Category: Burton Passive House

It’s that time to get a little data behind the house again. You may have heard the old phrase, “a house needs to breathe”, but without giving that phrase some good thought, it’s easy to miss in important factor. To control air, you must first contain air. I took that phrase from Joe Lstiburek. It’s fairly common sense to understand that air contains moisture, temperature, and contaminates (pollution, pollen, etc). Having these things drifting uncontrollably in and out of your home through a leaky house, is the traditional meaning of a house that breathes, not what we are trying to accomplish, controlling this air requires some work.

We have worked hard to design an air control layer for our home. This control layer consists of certain materials, design decisions, and install methods. We then test the quality of our work with an air leakage test to make sure we achieved the level of designed air control. For us, that would be < 0.6 ACH @ 50 pa. ACH is the Air Exchanges per Hour and the 50 pascals is a unit of pressure. This test is performed by doing a blower door test. Here is a video of a blower door test being performed with some great explanation of Passive House air tightness, https://youtu.be/B8UFGnHmFJ4.

Alright, now that we have a tight house with an optimal air control layer, which reduces our energy loss, improves the life of the building, and allows for controllable air quality. We will be using a fresh air system called an Energy Recovery Ventilator (ERV) that will be centrally controlling the fresh air coming in and stale air going out. This allows us to fully control the flow of fresh air into the house and filter that air on its way in. This system will use small 2.5” flex ducting to bring fresh air to all rooms. Fresh air should be controlled in many normal homes, but that is a topic for another day. Details on the model of ERV and ducting were in my previous post.

We can’t wait to share this house with friends and family (which is why we are building it). We’ll continue to follow up with progress after we get a bit more done this week with some sun coming. We also plan to go over a solar / electric design in more depth in the near future.

It was an unexpected, yet exciting time with week as our window order had been delayed waiting on our triple paned glass from over seas. So, surprise to us, we were planning on only having a fresh air Energy Recovery Ventilator (ERV) meeting, it turned into a huge window delivery day too!!!

For those interested in ERV’s and what that fun meeting was about, please feel free to head over to our manufacture site Zehnder. Simply put, this unit will be bringing in fresh air and taking out stale air very efficiently 24×7. ERV sounds a bit fancy, maybe we should just call it our fresh air system. We will be using two main products that you are welcome to read about as I will indeed be documenting the install and such.

• Zehnder Comfoair Q450 (fresh air unit)
• Zehnder Comfotube (fresh air ducting)

Nothing exciting there until the unit and tubes arrive, so on to the windows. We partnered with a Passive House certified window manufacture that just so happened to be located 1 hour away, Ventana USA. I have found there site pretty, but not as easy to find what you are looking for, so here is a direct link to the European style tilt & turn windows that we purchased for our home. The professional pictures on there site are nice and all, but nothing compares to having the real thing delivered, yeah. Picking up the large 500 lbs pieces and moving them into the house was indeed a nervous task. Here are some pictures of that move.

If you made it this far, you deserve to see the last video of us moving this large piece of glass into place: https://youtu.be/iUrxejvkXm8

The next question you might ask is, why didn’t we place them directly in their final location upon delivery? With our air sealing details, we can’t install the windows until we a air/water seal our window openings with liquid flashing, which requires some weather above freezing to cure. It looks like next week we will see a break from sub-zero temperatures and have 3 days in a row with highs in the 40’s. There is still so much to do with the garage and windows, but with the priority being the garage we likely won’t see window installs for a couple weeks.

The weather apps showed 2 – 4 below Fahrenheit last night, but our two sensors both recorded 12 below this morning. No new snow for the past few days and we did have 2 days this week where we made some great steps: Garage loft floor joists and mini-split installs. Let’s go over them both with some pictures.

Yes, mini-splits will be our primary source of heat and cooling in our house. The house is so well insulated that we don’t need a large heating or cooling system. The BTU demand is actually calculated using our weather, combined with our insulation, solar heat, house orientation, and a bunch more science and math around thermal bridging and transfer through different materials. There is some software that does these calculations for us (WUFI), so we aren’t flying blind or simply guessing. Anyway, on to the pictures.

The outdoor unit can’t be installed yet as the concrete pad still needs to be poured and the weather has not permitted that. Our team did brave the cold and make some additional updates to the garage in some below freezing weather.

Notice that the floor joists only cover one of the garage bays by design. Our shed style roof gave us the additional head space to put in a loft on the high side of the garage while we chose to leave the lower side vaulted for some additional vertical storage above David’s workshop area.

That’s it for now. We love winter and are so thankful we have some snow to play with, even though it slows the build down. We praise God everyday for His blessings in our life through all of our ups and downs.

Happy January here in PA. The weather had been kind to us during building in December, but winter weather has finally caught up to us. The temperature has been low, which makes it hard to work outside, but with the roof on, the team has been able to make additional progress inside.

