Building Certification

Passive House Certification is an extremely rigorous quality assurance process that determines whether a building meets all of the requirements of the international Passive House Standard. This Certification proceedure is normally done off site and after construction, by any one of PHI ‘s international team of accredited Certifiers. The Certification process confirms that the building has been both designed built to achieve high levels of occupant comfort and health and energy performance. For detailed information about every step of the building Certification process see PHI’s recently published Building Certification Guide

All heating and cooling energy calculations for Passive House buildings are based on the net usable floor area of the building (the so-called Treated Floor Area (TFA) of the building). Both heating energy and cooling (air conditioning) energy demand for a Passive House building must not exceed 15 kWh/m^{2 ,}

The Passivhaus Institut recently released a full Building Certification Guide, which explains in great detail what to expect from the Certification process

For details and requirements of how to Certify a Passive House building, please refer directly to one of PHI’s accredited Certifiers. Note that Certification is done remotely, and does not include either monitoring or site visits by the Certifier, so they can be based in any part of the world and still certify your project. Be warned that Certification is a rigorous and time-consuming process, which can add a significant extra cost to a small project.