General: Could living in a Passivhaus reduce your potential lifespan?

1 to 16 of 16

- CommentAuthorShevek
- CommentTimeMay 20th 2022
High intensity exercise, intermittent fasting and eating less, exposure to cold. In small doses these things are increasingly shown to increase healthy lifespan. Hormesis or an adversity mimetics as David Sinclair calls them.

Which begs the question: who will live longer out of two identical twins? The one living in a comfortable Passivhaus or the one living in a draughty unheated home.

My guess would be the draughty home dweller, unless the Passivhaus dweller took ice baths.
- CommentAuthorJonti
- CommentTimeMay 20th 2022
Posted By: ShevekHigh intensity exercise, intermittent fasting and eating less, exposure to cold. In small doses these things are increasingly shown to increase healthy lifespan. Hormesis or an adversity mimetics as David Sinclair calls them.

or the Passivehaus dweller could simply go outside in the winter for a short time and would be better off in the still summer heat than the sweltering dweller of the draughty, uninsulated house.
- CommentAuthorfostertom
- CommentTimeMay 20th 2022
More interesting if triplets - a question graduated between today's three poles - two triplets as above and the third watching 'Entertainment' in light clothing in an overheated toxin-filled estate house which alternates between draughts and stagnant air.
- CommentAuthorMike1
- CommentTimeMay 20th 2022 edited
Posted By: Shevekwho will live longer out of two identical twins? The one living in a comfortable Passivhaus or the one living in a draughty unheated home.

Based on the research I posted in the 'set temperature' thread:

- There are around 25,000 excess winter deaths in England each year. The high prevalence of cold, damp, poorly energy efficient households in the UK is considered one of the main reasons. Estimates suggest that about 30% [of these deaths] are due to cold homes

- Cold weather is not only associated with an increase in deaths but also impacts significantly on morbidity by increasing the risk of heart attacks, strokes, respiratory illnesses, flu and other diseases.

- Small laboratory studies support the findings that exposure to cold temperatures increases blood pressure and risk of blood clotting in healthy people who are sedentary and wearing minimal clothing, with one study suggesting these effects start at 18Â°C (+/-0.5Â°C).

- Among older adults with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, better respiratory symptom score was associated with more hours of indoor warmth (at least nine hours) at and above 21Â°C in the living room.

I'd choose the twin in the PassivHaus...

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/776497/Min_temp_threshold_for_homes_in_winter.pdf
- CommentAuthorowlman
- CommentTimeMay 20th 2022
Posted By: Mike1
risk of blood clotting in healthy people who are sedentary and wearing minimal clothing.

How can you be healthy and sedentary?
- CommentAuthordjh
- CommentTimeMay 20th 2022
Well my brother lives in a fairly ordinary house, but not cold, damp or particularly poorly energy inefficient. He's not my twin but just a little younger. I would guess that other factors are much more likely to have a significant effect on our lives than the type of houses we live in. Our medical conditions, lifestyle, habits, family, etc etc are all more likely to affect us than the type of house I live in, IMHO. Even the fact I'm not as worried about energy bills as he might be might have more effect. :)
- CommentAuthorWillInAberdeen
- CommentTimeMay 20th 2022
As we found in the early days of Covid, if we apply a group of well-intentioned-but-untrained-people to a medical issue that is as-yet poorly researched, we are at risk of generating all sorts of factoids which (once shared on the internet a few times) seem real enough to frighten people. (Anyone remember "5G spreads Covid" or "gargle with Listerine"!?!)

I'd say that we don't know if living in a Passivhaus reduces your lifespan, and we won't ever know, unless someone does a randomised control trial with a sufficiently large number of participants to account for factors such as age and wealth and diet and lifestyle of PH residents vs the general population, and run over enough years to identify how the environment experienced in youth affects physical/mental health in later years. That ain't happening soon! Until then, don't worry :-)

There are definitely sick-building issues such as over-ventilation causing excessively low humidity, or under-ventilation causing mould, and with too-warm or too-cold or too-variable or too-constant temperatures. But I don't think it is possible to correlate those with PH, versus other design standards such as the recently updated Building Regs/Stds (themselves now not that far different from PH).

There is however a growing body of evidence that global warming will reduce many people's lifespan, so that's worth acting upon.

There is also growing awareness that embodied carbon in cement/steel/insulation is significant compared to the rapidly-decarbonising energy that will be used for heating, so possibly PH and BR will be revised or replaced to address that.

