost considerably compared to the usual I beam system used in Passive Houses. All our kits are assembled using diffusion open natural materials, with zero cold bridging and excellent thermal damping. We scientifically analyse your design to determine where the best bang for your buck can be achieved. (Its the insulation and airtighness by the way, after orientation and form have been set.)

What we provide

We have a range of foundation solutions for all soil types and loading conditions. We have developed solutions for wide cavity masonry and lightweight rain-screen builds. The foundation system uses EPS formwork to super-insulate the ring-beam and distribute loading evenly. See (insert foundation page link.). We have been inundated with enquiries from self-builders and contractors looking for foundations and kits. We supply and erect the structural frame leaving the self-builder to manage the works that they are competent with, which is primarily finishing. We do the tricky work fast and cheap like the Airtightness, Cold Bridge elimination etc to get you well on the road

Coordination

We take your planning or tender drawing and turn them into construction details and services coordinated shop drawings. At this stage we input all the data from your build into the PHPP (Pasivehaus planning package) to determine your optimum window specification and heat load. This program looks at your build, not simply as an assembly of individual components but as a single entity composed of inter-related systems. This data gives you full control over what components to order and the value of improving or down specking window frame and glazing or wall thickness, all with a view to maintaining year round indoor comfort with minimal input from heating sources.

Why? Carbon, climate change, peak oil and de-growth are our biggest priorities, but this is all about building a house, for us its simply a well built comfortable house at an affordable price. Passive houses are essentially bog simple buildings. You can get an eco-building by building a conventional built building regulations house and plant on a shed load of ‘eco-bling’. Why bother, Instead of spending upwards of twenty grand on a fancy ’ground source geothermal heat pump and full central heating.’ Spend an quarter of that on insulation and a small underfloor heating system, then go spend the change on yourself. Go and have a nice holiday ( no flying now) and upgrade the car to a Prius. For us in our little passivhaus world, we can’t understand how anybody wouldn’t use the Passive concept. We don’t like the words Eco- or Sustainable, they have been devalued too much by ‘greenwash’ we prefer the word ‘€’. Passive houses are, at the very least half the price of an A3 house to heat and provide hot water.

How much?

‘I’m glad you asked me that’ as the man said.
Every house and site is different, email me your plans and I’ll send you a breakdown. Then we’ll talk to work on delivering a spec and pricing solution that dovetails nicely into your budget.

Anything else?

Once the house is designed, you need to think about the environmental comfort of the house. Filtered fresh air, even stable heat, and a small radiant heat source should be designed into your house from the start. If your heat load can be brought down towards 10 watts per meter squared, The heat can be distributed through the ventilation system. We will design your heating and hot water solution to give you a low capital cost, low running cost solution that can be replaced cheaply at the end of its lifecycle. We can get you good deals on Heat recovery Ventilation, compact heat pumps and room sealed back boiler stoves. We can also let you know where you can use double glazed windows, door and rooflights and when and where to use treble glazing. We’ve been building passive and near passive since before it became easy, we’ve learned all the lessons, made some mistakes and invented some stuff.

Some passive myths spread by those rascals in the concrete lobby.

