https://ecokit.us/passive-solar-design-vs-passive-house/#:~:....
To me, it's almost a matter of semantics.
In passive solar building design, windows, walls, and floors are made to collect, store, reflect, and distribute solar energy, in the form of heat in the winter and reject solar heat in the summer. This is called passive solar design because, unlike active solar heating systems, it does not involve the use of mechanical and electrical devices.[1]
The key to designing a passive solar building is to best take advantage of the local climate performing an accurate site analysis.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_solar_building_desig...
I think of passive solar as the umbrella term for such strategies. My understanding is passive house comes from a German project. It shouldn't surprise anyone that strategies which work well in Germany differ from strategies that work in warmer climates.
There are also traditional building approaches in Middle Eastern deserts that keep the entire city at bearable temperatures. They historically built on a plateau, oriented streets to be cooled by prevailing winds etc.
Both in Mexico and Iran, they have passive air exchange systems that help cool homes. Stairwells in Victorian American homes have similar features and likely served a similar purpose and were probably not merely ostentatious.
If you know a better umbrella term for this approach, I'm open to suggestions.
It actually started in North America around the time of the oil embargo as a mechanism to reduce energy costs. (See the history section of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house). Once that shock passed, people went back to not caring.
Even at the time, and still today, most write ups are focused on harsh climates like New England or Canada in Winter, because it's harder. It's also the case that in milder climates, the cost to make your home passive has historically been higher than just paying the subsidized bills (and/or requires capital). So most of the US hasn't cared (again) until recently.
Modern passive houses use HRV/ERV technology, so they achieve high efficiency while avoiding moisture and mold.
As usual, it's the early adopters that find the problems.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passivhaus-Institut
As someone who has followed such things for decades, it is my personal recollection that this German project is the root source of the expression Passive House. Most passivhaus buildings are in Germany and Austria and everything your source says suggests to me that passivhaus falls firmly under the umbrella term passive solar design.
So I stand by what I said unless someone can find a better source that somehow actually rebuts my understanding that passivhaus is a German project that popularized the term passive house and construction techniques associated with it, but it is simply a subset of the general concept of passive solar energy design.
This one is the first result which explains the difference in terms: https://www.whitepebbleinteriors.com.au/the-difference-betwe...
I believe passivhaus as a term did originally arise/derive from solar house, but since then the terms have come to mean very different things. I wouldn’t say that solar house is still considered an umbrella term for passivhaus nowadays.
I wanted to be a translator at one time. I've had Intro to Linguistics as a college class.
I genuinely have zero problem with people wanting to use the term passive house to refer to a distinct set of building techniques and passive solar to refer to a different set of building techniques. Living languages evolve. It's a known phenomenon.
And, yet, so far no one has suggested to me a better umbrella term than passive solar design.
I defined the term thusly in one of my comments here:
Passive solar design is about creating a home which needs little energy to stay at a comfortable temperature.
My best understanding of life, the universe and everything is that without energy from the sun, earth would be extremely cold. And also wind energy is a form of solar energy which arises from air movement caused by temperature differences.
So to my mind, any technique that tries to keep a home a comfortable temp using sunlight to warm it and air flow to cool it with a minimum of electricity, oil, and other energy sources is using passive solar. It's trying to primarily use energy from the sun in a passive fashion by means of elegant design suited to the local climate conditions.
I guess I need to start defining my terms up front on HN for this topic because I do understand why people want to make this distinction in building techniques, yet I still need an umbrella term for this and I don't currently know of a superior umbrella term to the one I'm currently using.
the 1992 second edition of Energy Efficient Australian Housing has an entire chapter entitled Passive design strategies with a section on the use of passive solar energy.
In a sense the entire book is about passive design, optimal placement coupled with sensible insulation to create optimal (and ideally passive (no additional energy inputs)) heat sinks, sources, and flows .. sometimes to heat and sometimes to create a draw and cool as a side effect.
Historically much of this goes back thousands of years to designs that draw in water from a height and use heat towers to create flows through water sprayed gardens, etc.
It's important that even well sealed homes have both A/C fresh air sources as well as ERV/HRV systems that can recapture the heat/cold the house has while replacing the CO2 with outside air.
I wish people would stop conflating low oxygen with high CO2.
Even at 5000 ppm CO2 (which "significantly impair" attention, executive function, and risky decision-making[0]), the oxygen has only dropped from 20.95% to 20.45%. This ~2.5% difference is negligible, equivalent to natural variations in atmospheric pressure.
The buildup of CO2 is the issue, not the depletion of O2.
For a plant to absorb 1KG of CO2, it needs to increase in weight by at least ~1Kg.
An average human exhales ~1KG of CO2 a day.
Unless your house plants are gaining half a ton of mass a year, they aren't meaningfully offsetting your CO2 exhilation.
But you are part-right, carbon is ~35-50% of a normal plant's weight.
Maybe an algae farm is that you'd need.
Some years back, "sick building syndrome" was a prominent topic of discussion and there was a push for fresh air, windows that opened, etc. but this seems to have largely dropped off the radar, afaict.