Ongoing costs of a passive house?

You can inquire about electricity, water, and garbage at your municipality. Home insurance costs extra (with us about €300 for household contents and liability including fire, storm, etc.). Property transfer tax depends on the multiplier of your municipality - this can be anywhere from €70 to over €500 per year - depending on how large your plot, house is, and which multiplier has been set. Heating is not a big issue in a passive house; if a controlled residential ventilation system with heat recovery is used, you will of course have electricity costs for this device - AND electricity consumption according to the manufacturer often has nothing to do with actual electricity consumption.

In my opinion, the question about the monthly costs can hardly be answered. No one knows your electricity consumption, since we don't know whether you have old or new appliances, how often you run the dryer (we currently do it almost daily ), how often you use the oven, how many freezers are in operation.

We have a KFW 55 house and manage with the following payments: (approx. 300 euros + phone & internet)

Of course, all this is very roughly estimated. What’s added for us are about 150 € more in fuel costs, and 70 € for the transport ticket, since we now have a significantly longer commute and can no longer just walk to the supermarket like we could in the rental apartment. You should also save for possible repairs on the house in a few years.

In general, I have to say, we quickly abandoned the passive house idea because the costs were disproportionately high compared to the expected savings in consumption. KfW 70 was targeted, but it ended up being KFW 50.

Regarding the basement, everyone has to decide for themselves whether they can manage without one. We don’t have one because the money was simply too expensive to invest 50,000 € more just like that. The result would have been that we would have had 120 sqm in the living area instead of 150 sqm. We currently don’t have one but miss it, since we also don’t yet have a garage... once that is eventually built, we might finally be able to declutter inside. At the moment, 2 strollers, a tricycle, and other stuff stand in the hallway under the stairs... which you don’t really want to have directly in the house.

A PH only makes sense if there is also a person in the house during the day – the residents’ body heat is also considered in the calculation for the PH standard. [...]

From my point of view, KfW 70 is currently economically sensible; with the red competitor colleague, also KfW 55, because their wall construction allows for it anyway. Only the exhaust air heat pump should be replaced by another system.

What are the reasons that you are considering KfW 40 or PH?

If you stick with KfW 55 – the standard of the red competitor colleague – you will not manage with your above-mentioned costs. They use an exhaust air heat pump as standard, and this is not sufficient to properly heat a house. The internet is full of builders who have taken sobering notice that a house below PH standard with this system, which fundamentally corresponds to a controlled residential ventilation with heat recovery, just cannot be heated comfortably.

In my opinion, a basement only makes sense if it either results from a hillside location (the necessary earthworks for such a plot are not trivial, so a basement always pays off) or if the basement is converted into living space. Because usually, the following happens with a pure utility basement: the desired basement is fully used as storage space. Maybe one or two parties are held in the larger rear basement; but soon the person responsible for household chores realizes that the terrace and garden are much easier to clean after a party. After that, the basement hosts the house connections, possibly the washing machine and dryer, and a storage room – the rest is used as a warehouse. For moving boxes, furniture the builders do not want to part with, decorations, etc.

For a house of size 140/150 sqm, the pure utility basement costs about EUR 40,000, and a finished living basement another + EUR 20,000 for necessary insulation, underfloor heating, living room windows and interior plaster. Floor and wall coverings not yet included. For this money, you can better build above ground; unless you want to create a utility garden and need storage space for the harvest of potatoes & co., as demonstrated by the generation of our parents.

I'll play the opposing view: A basement is absolutely essential. Of course, it is used more than 70% as a junk room and at most 30% for the washing machine, dryer, heating, and technical equipment. But all that stuff has to go somewhere. I don’t want to have all that junk in the apartment or plaster every room with cabinets to store winter clothes, motorcycle gear, the wife’s 174 pairs of shoes, and everything else you have. Where do the tools, the rotary clothes dryer, the deep freezer, the drink crates go? And you can’t seriously get rid of the sacred relics of your existence: the C64, the boombox, and the Grundig stereo system bought with confirmation money, just to name a few examples.
In most cases, that leads to those wonderful structures made of sheds, cabins, and lean-tos that “beautify” the garden. Sometimes you shouldn’t weigh everything just based on cost and effective use.

Hello Wastl!



Thanks for the breakdown of the costs. I just checked, the assessment rate for Property Tax B does indeed seem to be 590% here. However, the determination of the, in my opinion, odd standard value goes too far for me. I fear that the property tax – which apparently is also calculated based on the value of the buildings on a plot? – will be quite high here with this assessment rate and will probably even exceed 500 euros per year. Target plot size so far is 400 - 600 sqm.

Best regards,
Chriss