They are quite different in construction though. The insulation on this house corresponds to a garage in the nordics today, or how the building code looked in the 1970s and 1980s. Today the code requires twice this much insulation for a normal home (around 300mm), and it's still nowhere near a passive one.
Come to Lithuania (we have winters of -25C and summers of 35C). All new homes have to be build to a building code that actually exceeds Passive House in some cases. In our apartment (built 2016) we don't even turn on the heating until it gets close to 0c outside.
Two years ago I spent a week in a passive house near Piteå. The outside temperature was -25c and heating the house was done exclusively using an accumulation tank of solar heated water (yes. It worked just fine in -25 if the sun was shining for more than 2 hour a day).
The only problem was that it got too hot when we were making food or running the tumble dryer.
Heating for that house was between 500 and 2000 kwh/yr depending on how much the sun was shining.
One well known example of modern efficient houses is the one Amory Lovins built in the Rocky Mountains in the US. It gets quite cold there, yet he likes to point out he grows bananas in the house.
The entire structure is built with the climate and site in mind. Large south-facing windows, thermal mass in the floor and walls. At the time, the major energy draw was laserprinters, given that the xerographic process used relies on a heating element kept at about 400F. Switching to inkjet printers was a major energy gain (though ink costs might make this a financial wash).
First one was built 20 years ago but getting more popular after 2010. You can order them, it's a building standard so does not require anything from you except money. But they say it's not that much more expensive than a normal swedish house since we already have a lot of isolation and 3 glass windows as standard for the climate.
So what is the difference and why does my modern Swedish house, with heat recovery ventilation and east-south facing windows consumes more energy to heat?
