Pawel Okurowski

If your home is insulated but still cold, draughty or showing signs of damp, the issue may be hidden in the build quality. This article breaks down the most common defects and the practical checks that protect comfort, health and energy use.

Modern architectural design showcases a two-story steel frame house with expansive glass walls and warm interior lighting, under construction on a spacious lot. Design intent doesn’t disappear in one dramatic moment. It erodes through small, seemingly reasonable site decisions: a detail is “simplified”, a product becomes “equivalent”, a service route moves because it’s convenient, a junction is closed up before anyone has verified it. On Passive House and other low-energy projects, those...

Passive House projects rarely miss performance targets because the physics is wrong. They miss because small site decisions quietly break the assumptions the design and PHPP model depend on. The performance gap is usually not one big failure  its lots of tiny, untracked changes: a junction simplified, a membrane punctured, a product substituted, a service route moved. This article is a practical, fact-led way to reduce that risk. Its written for architects and developers who want a...