Green Project of the Week: Ohio Passive House
Engineer-turned-burn Stephen Rhodes and his wife Becca Rhodes built Ohio’s first ever Passive House Institute United States (Phius) design certified passive house entirely from scratch, featuring limited and renewable energy use.
He attended the institute after debating on building his own home. As the Rhodes were looking for land in Columbus, Ohio, to be closer to friends, they came across a rare, vacant lot nestled in a neighborhood of century-old homes in Clintonville. Once they bought the home in 2020, Rhodes began to apply his skills and knowledge acquired at Phius. In December 2020, Phius formally recognized his passive house project as “design certified.”
One of the hardest parts of the home’s construction were the 2-by-6-foot clerestory windows in one of the bedrooms that had to be lifted 12 feet from the floor. From the roof, Rhodes hauled the windows up hand-over-hand with a rope via an improvised ramp he designed for them to slide along.
Because of its passive design elements and because the house is all electric, the house is projected to use less than half the energy of a similarly sized, newly code-built home. The small amount of energy the house does consume is offset by renewable energy produced on site via solar panels. Rhodes designed the roof to have a large surface area facing south to maximize solar energy collection.
Photo Credit: Tim Johnson
