"1000 Passivehouses in Austria" - Passive house object databank

Status

finished

Summary

Motivation

The ecological passive house fulfils the need for living quality, comfort and cosiness at a quality level hardly attained so far. This applies to both single and multi-family homes as well as public and industrial buildings and is the most consistent concept of sustainable building. For promoting this positive tendency, it was imperative to establish a network encompassing all passive houses built in Austria.

Objectives

The objective was to use this unique network for presenting 80% of all passive houses built in Austria as successful examples of sustainable building. This platform for expert planners, developers, trades and opinion leaders is used to broaden knowledge about passive house standards, different types of buildings and uses, types of construction, services and technical equipment concepts and architectural solutions demonstrated in already built projects. Experiences, developments and the assessability of the number of buildings constructed and tendencies for the next few years are opened to the general public in all federal provinces.

Processing method

The central online database was used as the management tool focussing exclusively on the passive house for entering and managing data gathered from all over Austria via a uniform data entry mask. The user can select permanently updated buildings with targeted search criteria and gets various evaluations in the form of charts and diagrams. With this, maximum market diffusion should help to rapidly disseminate information about the passive house.

Data

The criterion for including passive houses in the joint project of IG Passivhaus is that they fulfil aptitude requirements as passive houses according to the Passivhaus Institut Darmstadt! The clear definition of a passive house safeguards the high quality of documentation as a scientific database and makes a significant contribution to raise the general awareness of the high quality standard.

Buildings are subdivided into five categories:

Category "Passive house residential buildings with a heating load < 10 W/m²"
Category "Passive house residential buildings with an energy requirement < 15 kWh/m²a"
Category "Residential buildings close to passive houses with an energy requirement of 15 to 20 kWh/m²a"
Category "Passive house special-purpose buildings"
Category "Rehabilitation of existing buildings with passive house components"

Results

Due to the broad basis of cooperation in capturing planned and built passive houses in Austria all substantial data of a total of 203 passive houses with more than 1000 residential units were gathered, documented and put online as of February 29, 2004.

• 28 multi-family and row houses with a total floor space of 64,166m²
• 155 single-family and semi-detached houses with a total floor space of 26,225m²
• 8 schools, nursery schools, special-purpose buildings with a total floor space of 12,064m²
• 12 office and industrial buildings with a total floor space of 9,227m²

The passive house database is currently visited by an average of 350 users per day on the three websites: www.hausderzukunft.at/projekte/1000 passive houses, www.igpassivhaus.at/passiv-objekte and www.passivehouse.at/Objektdatenbank

Evaluation of the 203 buildings documented so far:

• The passive house market has developed vividly since 1996
• The province having the largest number of buildings is Upper Austria, followed by Lower Austria and Vorarlberg
• Tyrol has the largest number of residential units and floor space used as passive houses, followed by Vienna and Vorarlberg
• Referred to inhabitants per province Vorarlberg is the leader by far
• In Austria, so far no administrative building has been found to be built according to passive house standard
• Mean pressure test values n50 of 0.46 l/h significantly below limit value for passive houses of 0.6 l/h
• Pressure test peaks largely in timber construction, final values mainly in fireproof construction
• Mean annual heating heat requirement according to PHPP 14.93 kWh/m²a
• Heating load according to PHPP below 10 W/m² only in 40 buildings
• Mean heating load according to PHPP 12.67 W/m²
• 54% of all buildings are timber constructions
• 75% of all buildings have a basement storey, most of them outside the thermal envelope
• 61% of all passive houses < 15 kWh/m²a have done without a standby chimney
• 50% of all buildings close to passive house standard of 15 - 20 kWh/m²a have no standby chimney
• Two thirds of all buildings are equipped with compact technical units
• 60% of multi-family houses have central ventilation systems
• Passive houses implement outstanding architectural standards compared to standard buildings
• Half of all building owners agree to have their houses visited
• In 2010 the existing passive houses will save an annual 650,000 t of CO2 equivalents compared with conventional construction methods

Project manager:

Ing. Günter Lang
Lang consulting, Konsulent für innovative Baukonzepte, Wien
IG Passivhaus Oberösterreich, Geschäftsführer

Partners:

• Ing. Christof Drexel, Arch. DI Helmut Krapmeier, DI Bernd Krauß, DI Witke Wenzel, Karin Pürmair
  IG Passivhaus Vorarlberg
• Ing. Günter Lang
  IG Passivhaus Oberösterreich
• Arch. Erwin Schwarzmüller, Barbara Priplata, Katharina Guschelbauer
  IG Passivhaus Ost
• Wolfgang Lackner, Heinz Burgstaller
  IG Passivhaus Steiermark/Burgenland

Contact

Ing. Günter Lang
Lang consulting, Konsulent für innovative Baukonzepte
Linzerstraße 280/6
A 1140 Wien
Tel.: +43 650 900 20 40
E-Mail: g.lang@langconsulting.at