Below you can see our “Glass Wall” as we call it. It spans our office and library with a total of 27 2’x3′ windows. We actually went with clear polycarbonate to avoid safety glass on the lower row.

We had one or two slightly warmer days, so the team went outside and spent more time on the garage framing.

Also just before the end of the year, the team filled in the last few pieces of sheathing on the main building.

One more photo for fun. It was a nice calm day and I was able to get a high drone shot that included our entire build site and nearly all of our property out to the main road.

Ending the year with a water tight roof on the main building was a great end of the year and gives me some confidence that winter will be “mostly” kept out of the building…except for what blows in through window openings. Oh, and here is a fun slideshow of changes throughout 2021: https://youtu.be/IQrLeK2wIbU

We’ve received a number of questions about the lack of visible rafter tails to build eaves on as well as the lack of window openings. So, I thought I’d take the time to explain both of those answers in this post. For context, here is a recent picture of the front of the house.

Where are the windows?

Very odd looking, I know. The question about windows is a quick one to answer. There will be five windows on the front of the house, but they simply haven’t been cut out of the sheathing yet. That is the case for a few other windows on different sides of the house.

Where are the rafter tails?

This is a great questions, and while I love to get technical about it, I don’t want to bore anyone. The short version is that it is easier to make and maintain an air tight home without the rafters penetrating the air barrier. We will definitely be having eaves on the house, but they will be attached to the roof and walls. The front and back of the house will actually have 3 foot eaves, while the rest of the house will enjoy 2 foot eaves. This acts like an umbrella and keeps the majority of water off the walls. This concept and a few others related to our design are actually explained very well by Matt Risinger on his YouTube video here. I’ve watched many of Matt’s videos and he does a great job documenting his house build and you’ll find many similarities between our house designs. It’s actually funny to me to see how as the Burton’s were working through all of the hard decisions to build a Passive House, that there was someone (a professional builder, Matt Risinger) out there documenting his home rebuild and only deciding on going for a Passive House certification long after his remodel started.

Now that the exterior is nearly done for the season, the follow up posts will focus more on the interior, which often isn’t as exciting as the changes seem physically smaller, so please feel free to let me know if you’d like to see something specific. These are topics I’ve heard come up:

• Solar system design, size, batteries, backup, costs, etc
• Final house design, the digital 3D look of the whole house
• Personal story behind why we are doing all of this work
• More specifics on: power management, water management, construction project management, home automation
• …something else completely

We hope you all had a wonderful Christmas celebrating the birth of our Lord, Jesus Christ. We had a great time together as a family and just the right weather for some amazing updates on the house, praise God.

The roof couldn’t have come at a better time as the rain has held off for longer than usual in PA. Christmas day was beautiful and dry, but it seems to have rained non-stop since then.

The trusses came and went up all in one day!!!

Due to it being such a busy day, we missed the actual truss install, so looking forward to reviewing the time lapse. We just couldn’t believe it was all done in one day…and early at that.

On to the roof sheathing

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Do you see the sky in that last picture, beautiful Christmas Eve for roofing (not for white Christmas lovers like us, but we were happy for the roof though). This ended the week with a nearly water tight A-wing roof. Here is an aerial shot from the drone.

Here is a link to my drone flyover on 12/24/2021, https://youtu.be/ylccny_sj2I.

The team has been working hard to get ready for the roof trusses that are due next week…the best Christmas present EVER (for crazy people like us). We feel blessed every time we we see what God has helped us accomplish and with a team that cares about details.

Updates for this week include remaining support walls for the roof and lots of exterior air sealing details with Prosoco FastFlash.

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Below is an image of the 2 inch wide FastFlash between sheathing joints as well as a small dab on each nail hole for a “belt and suspenders” approach to air/water management. You’ll see a lot of that for this build. If you look close you can see the small black dots, apparently gnats enjoy FastFlash as well.

If you are interested in a more detailed install process for “Zip System 2.0” you can view Matt Risinger’s YouTube video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSdb8cCOc6c. Note that I made a modification by NOT using Zip flashing as I wanted a vapor permeable liquid flashing, which will give a better, more dryable wall assembly. This is key to a long lasting structure. This should be the “Zip/FastFlash system 3.0.”

Wanted to post my favorite picture of the site this week. This one shows the view from standing in the kitchen looking up to the North into the Office and Library…it helped make things just that much more “real” for me.

What an exciting past couple weeks. Some delays getting motivated to blog after being ill over Thanksgiving, but it reminded us how thankful we should be for our healthy family over the past 18 months.

