Jeff Colley

@jeffcolley.bsky.social

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Green building 🤓 PassiveHouse+ mag Zero Ambitions podcast + consultancy Heat Pump Assoc 🇮🇪 🪑 TEDx talker World GBC #BuildingLife ambassador Mag: https://passivehouseplus.ie Pod: https://tinyurl.com/Zappod TEDx: http://tiny.cc/TEDJeff

A stripped pale oak ceiling. I don’t know what’s holding it up, as we didn’t think to build it on top of the timber superstructure.
Three front doors in a row to open before you get in or out of the house. Just because.
Custom-built triple glazing, shown here for the big feature window with the sea view. The windows sit in the strawbale insulation layer to avoid thermal bridging
A first course of strawbales on top of the perimeter of the insulated foundations. This really should be lifted up off the ground, to keep the straw dry. But give us a break. Sadie’s nine. And I was tired and distracted.
A level, rectangular base for the foundations
A timber block lock patch up in the hardcore layer combusting due to magma below
When we levelled out the ground for the passive house, Sadie noticed that we struck coal: a seam sits directly beneath the house. There’s something poetic about building insulated foundations on top of a coal seam. This rings even truer given the foundations are for a house that, in part due to those insulated foundations, would need little or no energy to heat it, thereby enabling coal to be kept in the ground.
The finished house, with large windows facing the sea. The flat roof extends out, supported by columns, to shade the large windows from high angle summer sun
My daughter Sadie dancing in the dark with her multicoloured LED dancing wings
A picture by my son Rex based on the iconic “In space no one can hear you scream” poster for Ridley Scott’s Alien. Instead of an alien egg in space, Rex’s poster has a house in space, and the tagline has been changed to “In this space no one can hear you scream” — referencing the acoustic benefits of passive houses, which insulate homes against external noise.
Monitored indoor environmental quality from the living room of the Tierney Haines passive house. The CO2 levels spiked at 1:15am at 1558 parts per million (PPM), but why? Read on to find out.
The externally shaded facade of a passive house in Blackrock, Co. Dublin, designed by Tierney Haines Architects.
Real world energy excellence: the monitored space heating demand of the first passive house in its first quarter century of use - from 1991 to 2016. The usage has hovered consistently around 10 kWh/m2/yr, for a 156m2 house. That is really, really low. Suppose the cost was, say, 10 cent per kWh of heat.* The annual space heating cost would be €156. *This home, which was originally gas heated — a heat pump has since been retrofitted — would have been paying a much lower rate than that over those 25 years, but gas in Germany has gone over those prices post Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
A graph showing the indoor temperature of the first passive house, Kranichstein in Darmstadt, Germany, in a heat wave over a week in August 200. The outdoor air temperature rises gradually over the week from 26C to 36C, but the indoor temperature in the passive house - which has no active cooling system - remains under 24C.
Punk in the beer light (sorry - I couldn’t resist a David Berman reference). I’m standing in the spotlight in the foreground talking away like the pious gobshite I am, with a Covid-restricted crowd in the audience. Had they nothing better to do?
A screen grab of a sponsored LinkedIn post promoting global consulting firm McKinsey’s sustainability work.