Overheating in residential passive house: Solution strategies revealed and confirmed through data analysis and simulations

Energy efficiency and living comfort certainly contribute to popularity of the passive house concept. Since these houses are weakly coupled to an environment, any internal energy gains are difficult to be released against small temperature gradients, i.e. in a typical situation occurring in hot summer months. In such a case already a small energy input raises the internal temperature significantly and dramatically affects the living comfort. To provide more information on this problem, we collected and analyzed data from a single family Slovenian passive house. Our goal was to estimate the general house response under real conditions and to investigate overheating in hot summer periods. Different energy gains were identified and explored with respect to their influence on the overheating of this passive house. Results show that windows-opening during the nights in hot summer days, strict shading of the southern and western windows as well as minimization of internal energy sources are necessary and sufficient to keep internal temperature on the comfort level. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.