View full sizeThe PNC SmartHome Cleveland makes its move from the Cleveland Museum of Natural History to a permanent site on Wade Park Avenue in October, 2011. The energy-saving house built by the Cleveland Museum of Natural History as a temporary exhibit in 2011 and later sold and moved to a permanent site nearby, has won a unique distinction.
The PNC SmartHome Cleveland is the first building in Ohio certified by the Passive House Institute U.S., a non-profit organization whose mission is to popularize high-performing designs for houses and other buildings that are intended to reduce energy consumption.
The organization approved the certification in June, and has listed the house on its website.
“It feels great,” said David Beach, director of the GreenCityBlueLake Institute at the museum, and lead coordinator for the project. “At all levels it was very successful.”
The PNC SmartHome, designed by Doty Miller Architects of Bedford, is a 2,500-square-foot, three-bedroom house with 2-1/2 bathrooms.
The house features thick, heavily insulated walls, high-tech windows and nearly air tight construction to minimize the cost of heating or cooling.
It functions without a traditional air-conditioner or furnace, but instead relies on two wall-mounted “mini-split” heating units on the first and second floors, and an “energy recovery ventilator” on the first floor.
Architecturally, the house looks like a typical early 20th-century wood-frame house that might be found in any Cleveland neighborhood or Inner Ring suburb.
The difference is that the house passed a rigorous Passive House examination that included assessing the total amount of energy used for heating and cooling, total energy use for all needs, and a test of air tightness.
View full sizeThe PNC SmartHome Cleveland in situ during its temporary exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History in 2011.
“There are no drafts, there’s no air leakage,” Beach said. “It’s just an extremely well constructed, tight house, so that means you’re not losing your heat energy.”
The museum built the house for about $500,000, or $200 a square foot, and moved it in October, 2011 to 11601 Wade Park Ave. in Cleveland. It later sold the house to Jocelyn and Martin Schaffer for $331,000, Beach said.
The total cost of the project included items such as the temporary foundation on the museum grounds and moving the house to its permanent address, Beach said.
“For the museum, this was a fantastic project; we couldn’t be more pleased with how it turned out,” Beach said. “We did a great exhibit that thousands of people visited, with an amazing house and an amazing design.
“The construction and design process allowed us to do workshops for other neighborhood development and affordable-housing groups in Cleveland so they were able to learn passive house principles and apply it to other projects in town.”
Beach said that among other projects based on Passive House principles, the PNC SmartHome helped inspired the design of the Near West Theatre’s permanent home, which is planned for a site in the Gordon Square Arts District in Cleveland’s Detroit Shoreway neighborhood.
Building a house to Passive House standards might cost slightly more than standard construction in Northeast Ohio, Beach said.
But he added that there’s probably a “sweet spot,” in which a house could be designed to achieve roughly 80 percent of the efficiency of a Passive House at no extra cost in relation to normal design and construction.
Chuck Miller, a partner at Doty Miller, said the Passive House certification “is a really exciting accolade” for us, and that it has increased demand for house designs with high-performance features – if not necessarily houses that would meet the rigorous standard of the PNC SmartHome.
“We have clients coming to us who can’t afford to reach the total certified Passive House level, but we incorporate the most important features and it’s really paying off for our clients.”
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