Fin's Blog

The project wrapped up on Friday March 16th just in time for us to head to Dublin for Paddy’s Day. It’s hard to believe 3 weeks is over already. It has been a wild ride, and in the end I was very impressed with the results everyone came up with.

The project was to retrofit a standard Irish home to meet the PassivHaus (Passive House) standard. PassivHaus is a German standard that focuses on extreme energy efficiency. What a lot of people don’t know about PassivHaus is that Dr. Wolfgang Feist was inspired to create PassivHaus after viewing a house in Saskatchewan, Canada. Over a quarter century ago Canadian’s built a house so energy efficient that you could heat it with a hair dryer, and then we forgot about it.

Retrofitting our existing buildings is vital to using energy sustainably. Even if every new building were built to the best green standards it would have a small impact on the total building energy consumption because of the amount of buildings that are already built. Projects like this get us thinking about the challenges we are faced with in the existing built environment.

Retrofitting this building all the way to PassivHaus didn’t make financial sense when we crunched the numbers, but some of the strategies that are combined to meet PassivHaus could be employed individually with some success.

I’m ready to go home, but I’ve had an amazing time. Ireland has exceeded my expectations by far, and I will definitely be back some day. I’ve experienced a lot of Irish culture while I was here. I attended my first football game (we call it soccer). I’ve been inside my first castle. I travelled to Belfast in Northern Ireland and visited the troubled areas of West Belfast where the conflicts occurred, and signed my name on the peace wall. I made my way to the Guinness factory and learned how to pour the perfect pint. I even travelled into the middle of rural Ireland to visit an eco-village where residents live more sustainably than anywhere else in Ireland.

So long Ireland, its been grand!