Just imho!
- CommentAuthorSimonD
- CommentTimeMay 20th 2022
I haven't read David Sinclair's stuff to any great detail (I do have his book Lifespan) but there are some questions around the conceptualisation of how much stress to the person is beneficial/detrimental, and it's also not entirely a universal view that it's stress to the body/mind that promotes the longevity in the way often suggested (e.g see South East Asian approaches to longevity). There's also been lots of coverage regarding the cold showers/exposure to freezing temps following Wim Hof on TV, but again scratch deeply into the evidence base and it's still fairly thin even if there are some fairly promising studies. I've always loved Saunas with cold lake/snow dips, but even this hasn't received a huge amount of research to substantiate the benefits.

However, not intending to get to get into that one on here.

My question would not necessarily be a comparison between cold/damp/draughty house v passivhaus, but more about a question of the outcome of current principles of passivhaus design on the indoor environment and its long term health consequences. There are a number of architects out there who do question, from a health perspective, the uniform house temperature produced within energy efficient, airtight and mechanically ventilated homes (doesn't necessarily have to be a passivhaus for this). In this sense, it is argued that variable and varied temperatures across the house are a good thing - e.g sleeping in cooler environment than other living areas and also that it's good to even vary the temperature across time frequencies.

I happen to agree with this thinking and have purposefully not included MVHR in my house and also design it to provide natural stratification between living space and sleeping space to enable a cooler sleeping environment - hence the house is upside down - I like to sleep in temperatures as low as 10 C with fresh air.
- CommentAuthorWillInAberdeen
- CommentTimeMay 20th 2022 edited
As per the "set temperature" thread, I think it is advisable* to sleep in bedrooms cooler than the living rooms, but I think that is possible in a PH, if desired.

- warm living rooms and bathrooms grouped on the sunny side of the building, cool bedrooms in a wing at the back, with insulated internal walls.
- separate MHRVs for the "warm" and "cool" sides of the house rather than one big centralised MHRV (or even individual MHRVs per room so that supply temperature and volume can be varied with occupancy and time of day)

Keeping half the house cooler, obvs reduces the overall heating requirement which helps meet energy targets.

*not that I have any medical background, just going on advice from The Sleep Charity! Ref my previous post about spreading medical 'facts'.
- CommentAuthorSimonD
- CommentTimeMay 20th 2022
Posted By: WillInAberdeenI think that is possible in a PH, if desired.

Yes, I'm sure it is with good design - which I suppose rhetorically, isn't necessarily to do with whether it's PH or not, rather it's whole house design. Unfortunately, I think it gets overlooked, and I've struggled to find much reference to this.
- CommentAuthordjh
- CommentTimeMay 20th 2022
Posted By: WillInAberdeenThere is also growing awareness that embodied carbon in cement/steel/insulation is significant compared to the rapidly-decarbonising energy that will be used for heating, so possibly PH and BR will be revised or replaced to address that.
I'm not sure about this. I don't think the quantity of steel and cement or any other structural material will vary much with the building standard (modulo things like earthquake areas, so add 'for a location') and when comparing the quantity of insulation against the operational energy costs (the energy used for producing the insulation should decarbonise just as rapidly) I'd be surprised if it doesn't make sense to use a lot of insulation. Plus in the case of PH specifically, given the present lack of support by mainstream builders and legislators, I'd expect a greater proportion of insulation and other materials to be 'sustainably sourced' whatever that means.
- CommentAuthorWillInAberdeen
- CommentTimeMay 20th 2022 edited
The issue is that if you build a house today with polystyrene and cement/lime slab/render, it will release a lot of CO2 as they will use today's technology, so the embodied emissions are "baked in" forever. It doesn't help if manufacturing decarbonises in future, or not. However if the house stands 100 years, the heating energy will be low or zero carbon for 80+ of them, so it does help that heating decarbonises.

Polystyrene and cement/lime fundamentally release CO2 as part of their manufacturing processes, and steel does as long as coking coal is the reducing agent (IE for the foreseeable).

A standard such as PH or BR could mandate the use of glass wool and timber flooring/cladding, instead of polystyrene and cement/lime, and so avoid baking-in the carbon.

Or it could set an embodied carbon budget for the designer, similar to the operational energy budget set in PH, the designer could then choose to use some high-carbon materials in the floor in exchange for low carbon materials in the walls.

Just as context, a 70mm screed on 200mm polystyrene embodies around 35kg of CO2 per mÂ². The operational carbon from heat losses through it will be 0.3kg per year (heatpump at present grid intensity), falling close to zero well before 2050. So the operational carbon is a fraction of the manufacturing emissions, over the life of the building.