Now, on to the exciting stuff. We had a nice pause as we waited for the slab to set up for a week before building walls. We did have a cold spell during the week which required getting out the floor squeegee to clear off rain, ice, and snow for fear of damage to the slab during the cure process. We didn’t get any pictures of that fun. Just imaging 25-30F weather, dark, wet, boots, and sweeping off lots of water.

Framing started the last week of November, but things moved slowly as great care was required for correctly sealing the air barrier with liquid flashing under and both the slab vapor barrier (yellow Stego Wrap) and under the sill plate.

The team quickly got the hang of things and more walls were going up.

It was a slow week due to the temperatures often below freezing, making the liquid flashing harder work with, but the exterior framing did finish by December 1.

The interior walls were next and they didn’t take long once the headers arrived.

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…and thanks to my blogging delays another week went by and we have sheathing up. This was particularly exciting for us as the we could walk through and feel the spaces that had only existed on paper and imaginations, now a beautiful reality. I can’t accurately convey what we felt as we walked around our “house” and knew that what was being accomplished was some culmination of hard work, sweat, blood (many thorns), tears, hundreds of decisions, and a great deal of patience. We also felt confident and encouraged each other that what we were doing was worth while and the many decisions that were made were the correct ones and they were made for the right reasons. Okay, on to the pictures…

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The week ended with a completed set of floor joists and the start of the second level subfloor install.

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We get this question a lot, so let’s try to explain it simply. The original term “off-grid” was more commonly known as being disconnected from the utility power grid. I looked up the formal definition and it now seems to encompass 1 or more utility companies, not simply electric. So, for our family, when we say we are building an off-grid home, we actually mean off-grid from all utilities (gas, water, electric).

We will be generating our electricity from solar panels and storing in batteries. We will also be capturing and storing rain water which will be gravity fed to our home. This post wasn’t meant to get into the details of HOW each system will be built, but just to lay down some basic answers to common questions we get.

The next most common question we get is “What if you run out?” (Of power or water). We’ve done the math (that’s the fun part) and have been able to create what we believe to be a safe buffer in the event we don’t have rain or sun for a period of time. We’ve also made sure we had backups with an on-site spring in the event we lose water as a propane generator in the event we lose power. A great deal of time and effort went into calculating our system size as we didn’t want to build too big or too small, but those details are for another post. I’ll probably start with the water design first as it’s short and far simpler to understand, then I’ll follow up with the solar design.

Sorry about the delay. I haven’t carved out a routine yet for posting. Feel free to give me any advise on making a schedule.

I know there are folks who just want to see the pictures, which I totally understand…so I used more in this post. Let me know if you think I had too many or not enough (I have more). There has been a lot happening since our last update, so let’s start with some pictures of the progress since the stem wall.

• Plumbing

I loved the comment Stephanie made about how it never occurred to her how many pipes are actually under a house. It’s great knowing exactly where they are as well. There is actually a separate grey water and black water in the hopes that we can convince PA to approve the use of grey water on our property and not have to run it to septic.

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Under slab plumbing and conduits

• Gravel, lots of gravel

The gravel is a pivotal part of the water management system. It also provides stability and creates the first super level surface as we work up to the slab.

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Under slab gravel

• Beautiful sea of EPS insulation, done

There are indeed challenges in getting EPS to be VERY level, but the team started with a strong effort to get the gravel perfectly, but every little bump can be seen as the EPS is laid out in large 4×8 sheets. Thankfully it’s easy to cut and form into the needed shapes for getting around pipes and getting tight to the walls. 8 inches of total EPS under the slab, which provides an R-value of 4.35 / inch @ 25 F° (reference here). This will provide an ~R-35 for the slab.

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Under slab insulation

• Interior concrete footers

• Vapor retarder

We used a 10-mil vapor retarder from Stego Industries, they were great to work with on the phone and we were able to source the materials locally. This barrier acts as the water and air barrier and will be tied into the wall air barrier as it gets built. It is critical to tape all joints and pipe penetrations to maintain a proper air barrier. The wire grid you see weren’t needed for structural support, rather we needed something to tie our in floor electrical in-floor heating. This is something I’ll likely geek out about in a future post for those interested.

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Vapor retarder and heat wire

• A/B Wing concrete slab

I could not believe how quick this pour went. I don’t understand all of the prep work to make all of this happen before the trucks arrive, but once they do, it’s “game on.” They moved through three trucks of concrete very quickly and the final polished surface looks marvelous. It was so satisfying to watch it all come together.

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Beautiful concrete slab

Thanks so much for sticking with me as I walked you through all of our excitement. Lots more content to create and hopefully some follow up videos. The concrete for the C-wing is next, followed by a brief break to allow some curing…then we go vertical.

Thank you so much for those who are praying for us through this process. As exciting as it all is, it can be rather energy draining during week of heavy engagement. We want to thank everyone for their continued support through the project. Next update soon.