Pandemic and Passivhaus

The pandemic has exposed how deficient many of the houses that have been built for decades are. Many people have spent the months of confinement in houses with energy, ventilation and filtration problems and poor indoor air quality.

However, houses can be built much better. Three decades have passed since Wolfgang Feist, a German physicist, built the world's first passive house in 1991, in Germany.

Feist realized that more than a third of energy consumption came from heating. He therefore studied the distribution of heat, windows, roofs and ventilation systems. His house managed to consume 85% less energy than a traditional one. Passive houses have a high degree of insulation of the envelope without thermal bridges and good sealing of the outside air that manages to guarantee the minimum energy demand.

Virologists now recommend exactly what the Passivhaus standard has defined for many years as the essential thing that a home should have.

Since 2012, the European Union has developed a directive that requires all new residential construction to have almost zero energy consumption from January 2021. This is helping to arouse greater interest in this type of passive housing.