Despite this, the BR has 100+ pages about heat conservation, and nothing about embodied carbon.

Edit: more context https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-58878192
- CommentAuthordjh
- CommentTimeMay 21st 2022
I think the difficulty I have with a lot of this is that as yet there's no consensus about exactly what's required or the best way to achieve whatever it is. So I'm somewhat opposed to mandating particular things prematurely.

As well as revising the ways of making steel, there are various proposals to make cement and lime without associated carbon emissions, and of course lime supposedly absorbs carbon beneficially throughout its lifetime. Cement also absorbs some CO2, but detrimentally AIUI.

In particular I'd be opposed to extending the PH standard to cover embodied carbon unless and until there had been a lot more research and consultation around various drafts. I feel there's a very great danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater if we attempt to bolt an extra area of requirements onto PH.

BR is a different kettle of fish; it's just a collection of bits. Part L itself is relatively new and fast changing and as we have discussed seems to have got itself into a mess as a result. There are various other parts of Building Regs that I have no respect for at all, which is not a good situation. It may be that yet another part could be added to BR to deal with embodied carbon; it remains to be seen how sensible it is.

Ground floors are an interesting case. When I built I looked at using a timber floor but decided against it for two main reasons: cost and the difficulty of design. It's quite difficult to build a thermal-bridge-free, extremely well-insulated timber floor with level access to the outside whilst also keeping all the timber 150 mm or more above the ground. It's also expensive compared to the very simple and reliable passive slab I went with. So I'd hate to see anything mandated in that area until I've seen some reproducible examples of solutions.

I've included a couple of links. My main take home from the second was yet another reason to never use PUR insulation.

[1] https://elrondburrell.com/blog/passivhaus-standard-not/
[2] https://www.greenspec.co.uk/building-design/embodied-carbon-of-insulation/
- CommentAuthorowlman
- CommentTimeMay 21st 2022
Posted By: WillInAberdeenThe issue is that if you build a house today with polystyrene and cement/lime slab/render, it will release a lot of CO2 as they will use today's technology, so the embodied emissions are "baked in" forever. It doesn't help if manufacturing decarbonises in future, or not. However if the house stands 100 years, the heating energy will be low or zero carbon for 80+ of them, so it does help that heating decarbonises.....................................Despite this, the BR has 100+ pages about heat conservation, and nothing about embodied carbon.

Edit: more contexthttps://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-58878192" rel="nofollow" >https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-58878192

Succinctly and neatly put Will.
- CommentAuthortony
- CommentTimeMay 23rd 2022
My view is that living in a home with cleaned air will increase lifespan as pollution is harmful and some gets filtered out by the air handling system, in my case lots.
- CommentAuthorShevek
- CommentTimeMay 28th 2022 edited
Posted By: SimonDI haven't read David Sinclair's stuff to any great detail (I do have his book Lifespan) but there are some questions around the conceptualisation of how much stress to the person is beneficial/detrimental, and it's also not entirely a universal view that it's stress to the body/mind that promotes the longevity in the way often suggested

Psychological stress certainly reduces lifespan rather than increases it, so very much a different category of stress.

There are a number of architects out there who do question, from a health perspective, the uniform house temperature produced within energy efficient, airtight and mechanically ventilated homes (doesn't necessarily have to be a passivhaus for this). In this sense, it is argued that variable and varied temperatures across the house are a good thing - e.g sleeping in cooler environment than other living areas and also that it's good to even vary the temperature across time frequencies.

I'm guessing you've also read Why We Sleep by Mathew Walker. Based on his research you can now get beds that purposely drop your body's temperature during the night and then raise it toward the morning to improve your quality of sleep.

I happen to agree with this thinking and have purposefully not included MVHR in my house and also design it to provide natural stratification between living space and sleeping space to enable a cooler sleeping environment - hence the house is upside down - I like to sleep in temperatures as low as 10 C with fresh air.

I remember a time when I would have stressed out if I got hungry and could eat, believing it was unhealthy in some way. That is until I became aware of intermittent fasting. Now I quite happily go through long periods of not eating for health reasons, ha.

I think I've gone through a similar thing with heating and ventilation. I'm glad now that we didn't install any additional heating or whole house MVHR in our home in Portugal. Changing the intermittent fan in the bathroom to continuous background ventilation was enough to get rid of the damp/mould problem and, in the same way that we don't stress out about being hungry, we don't stress out about being a bit colder than is completely comfortable these days. Watching my girlfriend's 90 odd year old granny potter around her cold unheated home in winter has been enough to inspire the use of jumpers and blankets instead.

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