## 4 Discussion  
This study demonstrated the possibility of building a house considered as affordable in Chile with a budget less than CLF 2000 (\(\approx\)81,000 USD) with the Passivhaus standard. It should be clarified that this study only considered costs relating to labor and material cost during the construction phase. The additional costs of managing, designing, or additional checks/testing were not considered due to the scarcity of data related to these aspects in the Chilean market. Consequently, it is necessary to focus efforts on gathering data to determine these additional potential costs related to the design and checks to achieve Passivhaus house. As awareness of Passivhaus increases within Chile and becomes more commonly practiced, it is likely that these costs will not significantly differ from current practices. Another important aspect to discuss is the designed dwelling energy performance and its comparison with existing homes. [PERSON] et al. (2012) demonstrated that a standard house based on the Thermal Normative in Chile requires at least 86 kWh/m\({}^{2}\)a for heating energy consumption [6]. If we consider a 100 m\({}^{2}\) house located in Santiago with a referential annual energy demand of 86 kWh/m\({}^{2}\)a, the proposed Passivhaus represents just 11% of the standard house energy demand. The proposed design complies with the allowable Passivhaus energy consumption with thermal transmittance values (Table 3) that are likely too high for cold climates [22]. This has been similarly demonstrated by other authors that have shown that in warmer climates it is possible to reach the passive standard with higher values of thermal transmittance compared to cold climates [6; 24]. Although it was possible to demonstrate the construction of Passivhaus within the current state subsidy, we found that there is likely to be a restriction in dwelling size. This restriction is likely to be more pronounced in cold climate regions of Chile, where average temperatures are much lower and may lead to issues of overcrowding if subsidy costs cannot be increased for these regions. For the construction of a traditional house compared one that complies with Passivhaus standard, a substantial difference in construction costs are noted (Appendix B). The initial cost of the Passivhaus is more \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c} \hline \hline  & **Conventional Housing** & **Passivhaus Housing** \\  & **Values Based on**[18; 48] & **Passivhaus Housing** \\ \hline  & Value U (W/m\({}^{2}\)K) & \\ Walls & 1.9 & 0.244 \\ Roof & 0.47 & 0.238 \\ Solid floor & Does not apply \({}^{*}\) & 0.307 \\  & \% Window surface & \\ Total (DGU 2.4 \(<\) U \(<\) 3.6 W/m\({}^{2}\)K) & 60\% max & 14\% \\ North facade & Does not apply \({}^{**}\) & 26\% \\ Air changes/h & 8/h & 0.6/h \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular} \({}^{*}\) The regulation does not consider values of thermal transmittance for floor in contact with the ground, only delivers values for ventilated floors, for thermal zone 3, for example, consider a thermal transmittance value of 0.7 W/m\({}^{2}\)K.  
\({}^{**}\) In the regulation surface of windows oriented towards the north is not considered, considers percentages in relation to the total surface of vertical walls.  
\end{table} 
Table 3: Comparison between conventional housing characteristics and the designed Passivhaus. than 40% higher than that of traditional Chilean housing in the construction phase. This is in line with similar work who found that achieving compliance with Passivhaus standard has around 30% higher cost per square meter [4]. In this study, the city of Santiago with a Mediterranean climate (Csb) was considered. It is expected that in the south of Chile, which experiences colder climates, greater investment will be needed to reach Passivhaus standard. Further work is needed to assess the viability of achieving energy efficiency housing given the available subsidy across all climate zones in Chile.