Passive House in the Czech Republic

Rockwool East South Europe has helped build a new complex of 13 highly attractive passive houses set in beautiful surroundings.

The complex was built as a Passive House demonstration project in cooperation with the Czech Technical University. The properties are located in the beautiful surroundings of Cesky raj, also known as the Czech Paradise, in Northern Bohemia, 100km from Prague. The construction of the houses is in keeping with the traditional building character of the area. However from the functional point of view, the houses fully belong to the 21st century.
 

What is a Passive House?
The limit for energy consumption in a passive house is 15 kWh/m2 per year. A passive house is a construction form where the energy consumption is minimised as much as possible via “passive initiatives” i.e. initiatives that do not involve mechanical parts that uses electricity such as pumps, solar panels etc.

Building year
2008
 

All the houses are airtight and they have heat recovery systems. They are also equipped with a number of sensors that transmit scanned data for the continuous evaluation being carried out at the Czech Technical University in Prague. In addition, one of the houses is equipped with photovoltaics placing it in the ’zero house’ category – that is, it has a balanced (zero) energy consumption and production.

A demonstration learning centre
“With a price of EUR 800/m2, the project will certainly attract growing numbers of people who are thinking about getting their own house and it will help to make low-energy buildings more popular. For these reasons, one of the houses has been assigned as a demonstration learning centre” says Business Development Manager Jan Novak.

“This development is partly influenced by the deregulation of the energy prices in the Czech Republic. Another key factory is the strong influence from Austria and Germany, where Passive Houses have become very popular in the past few years,” Jan Novak concludes.