Passive House Accelerator is pleased to announce that EkoBuilt has joined the Accelerator community as an Innovation Partner. Based in Ottawa, EkoBuilt has long been dedicated to spreading the Passive House standard across Canada and the United States by making high-performance homes attainable for ordinary homeowners. Its pre-certified Passive House plans and panelized building system have already delivered homes to owners across North America, from Atlantic Canada and New England, all the way to Washington State.

EkoBuilt’s foundational premise for homeowners is straightforward: if you can afford to build a home, you can afford to build to Passive House standards. The company pairs a catalog of pre-certified Passive House designs with a prefabricated, panelized shell that is manufactured at their facility in Ontario and shipped to build sites across the US and Canada. By engineering the design and the building envelope up front, EkoBuilt strips out much of the cost, complexity, and risk that have historically kept Passive House out of reach for middle class homeowners and small builders. The company reports that it is not aware of another provider able to come within 15 percent of its pricing for a weathertight, high-performance shell.

EkoBuilt’s ability to use panelization as a means of driving both performance and affordability puts them in a privileged position to respond to the housing crisis. Throughout North America, there is an urgent need to build more homes faster, and EkoBuilt's panelized, factory-built approach offers a path to housing that is not only quicker to erect but also healthy, durable, and energy efficient. Rather than treating high performance as a premium upgrade, EkoBuilt treats it as the baseline, and it has built its plans, shells, and kits around getting more people into that kind of home.

For the Accelerator community, EkoBuilt is also a useful proof point for the panelized and pre-certified model itself. Design teams and prospective owners no longer need to start from a blank slate, and builders new to Passive House can lean on a system that has been refined across many completed projects in a wide range of climates. EkoBuilt’s catalog includes more than 75 pre-certified passive house plans. The lineup spans compact tiny homes and secondary dwellings, including coach houses and ADUs, single-story bungalows, and two- or three-story homes. Homes can be designed with garages (either attached or detached). Pre-certified plans even extend to some multifamily typologies (as shown above). Every plan is customizable to fit the climate, building site, or aesthetics of the surrounding built environment.

To learn more about EkoBuilt and its pre-certified Passive House plans, panelized shells, and kits, you can check out their page on the Accelerator site or visit ekobuilt.com.