Everhart Residence Energy Efficient Windows in Solar Passive Home Design

Everhart Residence

Portland, Oregon

Construction Type: Energy Efficiency Retrofit

Design Standard: Passive House

Objective: Tad and Maria Everhart chose to retrofit their Portland home to Passive House Institute US standards in an effort to "lead by example" in terms of sustainable building and climate change. The Everharts term their project a "future-fit" instead of a retrofit because they see low-energy housing at the only sustainable path in the future. As he details on his blog, Tad Everhart, a licensed Passive House Consultant, put an extraordinary amount of time into research all the best materials to make his existing residence Passive. A big part of the Passive House retrofit project is the extensive planning phase performance modeling that which projects detailed heat load, heat loss, and primary energy usage for individual building parameters. The model is predicting the final building energy load will be 6600 BTU's per hour or about an eighth of a typical home.

Serious Solution: The Everharts replaced their existing windows with high-performance SeriousWindows Series 925. These super-insulated windows feature a U-factor of just 0.13; this is the equivalent of R-7. Compare this to a typical double pane window with the equivalent of R-2.

The Everhart House was showcased by Oprah on her Earth Day Special. See Maria Everhart take you on a tour of their amazing future-fit.