1. “You can’t open a window in a passive house.”
   Passive houses have just as many operable windows and doors as a conventional house, opening windows provide purge ventilation with the background ventilation providing the background ventilation which changes the houses air once every two hours minimum. With our mild winter climate, we need to open windows when the occupancy increases. When you have a crowd round, their body heat will warm the house significantly, the fans will ramp up to one or two air changes to keep the carbon dioxide under 1000 parts per million. In summer you bypass the MHRV, so fresh cool air. In winter even with windows open, the ventilation system will recover at least 60% of the heat exhausted in the stale air.
2. “Passive is 20-30% costlier than conventional block.”
   Nonsense, its about 4-8% depending on the design of the house. If the house is designed by an architect with an understanding of heat loss and solar gain, then the cost increases are minimal. With the changes in the construction industry and the insulation grants, the infrastructure for low energy building, is developing rapidly to the point where by the end of 2009 we expect to be able to out-compete houses built conventionally to merely meet the 2007 Part L Regulations. Our houses have none of the hi-tech sticky on machinery to reduce carbon. Our focus is workmanship and good components. Simple. This is where the extra costs come in. You simply can’t get away with shoddy Celtic tiger era work on a passive house, it would show up in the thermography and airtightness tests. This is what the extra €15k goes on. Better windows and junctions. I agree that if this was better spent on a marble bathroom, you could impress you guests, who will never see the extra insulation and the clean air ventilation, but I can assure you they will feel it.
3. “Timber frame has no thermal mass”.
   We deliver houses in both timber and masonry, in fact we’d build houses in rice crispies, marshmallows and chocolate if we thought it made sense, actually it does!, watch this space. Thermal mass is not relevant for residential buildings in Ireland. We do not have the large day/night or summer/winter variations in temperature that justify storing heat or coolth. In Ireland we can get a summers day in winter or vice-versa, so responsiveness is paramount. We do however put a premium on Thermal inertia in our buildings. Think of this as being in a caravan on a hot day (remember those sun-drenched holidays of your youth in bundoran). Simple polyurethane insulants cannot hold heat for any length of time, equally blockwork. However densely packed cellulose, softboard and natural insulation are better at dampening temperature and can release this temperature back into the building at night as decrement delayed thermal gain. This is especially important for rooms in the roof such as dormer and story and a half builds. Kingspan just isn’t suitable for roof applications.
4. “‘A’ rated is just as good as passive.”
   DEAP generated BER heating demand is an assumption based on drawings, passive standard is a performance rating of a completed building. Cold bridging and Airtightness and high levels of insulation are accurately represented in PHPP, in DEAP they are just considered as minor factors. Passive focuses on reducing heating requirements, DEAP focuses on reducing or offsetting electricity and fossil fuel use. Passive houses have a tiny heat load but if your small heating system uses electricity, you could find that your house which is cheaper to run than an A1 house gets an A3 score. Its very easy to get to carbon neutral once you are at passive. The cost of PV arrays is coming down every month and the price offered to micro producers by the grid is improving. Some of our Passivhaus builds are now ‘activhaus’ they are energy plus houses who receive a cheque from the ESB in place of a bill.
5. “Heat recovery ventilation is dangerous.”
   Modern systems have carbon dioxide and monoxide alarms and the fans are fail safe to open in the event of a power outage. Filters keep the air and the ducts free of contaminants etc. A good supplier/installer will include a maintainace contract to replace filters twice yearly for the next five years. They are extremely easy to replace anyway.
6. “Passive house windows are twice as expensive as ordinary windows.”
   In Ireland you don’t need Treble glazing throughout to achieve passive. Besides, Munster joinery now supply a passive window at a very keen price.
7. “Carbon/Energy reducing components have long paybacks.”
   And what payback has a kitchen?
8. “You can’t have a fire in a Passive house.”
   You can have a room sealed stove, then again why would you want an open fire that just gets lit five or six times a year and spend the rest of the year sucking warm air out of the house. Passive houses are always warm and comfortable, in some cases where we’ve installed small stoves, the owners have never felt the need to operate them in the three or four years since they’ve been built.
9. “Low energy designs look like muck.”
   Passive houses can take on any design, but are probably not suited to sprawling ill conceived, fairytale castle type concoctions with lots of bits sticking out. But then Mac-mansions look like muck anyway. We are currently providing solutions to designs by Irelands leading Architectural firms, for designs that focus on good architecture, with Passive as a hidden added benefit.
10. “Passive is just a fad.”
    Passive has been around since 1992 and over 110,000 Passive house have been built worldwide. From 2014 all EU countries must adopt Passive house as a means of achieving Low to zero carbon buildings. It is widely perceived that the 2011 Part L will effectively introduce the Passive Standard as mandatory in Ireland as a means of achieving a 60% improvement in building regs. This will have the effect of putting in a world leading position in Passivhus design and construction, reinvigorating our construction industry. Just a pity the CIF feel they have to fight the inevitable.

Seamus O’Loughlin