Passive Sustainability in Residential Design

About this course.

Passive design shapes how a building responds to its climate, using orientation, insulation, glazing, shading, natural ventilation and thermal mass to keep occupants comfortable with little or no mechanical heating and cooling. It matters first because it is the cheapest and most durable lever available: get the fundamentals right on paper and the home needs less energy for its entire life, before a single dollar is spent on solar panels, heat pumps or batteries. Technology bolted onto a poorly designed home simply works harder, and costs more to run, to compensate for the fabric.

Heating and cooling are typically the largest single household energy end-use in Australian homes, so any reduction in that demand has an outsized effect on running costs and on the emissions associated with the home. Your Home (yourhome.gov.au) describes passive design as design that works with the local climate to maintain comfortable indoor temperatures, and frames it as the foundation on which everything else is built. The sequence matters: reduce the load first through the building fabric, then meet whatever load remains as efficiently as possible, and only then size any renewable generation. A designer who reverses this order tends to over-size and over-spend on equipment that would have been unnecessary had the envelope done its job.