Denby Dale Passivhaus

Location: Denby Dale, West Yorkshire
Completion Status: Completed	Occupancy: Occupied
Architect: Derrie O'Sullivan Architects	Consultant: Peter Warm
Contractor: Green Building Company	Client: Geoff & Kate Tunstall
Certification: April 2010	Certifier: WARM
	Share this project:

The Denby Dale Passivhaus was designed and built by an inter-disciplinary team led by Green Building Store’s Bill Butcher as a cost-effective and ultra energy-efficient home for a retired couple. The clients’ desire for a conservatory was incorporated into the building envelope as an integral solar space on the south elevation, with exterior blinds to minimise overheating.

The Denby Dale Passivhaus is the first certified Passivhaus in the UK to be built using cavity wall construction. To achieve Passivhaus performance in cavity wall construction, the Green Building Store team developed a number of original design details. These details have been freely disseminated to the wider construction industry through technical briefings, blogs and films.

The project’s pioneering approach has subsequently been adopted by a number of large scale projects and has demonstrated that cavity wall construction is a serious and cost effective option for Passivhaus projects.

Denby Dale Passivhaus Image credit: Green Building Store

Building performance monitoring

Leeds Beckett University undertook extensive post-occupancy monitoring of the project which concluded that that space heating during the monitoring period could be estimated to be in the range 9 – 20.7 kWh/m2/year, in line with Passivhaus certification criteria of 15 kWh/m2/year, while total primary energy requirement was also within the certification criteria.

Lessons learnt

The project team shared many of the lessons learnt on the project through a series of blogs and technical films. Subsequent cavity wall projects undertaken by the same team included iterations and developments on construction detailing:

Embodied carbon

In 2022 the project team revisited the project looking at the embodied carbon of cavity wall construction in comparison with other possible construction types using the PHribbon tool. The team concluded that talthough the timber frame construction options modelled had lower embodied carbon there might still be a role for masonry cavity wall construction. The team concluded that operational energy (building to the Passivhaus standard) and low carbon heating (installing a heat pump) should be tackled first and then there was a need to address the embodied carbon of building materials.