Flatrock Passive House: A Passive House in Newfoundland

Who would have thought that putting a wood stove into a house could be so complicated!!!  I know I didn't.  It really started when we decided to put the wood stove more centralized in the home.  Running a chimney inside the building envelope is much more efficient than running it outside the thermal envelope from many perspectives.  The chimney will develop draft much more quickly if the chimney runs inside the envelope, and there is less thermal bridging to the outside. Have a look at the stove in question below, the Walltherm gasification boiler ( www.waltherm.ca ).  The picture below illustrates the back of the stove. It has a sealed combustion chamber with an air intake at the bottom that is ducted to the outside.  It is a closed combustion system.  This is a necessity in a passive house for several reasons 1.  Draft in the chimney requires air to be pulled into the stove.  In a super tight house, the draft necessary to keep the stove going will be hard to make up if

The National Building Code of Canada is a prescriptive standard.  A prescriptive standard is one where instructional information is provided to ensure that the components are built to ensure longevity, safety and health of the occupants.  The end game is not necessarily energy efficiency.  For example, 2x6 stud walls 16" o.c. with double headers over windows is purely prescriptive.  We need prescriptive standards but we also need a way to ensure that homes are also energy efficiency.  Here's where performance standards are important.  A performance standard is one where the performance of a building as a whole is important and can be measured and compared against a set of standard metrics eg. air leakage, thermal performance, energy usage.  Mixing the two ensures that a home is energy efficient, safe, healthy and comfortable. To ensure that structures are more efficient, Canada introduced the National Energy Code for Buildings.  This code is prescriptive but defines minimum